Did you know that nearly 20% of employees in the United States are actively disengaged with their jobs?
The environment isn’t one that they feel they can flourish in, which hinders their performance and the teams.
If you own a business and want to ensure that your staff is happy, you should increase collaboration.
Keep reading to learn about some of the most effective ways to boost employee collaboration!
Improve Communication
One of the most beneficial ways to increase employee collaboration is to improve communication.
If your team is still using email correspondences to get information, it’s time to make some adjustments. Chat programs and video platforms make it easier for teams to work together, especially if some people are out of the office.
Whether your staff are remote or come to the building each day, communication should be effortless. Make sure that you encourage staff to ask questions and be as transparent as possible.
Open communication will involve timely responses and honesty. Don’t leave staff in the dark, since this can lead to larger issues.
Provide Time off From Work
When employees get burnt out from their jobs, satisfaction decreases, which impacts your team dynamic.
Unhappy staff can spread their frustrations onto other staff members, which breaks down progress. By giving your staff enough time off of work and sick days, you can ensure that they won’t get overwhelmed.
Satisfied employees are much more willing to work in a group and people are less likely to get frustrated with others. Working with HR to determine time off can improve their work-life balance, which ultimately reflects through the entire team.
Identify Each Person’s Strengths
When team members feel noticed and can use their strengths, productivity increases.
Pay attention to the strengths of your staff and make sure that they are being used in the right ways. If you have someone with less experience leading team meetings, others that are more qualified might get frustrated.
Uses strengths and experience to determine the best place for people on the team. If you can’t find an ideal spot for someone, talk to them and discover their interests. When each member enjoys what they’re doing, they are more likely to produce high-quality work.
A fun activity to try that captures each person’s strengths could be an escape room. Escape rooms bring members together as they work on individual items to solve the bigger picture. This is essentially what they do at work each day and is a lot of fun.
Create a Supportive Environment
If gossip and cliques lurk in every corner of your office, you need to make some abrupt changes.
Creating a supportive environment can improve employee collaboration in many ways. Not only will employees build trust with one another, but they will also discover the other skills that members bring to the team. Support should come through training and then be an ongoing priority.
Talk to your staff about the company culture that you want to have and hold each person accountable. When employees are held accountable, they can work better as a team.
Find a balance of offering resources and knowledge to everyone and they will do the same for others.
Set Clear Expectations
When upper management isn’t setting expectations, issues begin to arise in the workplace and teams crumble.
A great way to give clean expectations is to set specific and measurable goals. You can check here for information about goal-setting and how it can improve collaboration. Goals and expectations let each person know what they’re responsible for and who to contact for what information.
If staff doesn’t know who to contact when a problem occurs, it can get overlooked and fall on another person. Pay attention to your workflow and get feedback. These are your best ways of determining if staff is getting guided correctly.
Supply Staff With Resources
If you want to improve employee productivity and collaboration, you need to supply the resources.
A common problem that companies face is not being aware of the missing resources to do a job. If you supply your staff with all of the knowledge, technology, and supplies that they need, it’s easier to get each task completed.
Companies often get held back on jobs because certain members of the team can’t get their resources quickly enough. Try to plan and prepare these resources so that people can focus on working together rather than who took the last black pen.
Avoid Micro-Managing
Mirco-managing is a poor habit that can harm a team’s performance.
Try to avoid lingering over employees as they work on a project as a team. Letting them problem-solve independently can increase productivity and trust amongst staff. Each time you get involved, staff will assume that you need to solve each issue and question.
Giving your employees space to learn together and find new ways of doing things can also help them bond. It’s better to have staff bonding overwork in a good way, rather than complaining about their boss annoying them.
If you need to get information from members, consider adding a weekly meeting so that you don’t have to look over their shoulders. As each employee feels confident and trusted, it will reflect through the rest of the business.
Does Your Employee Collaboration Need Help?
Improving employee collaboration with open discussions and clear expectations is essential.
A productive business needs a well-functioning team and when one person is struggling, the entire team gets delayed. Preventing burnout and giving resources needed for their jobs should be a constant priority if you want to gain revenue.
Don’t hesitate to make some changes, especially if your communication is falling apart.
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