How to Create a Culture of Teamwork
Last Updated August 12, 2020
As a leader, you may know how to create, engage and guide high-performing teams, but how do you scale this teamwork concept on a company-wide level?
Creating a culture of teamwork is not the same as team building. However, if you’ve developed strong teams that produce solid results, you have the foundation for a teamwork culture. An organization that seeks to develop productive, high-performing teams first needs to cultivate a culture that’s positive and open with an environment rich in creativity and challenges. This kind of a culture can help to attract top talent and retain employees who thrive at teamwork.
When teamwork becomes an intrinsic part of your organization’s culture, everyone benefits—the company, employees and your customers.
What is Teamwork Culture?
A successful culture of teamwork can be characterized as an environment marked by the shared belief that the organization can move forward most effectively when collaboration and cooperation are at the heart of thinking, planning and decision making.
This kind of culture results in companies where each member of the organization—from executive leadership to management to frontline staff—are engaged, productive and loyal. If that’s the type of culture you’d like to create in your organization, consider these five attributes shared by companies where teamwork is the key to success:
- Empowerment: Teams are encouraged to be self-reliant and empowered to make their own decisions.
- High Expectations: Teams are given important assignments and projects, not just low-level tasks.
- Support: Teams with the talent and ability to produce results are supported by management with the time, budget, people and other resources needed to do their jobs.
- Encouragement: Teams are encouraged to work independently, and employees are encouraged to form their own informal teams to solve problems.
- Training: Teams have the proper training for their own positions as well as cross-training opportunities. This makes teams more nimble and increases appreciation and understanding among colleagues.
Creating a teamwork culture is easier when teamwork is promoted, sponsored and supported from the top of the organization.
Why is Teamwork Important in the Workplace?
Having this shared belief in collaboration and cooperation, which a culture of teamwork can help to foster, provides your organization with not only a unifying focus, but also a unified approach to how work gets done. Every individual, team and department know they will be expected to work together to complete tasks and accomplish goals.
Some of the benefits of creating and fostering this teamwork culture include:
- Employees who contribute to well-oiled teams are happy and engaged; care more about their companies, their co-workers and their jobs; and are far more productive than those in an individualist environment.
- Companies with a team-oriented culture enjoy higher levels of employee retention; the decreased investment in recruiting and training strengthens the bottom line.
- Ultimately, strong teams work harder, improving themselves and the organization, which is why so many organizations emphasize strategies to hone their development.
To put it simply, creating a culture of teamwork in your organization just makes business sense.
Building a Culture of Teamwork
Building an environment conducive to teamwork is a process requiring a plan and specific activities to support collaboration. Some of these activities that can help take your company in a more collaborative direction and serve as the building blocks for a culture of teamwork include setting organizational-wide goals, measuring productivity and progress towards goals and modeling collaborative conflict resolution.
Goal Setting
The plan itself must set goals for building individual, team and management expectations for work and performance. It must identify events, rewards or incentives to solidify support of teamwork culture. In turn, each employee needs to fully understand the company’s goals and vision, as well as their role in getting there. The plan and the end objective must therefore be communicated openly and frequently with employees.
Measuring Productivity
Setting goals creates common ground and increases productivity, as individuals and teams align and collaborate to achieve the larger organizational goals. Measuring productivity is the only way to ensure the concept works – especially when emphasizing teamwork company-wide. Progress against the plan should be monitored and measured. Also, employee feedback on how the plan is proceeding is an important measurement that can’t be neglected. Likewise, measuring individual employee and then team productivity and finally organizational performance—i.e. increased sales, higher production, cost reduction, new customers added or other relevant metrics—can help gauge the impact of teamwork culture on employee progress and the company’s bottom line.
Modeling Conflict Resolution
Senior management is responsible for more than just communicating the value and need for a culture of teamwork. They need to be models for the kinds of collaborative behaviors they want to see take hold, even when circumstances might make it expedient to slip back into a more individualistic mode. This temptation is most likely to arise when conflicts happen, whether that be between individuals within a team or between teams. Setting the expectation that members need to work out conflicts as much as possible, without retreating into departmental silos or “pulling rank” and escalating situations up the chain of command, is teamwork in action. It is an organizational direction that must be set from the top for this culture shift to take hold.
Growing a Culture of Teamwork
Successfully growing a culture like this requires setting up a system that demonstrates and recognizes contributions and performance on individual and group levels. It requires establishing an understanding of the consequences, ensuring employees take responsibility and accountability for team achievements. Recognizing and rewarding individual and team performance are important. Your system should ensure that people who contribute to teamwork success reap a tangible reward for their contribution to the company’s increased success.
Human resources and talent management teams play a crucial role in implementing the systems and processes that maintain and grow organizational culture. By recruiting, hiring, and training top talent that fits your culture of teamwork, human resources and talent management help to continually shape the direction of company culture.
For example, training and development managers can provide teams with best practices and systematic ways to collaboratively trouble shoot and solve real work issues, improve interpersonal communications and hold productive meetings that review projects and work processes that are mutually owned across the organization. Implementing benefits and rewards, such as sponsoring sports teams, organizing quarterly company-wide celebrations or lunchtime potlucks, can help bring all the individuals and teams within your organization closer together.
As remote work becomes more prevalent, due to necessity and employee expectations, bringing your people together is even more critical and challenging. Team-building activities, even if it’s a happy hour over Zoom, go a long way toward reinforcing the behaviors that build a collaborative team culture. The most effective are those that are seamlessly incorporated into the larger teamwork effort and are practiced every day.
Making Your Culture of Teamwork a Success
A culture of teamwork is one that companies of all sizes and in all sectors should seek to create within their organizations. A well-conceived plan, embraced and championed by senior management, combined with consistent and clear communications about the objectives and outcomes, and a rational system of rewards can form its basis and lead to greater business success.
Getting Educated
Those interested in learning about certificate programs to advance their skills in improving organizational culture can benefit from courses offered in human resourses 100% online such as the Professional Certificate in Human Resources & Talent Management or the Master’s Certificate in Supervisory & Human Resources Management offered by Michigan State.
