Fostering collaboration between your employees strengthens engagement, productivity, and performance. These factors elevate team cohesion, morale, and innovation.
Because employees might have difficulty collaborating in highly technical environments, you should take steps to encourage teamwork. The following suggestions can help.
Develop Employee Rapport
Employees who know and trust each other typically enjoy collaboration. They feel comfortable sharing, developing, and implementing ideas to benefit the company.
You can help build rapport between your employees through team-building exercises. Employees can get to know each other, find common ground, and build work relationships.
Consider implementing these team-building activities:
- Schedule time for your employees to collaborate on jigsaw puzzles, word challenges, or other games to encourage friendly competition. Consider asking your team to recommend games for monthly challenges.
- Organize a weekly show and tell where an employee shares something they are interested in, something they collect, or a hobby. These activities help your team get to know each other and discover commonalities.
- Ask your employees to write a compliment about each team member. Read the compliments aloud to show your employees are valued, respected, and appreciated.
Create Team Goals
Meet with your employees quarterly to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Involving your team in the goal development process strengthens feelings of ownership in reaching company objectives.
Emphasize each employee’s role in helping attain team goals. Show how their activities impact the organization.
Providing your team with a purpose encourages collaboration to achieve common goals. Strengthening your employees’ skills, contributions, and achievements provides additional value to the organization.
Foster a Creative Workplace
Developing a creative work environment encourages your employees to think outside the box and share unique ideas. Providing diverse perspectives and feedback supports collaboration.
For instance, use collaboration tools such as videoconferencing, online chat, project management software, and cloud storage to encourage brainstorming. Also, place a whiteboard in a central location in your workspace, write down a company problem, and encourage your team to share solutions. Ask follow-up questions to further develop the answers.
Recognize and reward your employees who contribute to the discussions. These activities encourage ongoing team collaboration.
Include Your Employees in Decision-Making
Let employees participate in discussions and decision-making as much as possible. Including your team in daily or weekly huddles and meetings to discuss department or company issues encourages them to provide input and develop solutions.
For instance, talk with your employees about their workflows to improve efficiency and outputs. Also, consider setting up an online task board showing the projects your team is working on, the next steps, and what has been completed. These activities create a positive work environment, encourage collaboration, and help your employees learn from each other.
Get Help Adding Members to Your Team
Do you need help adding more members to your scientific or technical team? Contact Element Staffing today.
