“People” or “soft” skills, like building relationships and encouraging collaboration, are a lot better for the bottom line than you may assume. Poorly managed teams are on average 50% less productive and 44% less profitable than well-managed teams. The benefits go beyond just productivity. Effective teams even help out HR by costing 25% less in company healthcare. There may be a million factors that you can and cannot control that affect your profitability and productivity. But building and managing effective teams is one of the biggest factors to your company’s success you can control.
Building teams may seem like a common sense skill. However, 96% of employees attribute failures to poor organization, collaboration, and communication. Most teams are not effective. Managers and founders are missing the mark.
There are plenty of ways to improve communication, collaboration, and organization for more effective teams.
Here are a few simple methods to implement to build and manage a more effective team
Diversify skills and backgrounds
It’s easy to put together a team of people that are similar in personality or work style. It’s likely the least “frictional” way to assemble a team but it’s rarely going to be the most effective team. A diverse team can outperform a top performing, homogenous group up to 6 times. Having people with different capabilities and skill sets readily available is necessary to work quickly. If each person on your team knows how to do something, even small, the rest don’t you save time trying to learn a new skill or finding help with something small. It can save you a ton of time and really help when quick problem solving is necessary. Diverse skill sets and background can help with better brainstorming and coming up with better solutions a group of similar thinkers/workers won’t. If you’re building a small startup team, this is a must for an effective team to take you to the next level.
To manage a team, eliminate “layers” of communication
Elon Musk sent out a now famous communication memo to the entire Tesla staff about how communication at Tesla works and why. Musk pushed for a flat communication style where anyone at any level of the organization can be heard by anyone else. He calls manager-run, chain of command communication “incredibly dumb” and asks that managers “work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company”. Any team that wants to work effectively should focus on the same. Not only is eliminating the “rules” of communication necessary, but you have to make it easy. Without an easy way to reach each other, team members won’t talk or will waste a ton of time. Email is a huge waste of time and should be avoided for team communication. Replace it with a faster, more inclusive and intuitive tool like company chat. All team members can participate and it’s central and not siloed like email. Hibox company chat is a great tool as you can organize in streams and create and track tasks directly within.
Eliminate pain points of collaboration
Even though “teamwork” is necessary for most projects, new ideas, and problem solving, it’s usually ends up being delegated individual work. The more you can get team members to truly work together collectively on tasks, the more effective they will be. Work will be higher quality and cohesive. To do this, eliminate the problems team members face when trying to collaborate. Instead of emailing different versions of documents back and forth, use Google Drive documents. This way everyone can simultaneously edit the same document. Instead of trying to brainstorm over email or in meetings that are quickly forgotten, try chat streams or group video calls. Most importantly, use task management to make chat actionable and delegate work so it’s easy to work together towards goals. Hibox’s integrated task management is perfect for organizing and delegating tasks for your team towards deadlines.
Make personal relationships and team building a part of your routine
A big part of team effectiveness and engagement has nothing to do with processes and everything to do with relationships. 67% of employees say friends at work are a reason for their happiness there. People who like each other work better together. Try to get your team bonded as quickly as possible for a more effective team. Make team building a regular part of your routine. It doesn’t have to be a complicated, expensive habit, but there are little ways you can bond your team you can steal from top companies here. It’s easy to get disconnected when everyone works online, in office or not. If that’s the case, make sure to keep things personal by scheduling group video calls. Face (or voice) time is important. When people feel they’ve been personally included, they feel more connected to overall goals and are more at ease working together. Hibox is a perfect tool for group video chat. With one click, everyone can go from chatting and organizing tasks to on a group call without any extra logins.
If all managers and founders took a few of these steps to build and manage teams to be more effective, they could save tons of time and see better quality work. Hibox is a perfect platform to take care of a lot of these points for a more effective team with just one login. Try Hibox with your team for free today.
