Team Work and Synergy!

Businesses thrive when they have a diverse team of people who can contribute individual ideas. Team work helps solve problems. Brain storming is a good opportunity for the team to exchange ideas and come up with creative ways of doing things. By working together, teams can find the solutions that work best. Some benefits of team work are:

1. Teams self-monitor

When one person does a task alone, they have total autonomy — but if that person starts to work slowly or ineffectively, who will set them straight? Nobody, that’s who.

In teamwork, many people have responsibility for the same goal. Most significantly, teammates observe and depend on the quality of each other’s work. When one team member’s performance dips, the others have the knowledge and motivation to help them improve. Without management intervention, effective teams can often regulate their own performance.

2. Teams innovate faster

For any task or problem, there are usually countless solutions. When one employee tackles a project, they might be able to think of a few different ideas given time. But when a team tackles a problem, the project benefits from multiple perspectives, skillsets, and experiences all at once.

A team approach can therefore lead to faster, deeper innovation.

3. Teammates learn from each other

Imagine you have a workforce of 10 designers all working in separate rooms. Each designer works to their own strengths and suffers from their own weaknesses, with nobody to teach or learn from.

Now put them all in the same room, on the same project. Working together, they’ll soon learn each other’s strengths and correct each other’s mistakes. And everyone’s performance will improve.

4. Teamwork can create healthy competition

But what happens to that same team of 10 designers a year down the line, when they’ve learnt all they can from each other? They’ll soon start to compete with one another, to prove their ability and chase promotion or other incentives within your organisation.

Provided the right challenge and rewards are in place to promote competition, team performance can keep improving.