How Organizations and Leaders Improve Teamwork at The Workplace

Teams are pervasive in today's world. Even the largest and most complex teams can work together effectively if the right conditions are in place. The most productive, innovative teams are led by people who are both task-and relationship-oriented. It is seen that teamwork models related positivity to team performance. Post-pandemic, companies are forced to shed the traditional way of working and accept the uniqueness of their team in order to be able to work fully to their potential. In this article, we have tried to cover ways in which organizations and leaders can contribute to improving teamwork in the workplace.

It Starts with the Basics

At the most basic level, a team’s success or failure at collaborating mirrors the philosophy of top executives in the organization. Teams do well when leaders are involved in demonstrating collaborating behaviour themselves and take time out to invest in social relationships with the team members. Thus, good leaders should define the goal clearly, engage in debates about commitments, and clarify the responsibilities of individual team members. Furthermore, leaders who engage are often the ones who inspire, strengthen, and connect with their followers, thus satisfying their basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, respectively.

Team members respect executives who are understanding and give their colleagues a chance to put forward their concerns. This also gives members an opportunity to put their thoughts forward, which can have a great impact on the performance of the team, as a whole, thus increasing the exchange of ideas, and creating a sense of community among employees.

For instance, Google is known for providing an innovative and professionally collaborative culture. Their company culture thrives from this and the idea that a shared vision helps shape a company. Mastercard, another multinational financial leader, is known to drive employee engagement and inclusion with regular staff feedback. Mastercard allows their workers’ voices to be respectfully heard to make their customer’s experiences safe and straightforward.

Teaching Employees Relationship Skills

Leaders not only have to lead their teams to achieve their targets but also need to ensure the managers are contributing their best. To do so, leaders have to be committed to imbibing employees' relationship skills. This kind of teaching involves strategies for building collaborative partnerships with customers, emphasizing the importance of trust-based personal relationships.

Engaging leaders strengthen their followers and unleash their potential by setting challenging goals. Engaging leaders

• Create the belief in their ability to perform tasks that tie in with that vision.
• Foster team’s self-efficacy.
• Generate a positive appraisal of the future, thereby fostering follower’s optimism.
• Assist the team to bounce back from adversity because a favourable future is within reach.
• Set goals and induce the belief that these can be achieved.

HR Practices

The role of HRM has changed in the last few years. HR managers are no longer solely responsible for hiring and training employees. Instead, they now have many new tasks on their hands. They are required to continuously motivate the employees, which needs a strong reward system, and also act as counselors to understand the personal problems of the employees. HR managers need to stay abreast of the culture breathing in the organization and sometimes have to act as mentors to resolve conflict/miscommunication within teams to improve the working conditions within an organization.

They can improve the overall culture and inculcate collaboration by sponsoring group events and activities such as women’s networks, cooking weekends, and tennis coaching, amongst others. They can motivate the employees to contribute to their full potential by giving in more than monetary rewards. The focus should be on creating policies and practices that encourage them to work at their best. The managers must realign the team models with the demands of the current business environment to ensure productivity and enhanced performance.

To end it, organizations must focus on strengthening their capacity for collaboration. This requires a combination of long-term investments—in building relationships and trust, and in developing a culture in which senior leaders are role models of cooperation. Also, managers and leaders should define roles clearly, and articulate challenges and tasks in a concise manner because it is often noted that practices and structures that worked well with simple teams of people who were all in one location and knew one another do not work well in the current stance.