What is your team’s problem? Do you find it hard to close projects on time – or at all? Perhaps you feel like you and your people keep spinning wheels? If you wish your work was moving forward faster, today we’ll teach you several principles of the effective teamwork.
Communication won’t be one of them. You’ve probably heard that one already. If you’re struggling to make your team more effective, dig in – here are some tips that work for us and surely will work for you as well.
Encourage Independence
While you might think that “independence” and “teamwork” don’t belong in one sentence, that’s not really true. Even closely-knit teams benefit from people being independent.
Encourage your team members to take responsibility for their niches and actively look after them. Waiting for the manager’s sign to start working is what slows them down. The teams that work fastest are those in which people initiate action on their own.
Our team at Taskeo is fully distributed. With time differences as huge as several hours, we can’t allow ourselves to sit around and wait for others to call the shots. That is exactly why we’re all about independence. While we work as a team, each of us has their own niche to manage. We begin working on the tasks as soon as we see them, even without being told to do so.
Coach Productivity Habits
While you shouldn’t tell people what’s best for them, it’s always good to show them some ways to improve. Even better if the team coaches itself on its very own. Sharing good productivity habits can work miracles for your employees and for effective teamwork.
Introduce your people to all tips, tricks and hacks that worked well for you. In the same time, encourage them to share their own. Little shifts can bring about big changes.
Teach your people how to prioritize their tasks, how to deal with an ever-full mailbox, how to deal with low productivity. The more they know about task and time management, the easier the job is for you as their leader.
Choose The Right Methodology
Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, GTD or even batching – there are plenty of methodologies that your team can use. It all comes down to choosing what’s working best for you.
Just don’t work blindly. Specialist, psychologists, CEOs and hundreds of other professionals have analyzed different workflow theories for a reason. Make the most out of their efforts.
Create a process that works well for your team. Your goal is to ensure that everybody knows when they need to step in to continue the progress. When your people know how the processes work, they don’t need to ask questions. They don’t waste time seeking answers to their doubts.
Use The Right Software
Good software can skyrocket your team productivity but a bad one can kill it. Choose a good project management platform.
Different platforms solve different problems. Find the one that solves yours!
We already mentioned that at Taskeo we value personal input and employee independence. That is why, in opposition to many other platforms, we created software to increase the productivity of your employees individually.
This is particularly important if your team is a remote one. Distributed teams depend on systems that remind every single employee about their tasks and tell them what are their assignments for the upcoming days.
If you know what’ the core problem of your team – find a platform that will make it disappear.
…And Use It Right
But it’s not just about the platform you’ll use. Your key to succeeding as a team is to benefit from all the functions that your platform offers.
If you purchase a project management platform and use it only to assign tasks, you’re missing out. It’s that simple.
So what else can you do to squeeze out more from your PM software?
Let’s take Taskeo example.
Time tracking and reporting
Taskeo has an inbuilt time tracking feature connected to reporting. Even if your people are not entirely fond of tracking the time spent on tasks, convince them otherwise. Knowing how much time do you need to complete certain tasks gives you incredible insight into so many things – from efficiency to bottlenecks, allowing you to plan better and smarter.
Workload
Kanban is useful. If you organize it the right way, you can easily preview your team’s workload. But an even better way to do so – a way that Taskeo offers in its free plan – is to preview the team load.
Mapping of tasks on a timeline will help you spread the work evenly. Because the last thing you want is to jump between “idle” periods and “on fire” periods.
Project Types And Storing Knowledge
One of the best practices to stick to when you work with a project management platform is to avoid bouncing between apps. Keep your work in your platform for maximum efficiency.
Taskeo is so much help when it comes to that. It’s more than just a kanban so you can adjust your projects to make them be whatever you want. Change projects types to swap from a to-do kanban view to a time booking space.
Let The Team Decide What’s The Best For Them
Effective teamwork hardly comes down to people doing things exactly as the manager says. In fact, the more you let your team decide what’s best for them, the more likely they are to find the right method.
While in a position of a leader, you’ll naturally feel responsible for the project’s outcome. Don’t understand us wrong – it’s important for a team to have a knowledgeable leader that guides the efforts of their less experienced colleagues. However, something that worked for you may not work for the team.
Be open-minded. Let the team use their own experiences to come up with the best collaboration method that will render the best result. Having a little trust in your team will go a long way.
Effective Teamwork – Simple Idea Hard To Master
These principles of effective teamwork are simple enough. But while the idea is quite straightforward, it will take time to master it. Don’t get discouraged. Finding the right methodology and learning the best productivity tricks won’t happen overnight. But we promise you – it will be worth the waiting and the effort.
