Your work as a team leader can easily be compared to that of a coach. It is all about handling your team members’, mentality, collaboration strengths, and weaknesses to extract the most from them. You must always try to take 110% of your colleagues’ capacity in a collaborative manner that allows team spirit and cooperation to flourish.

Is it an easy job? No way. The difficulties lie down to collaboration, hence the lack of true coaches. Finding a very talented employee is easier than an average talented team leader. So, if you want to lead your team successfully, you should think twice and be certain that what you want to improve is through your team’s performance and not through your actions.

In this article, you will get 8 tips for improving team collaboration at work so that you can succeed and reach your business productivity goals.

8 Tips to Improve Team Collaboration

Building a strong collaborative team takes a lot of effort but is worth it as it boosts the productivity, creativity, and morale of your team. Here are some tips that will help you improve team collaboration at your digital workplace:

1. Set Key Milestones and Goals

When people with different roles work together, establish a common goal between all parties. Having a clear understanding of what they are working toward can help team members use their time effectively. This ensures they understand the company’s goals and plans.

Once you establish a common goal, your team can direct the conversation and workflow toward idea creation or problem-solving. The common goal also guides you and your team throughout the collaboration process to keep everyone on track.

Also, each one should have a very clear short-term target. If targets are long-term or if they are not set precisely, you will end up having people working on the wrong tasks, overlapping tasks, or even not working at all. Short-term targets help you follow up with their work and evaluate it correctly.

2. Define Roles and Responsibilities

When your team members know their specific duties, they will work with more focus and be better aligned with the goal. Moreover, there will be no duplicate work done.

As a manager, define clear roles and responsibilities for your team members. Collaboration does not mean that everyone will do the same tasks or that all resources can be reused. Having straightforward roles will help avoid conflicts and/or unassigned tasks. However, you should redefine these roles from time to time.

What’s more, accepting your errors early in role assignment can reduce the cost of the error. It will also give you the ability to try each member in different roles. Productivity measurement tools will help in the right way.

3. Use Collaboration Software

We don’t live in the middle ages anymore. Many enterprise collaboration platforms can help you assign tasks, create projects, track the team’s progress, add milestones, share documents online, share tasks, handle events, etc.

For instance, ProofHub fosters a collaborative environment by providing a central platform for communication, file sharing, and task management. This streamlines workflows, improves efficiency, and empowers teams to achieve their goals together.

On the other hand, Comidor focuses on enterprise collaboration by offering a digital workspace that helps improve process optimization and automation to perform business tasks more efficiently.

You can find any feature in these tools you could ever imagine about team collaboration. So, there is no excuse even if you have to manage teams in different locations. Even if you are a small company, implementing effective strategies and using the right tools can streamline communication and collaboration across diverse geographical areas. You could even use live video or audio chat to have a daily meeting. They usually offer powerful business intelligence tools to export analytics and reports.

4. Encourage Open and Transparent Communication

Encourage open communication and mean it. Collaboration happens when everyone feels like they can bring their whole selves to work.

As a manager, motivate your team members to participate, innovate, and communicate. Make sure that everyone is allowed to speak their minds and share their ideas. This means that instead of holding back their thoughts or reigning in their feelings, they can be themselves and bring all of the great ideas that come with it.

But, open communication also means that, sometimes, they are going to disagree. Disagreements are not counter to team collaboration. Healthy disagreements and open conversations are critical to unlocking successful team collaboration.

5. Manage Resources Effectively

If you are responsible for selecting your team members, think carefully about who you choose. If you choose members with identical abilities you will end up in conflicts between their roles. Balance in capacities is always the key to harmony.

Try to make at least two people work on a certain type of task periodically. Small groups of 2-3 team members can exchange ideas on accomplishing a certain task more efficiently. The knowledge inside the team should be shared and distributed evenly, ensuring that no single individual becomes the sole expert on a particular task or process.

6. Create a Sense of Community

You cannot collaborate with a stranger. Even open-source projects maintained by programmers located far from each other try to have a closer relationship.

This does not mean that everyone must be best friends with anyone, but that everyone sees the others as equivalent members. Respect and understanding are of top priority in a community. Egoism on the other side can have disastrous effects.

7. Hold Regular Meetings

A short meeting per day is helpful to see where the team is heading, what problems they face, and even get a hint on the relations growing among them. It also creates a light feeling of competition which often has creative results.

Nevertheless, you should try to keep a balance in your number of meetings frequency and duration, because long meetings especially in the middle of the day will end up reducing your team’s productivity dramatically.

8. Reward and Recognize Good Work

Justice and objectiveness are what team members want to have from their managers. Rewards can help in this direction. Personal rewards may lead to positive competitive feelings by other team members and more often end in everyone’s efforts to achieve the same good performance.

A team leader should be able to praise and thank the members of the team who try harder. The reward does not have to be something expensive. The gesture is what counts. Additionally, investing in employee upskilling is crucial. Providing opportunities for professional development not only enhances individual capabilities but also strengthens the overall team performance. When employees feel valued and see tangible growth in their skills, it fosters a culture of continuous improvement and commitment.

Conclusion

Building a cohesive and effective team is crucial for achieving success. By implementing the above team collaboration tips, you can build a highly collaborative team.

Successful teamwork means open communication among team members, clearly defined roles, and a sense of community. Effective team collaboration boosts efficiency and lets you and your team achieve your productivity goals.

*This article was written by the Comidor team in collaboration with an external guest author.

Author Bio
Vartika Kashyap, CMO at ProofHub, is a renowned B2B SaaS marketer with 17+ years of experience. She’s a prolific writer with 200+ articles on productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Vartika is a three-time LinkedIn Top Voice recipient and a thought leader in people management. Her work is featured on various top-tier publication platforms such as Muck Rack, Medium, eLearning Industry, Business2Community, DZone, Social Media Today, G2., and TweakYourBiz.

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Take a breath and start the race to reach inbox 0.

1. Sorting

First, start by sorting your emails as Maura Thomas, TedX Speaker, author (HBR, Entrepreneur, Huff. Post etc.) and founder of regainyourtime.com, suggests. This will make you skim through your mailing list easily and effectively. Most commonly, there will be an entire conversation of the same topic. All you need to do is sort emails by Subject, open only the very last one and read the whole story from bottom to the top. Then, what you can do is sorting emails by sender, too. That move will lead to a speedy massive deletion of advertisements, spams, coupons and any other “junk” email.

2. Deciding

While you skim through your mailbox, probably you will quickly grasp what you should do with each “unread” email. The ideal would be to deal with it, as soon as it arrives in your inbox, but -unless your job requires to respond immediately to mail sender- this happens rarely. Christiano Ferraro, management consultant and owner of christianoferraro.com, indicates that you should manage the email source, not the email itself. A quick respond at the time someone sends you an email leads to higher engagement and helps you be to the point of the email subject. It’s better not to open the email if you are not about to take action upon it, as it would cost you more time to mark it as unread.

3. Acting

Most of the emails we receive are orders or information about events and processes. What someone should do is work on it and take time to link or transform these emails into tasks and events or detach files and move them to file management system. Schedule your time, as Geraldine Markel, creator of managingyourmind.com and Frank Buck, author, blogger and owner of frankbuck.org, suggest, by moving emails to to-do-list or forward them to colleagues’ mailbox or task list immediately.

4. Making your life easier

There are also some tactics that will make your mailbox look organized like applying Tags, Filters and Archive emails. When an interesting article, blogpost or newsletter arrives in your Mailbox but you don’t have the time at that moment to check it, you can archive it and read it later. On top of that, Ian Lam, co-founder of cohesion.sg, and his team, have set their email client to automatically apply tags and categorize their inbox.

5. Falling in love with delete option

And now the best part of all, deleting! Don’t be afraid to put in your trash bin everything that just reserves a place without reason in your mailbox. As long as you have saved associated documents in your cloud storage, have scheduled your tasks and have planned your events, you can just delete the emails referring to them and save space in your mailbox. Mike McRitchie, strategist and owner of mikemcritchie.com, underlines that deleting emails will help you keep up with your inbox and not to miss key clients’ email. Also, Rahul Alim from customcreatives.com advise spend time to unsubscribe from unnecessary emails that have your email on their lists in order to avoid deleting same spam emails every day.

Good luck with Inbox 0!

Ready(?) Steady… Go!!!

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1. Build Trust

Jeff Kear, Founder of Planning Pod supports that the first thing you need to do to encourage collaboration in your sales force is to remove collaboration barriers. According to him, one big barrier is the development of hyper-competition among salespeople making them reluctant to share information or help each other out of fear of giving away a sale. His way to prevent this is to create a compensation structure that is higher on salary and lower on sales commissions. In addition, he has divvied up industries/verticals sales targets among salespeople so they aren’t competing for the same clients.

David Hoffeld, CEO of Hoffeld Group underlines that planning and clearly defining roles will equip colleagues to work with, not against one another. In addition he suggests us to prepare buyers informing them with whom and for what they are going to communicate and clearly convey the value of each member of our sales team. He supports that in this way we can create a positive first impression and prompt the buyer to be receptive to any individual of our sales team.

2. Share Information

Nick Kane, Managing Partner at Janek Performance Group suggests putting our sales team in a position to share information and communicate amongst the team. He explains that no one individual knows more than the collective so we should encourage information sharing and learning. His advice is to ask the more seasoned reps to impart their knowledge of your products, industry, etc. and encourage newer reps to share the strategies that have been working for them.

Jeff Kear, Founder of Planning Pod, provides us an example of sales team information sharing, a 10-minute phone conference every morning. He refers that the morning phone conference has become a great way for team members to share ideas, advice and contacts with each other to help team members close their leads.

3. Set motivating team goals

Gerald Bricker from Mentors Guild supports that we have to understand that each person on the team has a unique perspective and focus on determining the voice of the customer and employ the strengths of the company in exceeding the customers’ expectations.

According to Nick Kane, Managing Partner at Janek Performance Group, those that work toward a common goal tend to be more collaborative in their everyday work. This is why, he advises us to encourage a team atmosphere and reward them for their team accomplishments.

Jonathan Kendall, President & CEO of PopUpSelling , has no doubt that the only way to motivate a wide range of personality types, with different upbringing, generational idiosyncrasies, that see the world differently, and have unique goals is individualized motivation within the team. He is of the opinion that the promotion outcome must inspire and motivate the individual sales professional, giving us the following examples. The higher-spirited sales people often want the opportunity to help more people, and solve more problems. Boomers want to be secure, they’re getting old. Millennials want to feel special, like their parents have been telling them for years. His suggestion is that with technology, and proper training, it’s not hard to get it right, but it takes time and effort. He underlines that the rewards are huge and the sales staff will appreciate that management knows them!

4. Start aiming to Cooperation

Joseph Flahiff from Mentors Guild recognizes that growth and learning take time. We cannot expect from sales staff being used to close sales independently to start now to depend absolutely on each other to close a sale. At least to begin with, Joseph Flahiff suggests us to strive to get cooperation instead of collaboration. Using a great analogy, he explains us the difference between cooperation and collaboration:

“Think of a relay team vs. a soccer team. When I have the baton in a relay, I am the only one running, when we trade the baton we are cooperating. A soccer team on the other hand, is constantly collaborating, people play multiple roles, whatever is needed at the time, and even if I am not the one with the ball, I am still in the game blocking, positioning, or defending”.

He continues stating that coordination of sales staff efforts can make a powerful jump in productivity and success. Finally, he describes that coordination looks like two people working together, passing the ball back and forth, and looking out for each other. We have to admit that cooperation seems to be a really good start for sales teams’ collaboration.

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In order to be ready to play offense and defense, we have collected five (5) simple ways that already helped managers with collaborative project management:

1. Be balanced and fair:

This is the first thing that Andrea underlines in order to be the winner of the battle. There is nothing worse than the feeling of being wronged in a team, or having a leader that has a different attitude among different members.

2. Provide motivators:

What comes second according to Andrea is to stimulate your team to boost their productivity. This stimulus can be from a verbal endorsement to a financial bonus! Think of yourself, wouldn’t you really do your best if you knew that you will be recognized for your efforts?

3. Start using software tools:

Pick CRM Project Management tools, collaborative Project Management app, Business Intelligence Project Management solutions, Project Tracking and Task Tracking software or any other combination that fits your needs and start using it immediately! You will be surprised of the advantages that teamwork online can offer to your daily business collaboration. Frequent communication across the team is really critical for successful projects according to William Anderson.

4. Enhance the “Not Alone” feeling:

Rebecca Bredholt describes the way they work in Sutter Group: before anything goes out the door it’s seen by the keeper of the flame. Thus, they prevent anyone from feeling like they are going it alone. Two pairs of eyes are totally better than one, so apart from the collaborative feeling you will also have a project with better quality.

5. Invite all team members to all meetings:

Every single member of your team should be invited to all meetings, even if they are not working on that one piece. Rebecca quotes that “it helps trigger reminders”. Even before the actual beginning of the project, sharing all the information with all the team is really important, as William Anderson says, they start every project with a brief that is distributed to the entire team and any key stakeholders.

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But be honest. PM is not art, you’re not born with a divine gift sent from the heavens and certainly you’re not a wizard. When asked, what is project management I often reply: “PM is the organization and execution of tasks and/or groups of tasks in while eliminating the underlined risk in order to achieve a predefined goal that is defined by time, cost and quality”.  Who is the best project manager? That’s easy: A single mom of two kids! Want to be a good project manager? Observe the lady!

So first thinks first, in the PM class you start by comprehending the following elementary project terms:

Purpose

You should have a purpose. Purpose sets clear goals and gets your team motivated.

Goals

You have to set clear goals. Goals are the tools helping you to design the roadmap to your project’s objectives. Remember that goals should be S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based).

Decision makers

Only a small group of people in strict hierarchy should have the right to take decisions.

Resources

You should identify your project’s resources. These may include people, budget, equipment, infrastructure etc. Resources are not limitless and thus they define the project’s boundaries in terms of what can be accomplished.

Capabilities – Capacities

You should carefully select your project’s human resources based on their competencies, experiences and capacity. Always bear in mind that a human resource can be ideal for project A but not for project B. Thus, the evaluation of human resources and collaboration should be project –wise.

Tasks/Work packages

Group tasks into work packages and assign a responsible person (team leader) to each one of those while keeping track of their productivity. She or he should have the freedom to organize the work and assign it to team members, while always a project management app can help. She or he alone should be accountable if things go sideways.

Risks

Try to answer the following questions:

• What are the risks?
• What if the risks happen?
• How can risks be identified with live project tracking, analyzed and documented?
• How can the possibility of risk be reduced?
• What project management tools can support us in managing risk and monitor it throughout the project?

Critical Path

That is the longest pathway to achieving the project results. This is the alpha and the omega of any project planning and can be easily identified with a gantt chart.

Project Progress

At any given time you (the project manager) should always be aware of what has been achieved and what not based on the initial planning. A good solid way to obtain this information is through Kanban boards and Business Intelligence tools.

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