In the business world changed by the Coronavirus pandemic, leaders are talking more and more about how to ensure the effectiveness of their remote or hybrid teams.
Many of them started combining different teamwork models with advanced technology solutions like work tracking software to optimize their teams’ effectiveness and gain detailed insight into employees’ day-to-day performance.
Teamwork models aren’t a new concept. Leaders worldwide have been trying to find ways to optimize their teams and make them more effective for decades. This is why you can find numerous team effectiveness models from the 1970s to today.
Here you’ll find some tips on how to make the most of a teamwork model once you find one that best fits your needs.
Choose the Optimal Solution for You and Your Teams
Once you dive into the team effectiveness topic, you’ll find an array of reliable models you can use to boost teamwork. While some focus on potential pain points you need to tackle to optimize your team’s performance, others focus on internal and external factors that affect your team’s efficiency.
The best way to find out what teamwork model will suit you is to ask yourself what your goals and expectations are. Furthermore, this model needs to adapt easily to your employees’ needs and incorporate them into your leadership style.
Involve Your Employees in the Optimization Process
If you want the chosen teamwork model to have a positive impact on your team’s effectiveness, try to involve your employees in this process. Open communication is the key. You don’t have to name the model directly, but your employees need to know what your expectations are, focusing on the key takeaways and results.
This said if you decide to go with the Katzenbach and Smith model, your focus should be on performance, work outcomes, and personal development, improving team members’ communication and collaboration skills, making them more committed to and responsible for their goals.
Encourage employees to speak openly about their pain points and the specific aspects of their work they might be struggling with. This honest feedback will show you where your additional guidance and support are needed to make the most of the chosen teamwork model.
Strengthen Team Collaboration
Besides team communication, seamless collaboration is the key to developing highly effective teams. So whatever teamwork model you opt for, make sure that your team members work together.
If you want to build tight-knit teams committed to reaching set goals, you need to create an atmosphere where employees will feel free to express their different, sometimes conflicting opinions and know that they will be heard and respected.
Don’t try to avoid potential conflicts. Show your employees how to overcome them instead, using proven conflict resolution techniques. Learning how to agree to disagree and move on towards set goals can be a common ground for building effective teams.
Check in to See Whether the Model Works
You need to pay attention to employees’ performance and well-being while trying to adapt your business processes. Work trackers can offer comprehensive real-time data about the way your employees spend their work hours.
This can be a base for objective detailed feedback that will show you how your employees cope with the newly-implemented team effectiveness model.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see the wanted changes in productivity right away. Use a performance evaluation report to talk to your employees and find out what can help them adjust better to the teamwork model, and give them time to do so.
Final Words
Running remote or hybrid teams can be challenging but these models are the future of work so you better acknowledge this change and make sure that your remote teams maintain highly productive. Adopting a teamwork model that works best for you and your employees can increase employee productivity and strengthen cross-team collaboration. If you want to achieve this you need to involve your employees in the team-optimization process and stay open to their feedback.
Also, encourage your employees to share their ideas clearly and overcome potential opinion clashes with other team members. Innovation and progress derive from diversity of opinions and your employees may learn a lot from these productive discussions.
Finally, you can always rely on employee tracking app data to see whether the chosen teamwork model works for you, offering your employees time to adjust to it.
