By Stephanie Baskerville on January 09, 2018

5 Most Effective Ways to Improve Teamwork in the Workplace

 

Is teamwork in the workplace a prevalent theme of your organization? How happy is your staff with their ability to work as a team? According to a study done by Ernst & Young, a work environment that doesn’t encourage teamwork is one of the top 5 reasons people quit their jobs. Improving teamwork in the workplace is a common challenge faced by many managers. Here are five common teamwork challenges and solutions that will help to improve teamwork in the workplace.

 

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Challenge #1 - There isn’t a tool that can boost teamwork.

Solution #1 - Improve teamwork in the workplace with a set of efficient tools.

 

When a team of people work together on a project, where does the team store information and documents? How do they communicate with each other? Not having the necessary tools to communicate and store the shared information hinders productivity and collaboration. Providing a set of collaboration tools is a solution to this common challenge.

Microsoft Teams, a group chat software, can help the team effectively and instantly communicate with each other no matter where they work from. SharePoint, a cloud-based content management platform, provides the team a shared space to store documents and work together simultaneously. When you open a shared document in Teams or SharePoint, it doesn’t matter if you’re connected to the internet or not – you can keep working. When you reconnect, your file automatically syncs, you’ll be notified of any changes that are available, and others will see that you have changes. Collaboration gets a boost when you can use apps that support co-authoring capabilities.

 

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Challenge #2 -  Teamwork can be difficult because of meeting inefficiencies.

Solution #2 - Implement a reliable communication tool to improve teamwork in the workplace.

 

There’s nothing worse than struggling to participate in virtual meetings. Ever run into poor call connection? Meeting interrupted or delayed due to technical issues? These inefficiencies don’t just discourage team members from working together, but they also act as a barrier for your on-the-go workforce.

By using shared screens, instant messaging, voice calling, and video capabilities through a single reliable technology, such as Microsoft Teams, you can help your teams communicate more effectively. Microsoft Teams Rooms enables you to meet with teams of 10 or 10,000 or go big with live events. Host audio, video, and web conferences with anyone inside or outside your organization (Microsoft Teams Rooms still work with Skype for Business calls and meetings.) Plus, proximity detection makes it easy to discover and add nearby, available Microsoft Teams Rooms to any meeting. One platform, less technology complications.

 

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Challenge #3 - Working in silos is not conducive to teamwork.

Solution #3 - Consider an enterprise social tool to improve teamwork in the workplace.

 

It’s not a bad thing for your team to be head-down in their work – after all, you want them to be productive. But if your team is working in silos, they can be blind to what’s happening around them. Ever had an employee spend time working on a spreadsheet that already exists? Duplication of work is one of the major dangers of working in silos.

So, consider introducing an enterprise social tool that keeps your teams on the same page. With Microsoft Teams, you can send a file in a one-on-one or group chat, or upload a file by going to the Files tab and clicking Share. Once you share a file, you can also share a link to it. That way, you don’t ever have to upload multiple copies of the same file. Teams allows teams to stay up-to-date on what their teams are working on and discuss various project ideas with their co-workers, thus increasing teamwork in the workplace.

 

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Challenge #4 - Lack of version control makes teamwork difficult.

Solution #4 -Take teamwork in the workplace to the Cloud.

 

Your sales team is working on a major presentation for a client. They’ve gone back and forth on the document until it’s just perfect. But when they get to the client’s office, they realize that they’ve grabbed the wrong version. Has this ever happened to your team?

By using a tool like SharePoint, your teams can co-author documents in real-time, all from a single version of the file. Within this single file, multiple team members can add revisions or comments, which are tracked and automatically saved to the Cloud. Co-authors can even chat with each other about edits and other questions directly from within the document. Teamwork in the workplace just got that much easier.

 

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Challenge #5 - An inconsistent set of apps hinders teamwork.

Solution #5 - Implement a full productivity suite of interconnected tools to improve teamwork in the workplace.

 

People are accustomed to being able to download various apps on their phones, so the approach to “download an app to fix a problem” becomes second nature, even in the office. These various apps all do different things, have different sign-ins, and, in 90% of cases, aren’t even enterprise ready (meaning the security and compliance your organization requires is lacking).

A full productivity suite of interconnected tools, like Office 365, allows your teams the ability to collaborate as needed – they can tap into collective knowledge of the organization through SharePoint, get a question answered quickly by using Microsoft Teams Rooms, or, through Microsoft Teams, they can determine what their colleagues are working on.

 

Ready to Improve Teamwork in the Workplace?

Want to see and understand exactly what you can do with Microsoft Teams? Need some help getting started? ProServeIT is your Microsoft Teams expert, and we’ll be able to help you with your Microsoft Teams journey. Check out this short video below from our recent Teams webinar or download the full version here. It shows you how you and your team can utilize Teams throughout your work day, wherever you work from and whichever device you use.

 The content of this blog is taken from a Microsoft eBook called Unblocking Workplace Collaboration. You can download a copy here.

 

Published by Stephanie Baskerville January 9, 2018