3 Challenges of Teamwork & Overcoming Them
Ever had that time at school or college where you were the one carrying your whole group for a project? It’s not much use calling something teamwork unless the team is actually working. Sounds straightforward enough, right? The reality, however, is that effective teamwork is hard. It already controls much of the work that gets done in organizations today. The increased frequency of teamwork and collaboration creates problems, but there are ways to overcome them too.
1. Building Trust
In a time such as the present where the country reels under a second wave of COVID, you’d want to take care of your team. Yet you’re still trying to understand the right manner to manage their needs. Given this, building trust becomes of the essence, especially in the scenario of remote working, where you are only a point of contact over the phone. This comes down to 6 steps:
- Address each member and their needs
- Give them control
- Agree outcomes with team members.
- Using Inspirational Appeals
- Be Transparent
- Be Fair
2.Setting optimal work conditions
Even before COVID, we operated work environments that were fast-paced, with change being constant. COVID has only catalysed this condition, making it hard to keep pace with work, let alone move teams forward. Studies have shown that in the last 20 years, “the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more.”
In simpler terms, if one spent an hour before for such activities, it now became at least one and a half hours! In addition, employees are spending roughly 80 percent of their workday communicating or interacting with co-workers on work-related activities. This too, can be dealt with, using 3 mechanisms to cope with the situation:
Adaptability
In this day and age of technology, we live in a world operated by fast-paced work environments, with constant change. It’s hard to keep pace with work, let alone move our teams forward in the face of this disruption. However, there are optimal conditions that help teams be cohesive, nimble, and productive, despite the difficulties posed by pace and change. This creates the requirement to have an equally agile communication tool.
One such tool that can host such calls under a mobile device is MultiCall, which lets you call many with the ease of calling one, on the go. A group call can be set and scheduled for any time of the day. As seen in practices of effective conferencing, preparations ahead of time allow for more convenience, both for your business and for all the participants involved.
Resilience
Yes. This is exactly what you’re first thinking of when you hear or see the word. Resilience is being able to recover and bounce back to a prior positive state or equilibrium when confronted with sudden disruptions to an otherwise normal flow of activity.
As a tool, MultiCall ensures this too. In the event of suddenly being disconnected from a group call, you only need redial the number you were contacted from, and you can re-join with ease.
Agility
Being reactive to a situation is one thing, being proactive to it is completely another. Proactively sensing and redirecting to chart a new path to success by reallocating energy to build new capabilities is key to ensuring an optimal work environment.
3. Team Self-Awareness
You may not know it, but if you’ve worked on a team, you’ve likely felt the exasperation of having to work with someone who shows characteristics of low self-awareness. Some examples? Being resistant to feedback. Playing the blame game towards others for any failures, and taking unwarranted credit for any successes. And so on and so forth. But coming to the point, these characteristics are more common than you’d think.
Studies by Harvard Business Review found that though 95% of people think they’re self-aware, a stark-contrasting 10 to 15% actually are! Needless to say, low self-awareness is one of the most detrimental factors towards efficient and effective teamwork.
But more importantly, this is also detrimental to the organization’s health as a work environment. Increasing individual self-awareness would result in an improved quality of connections that develop in organizations. This in turn leads to better ways of working together — and ultimately, improved engagement levels.
Success and productivity for a company is only as good as how much the employees can strive to work together as a team. By being aware of the problems and working to counter them in the manner above, a team is capable of reaching more by promoting effective communication and collaboration, in order to allow room for gaining excellent results.
