Do you understand the value of team effectiveness in today’s fast-paced world? If you’ve ever been a part of a team, the chances are high that your answer is positive.
It’s hard not to notice that effective collaboration in a team has become much more complex nowadays. Over the years, the work environment has become more diverse, dynamic, digital, and dispersed.
Therefore, maintaining the focus on the team’s objective and supporting healthy relationships with colleagues is more complicated in today’s 4-D teams. However, plenty of studies prove that the success of the team still depends on the fundamental principles of team effectiveness (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006).
In this article, we will explore the concept of Team Effectiveness and take a closer look at its principles and strategies.
We will discuss the criteria of team effectiveness and methods to enhance work performance. You will be provided with tips to create a healthy team climate and develop a strong structure to achieve team success.
What is Team Effectiveness and Why is it Important?
Team effectiveness is defined as effective team performance; the potential of a team to achieve its goals during a certain period of time.
Effectiveness is a quality that leads the team to enhance employee performance, increase team member satisfaction, raise willingness to work together and improve the overall outcome for the team members.
There are many definitions of team effectiveness in the scientific literature.
Each of them tries to emphasize the dynamics within the group and outline that it’s a wide concept that is interpreted in many ways.
Some of the key factors that can be used for determining an effective team are the final outputs produced by a group; the consequence of the group’s success for each team member, and the increased potential to perform the tasks effectively in the future (Guzzo and Dickson, 1996).
Developing and sustaining a high-performance work team is challenging in today’s work environment.
Effective teams can fulfill their goals quickly and effectively and grow personally or professionally.
The team leaders of effective groups usually manage to create well-balanced relationships between the team members, enhancing their commitment and engagement.
This healthy environment positively influences work culture and helps the team increase performance and achieve well-being.
As a result, the team generates sustainably positive results, leaders get a resilient team full of physical or mental resources needed for fulfilling goals in the future.
Essential Components of Every Effective Team
Creating a useful model for team effectiveness is one of the major challenges of team science nowadays. As time goes by, the teams become more diverse.
Today’s digitalization of resources also creates plenty of problems such as time-zone differences, organizing the team remotely, and resolving conflicts between distant colleagues.
Consequently, there are various models of team science for developing a culture of trust. Nevertheless, every effective team relies on the basic model for team effectiveness.
According to Google’s re: work, the success of the team depends on the following five components:
Psychological Safety
Having a safe working environment allows employees to use their full potential, ask for feedback and take risks with their colleagues.
Psychological safety is the ability to express yourself without fear of negative association outcomes. It can be achieved through a supportive context at the workplace.
This feeling is vital to be confident, ask questions, and generate innovative ideas.
Dependability
Research proves that having a feeling of trust can create cohesion-effectiveness relationships between colleagues (Deortentiis et al., 2013).
It will provide cognitive team interaction by helping the team members count on each other to perform tasks. This can lead to increased employee involvement.
Structure and Clarity
Having a strong cognitive structure of the roles, plans, and duties of the team members is necessary for fulfilling the goals.
Team leadership should provide clear duties, set realistic goals, and create a strong structure to maintain team effectiveness.
Meaning
Finding meaning in work helps the team members to feel that their work is rewarding, providing opportunities for personal growth.
The purpose of work varies for different individuals. It can be financial security, professional development, helping family, supporting the team to achieve goals, expressing yourself, etc.
Impact
Team members desire to see that their actions can actually make an impact. In order to enhance team effectiveness, they should see that their work is important for their colleagues and contributes to the team’s success.
How Do You Measure Team Effectiveness?
The research shows a clear link between team effectiveness and team performance. As a result, team leaders try to balance employee performance in order to enhance team effectiveness.
But is your team really effective? How exactly can you know that your team is effective? Some of the key factors that differentiate ineffective teams from effective ones include collaboration between team members, a culture of transparency, and a focus on individual differences.
But in order to engage the team and increase performance, theoretical principles aren’t enough. In fact, team leaders should carry out practical exercises to measure the team’s effectiveness.
We’ve pointed out the 5 methods based on the previously discussed models of team science to help you shape team processes more effectively.
Exercise for Measuring Team Effectiveness
Performing a simple team task can help you find out the level of the team’s self-regulation and see how effective it is.
Just answer the following questions based on the 5 components of team effectiveness.
Psychological Safety
- Does your team feel safe when faced with challenges?
- Do you give your team members feedback or do they ask for your opinion about performed tasks?
- Are your team members comfortable admitting their mistakes?
Trust
- Do your team members manage to resolve relationship conflicts with colleagues?
- Do they have clear communication about their tasks, progress, and achievements?
Clarity
- Are your requirements transparent for team members?
- Do they understand how to perform certain tasks?
Meaning:
- Do you understand individual differences between your team members?
- Do you know what kind of projects they consider rewarding?
Impact:
- Do you appreciate the actions of a team?
- Does their work contribute to the team’s success?
- Can they make continual progress in the future?
Even if you’ve got “No” to some answers, keep in mind that it’s an integral step towards identifying team effectiveness.
That way, you can find out the problems that slow down your team’s progress and focus on the issues to perform better.
How to Create Psychological Safety on Your Team
Based on the field studies shared by Harvard Business Review, effective team leaders empower their team by increasing psychological safety at the workplace.
But what is psychological safety at all, why does it matter, and how it can make the work rewarding for team members? Dr. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor, defines psychological safety as a belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated by sharing your ideas, asking questions, expressing your concerns, or making mistakes.
According to the study of Lemieux-Charles & McGuire (2006), the relationships between multiple dimensions of team context, structure, processes, and outcomes create a healthy atmosphere for team effectiveness.
This can be achieved through creating psychological safety in the team.
3 Ways to Encourage a Sense of Belonging
Psychological safety is accompanied by plenty of benefits such as increased employee engagement, coordination during teamwork, and improved engagement.
According to Harvard Business Review, high belonging increases job performance by 56%, decreases the turnover risk by 50%, and results in a 75% reduction in sick days.
Accordingly, enormous annual savings is another great benefit of psychological safety at the workplace.
There are 3 proven ways to nurture and encourage a sense of belonging in your team:
Encourage the employees to connect emotionally
Everybody has moments of feeling demotivated. In order to avoid letting your feelings ruin your job performance, you need rewarding relationships with your colleagues.
Team members need a safe environment to share their emotions and gain the strength to finish their tasks without feeling uncomfortable.
Help the team grow
Feeling a sense of professional growth is one of the most rewarding parts of the job for employees. They need to receive feedback about their tasks in order to improve their mistakes, learn and develop.
Getting feedback will provide deep knowledge integration but only if there’s a safe place for feedback. Try to avoid blaming employees for their wrong actions.
Be aware of individual differences
Understanding differences in resources offers leaders the opportunity to learn more about their employees. Getting to know your coworkers will lead to effective delegation of tasks.
But neglecting their personal strengths and weaknesses can lead to ineffective teams. Although learning details about your distant colleagues can be hard when you work remotely, simple conversations during coffee breaks can help you shape team processes.
How to Build a Culture of Trust in Your Team
Apart from psychological safety, the culture of trust is an integral part of providing a healthy workplace atmosphere.
One of the most efficient ways to avoid relationship conflicts between coworkers is to develop a culture of transparency. This means that teammates acknowledge each other’s duties and have proper information about one another’s contribution towards the team goal.
Building a culture of trust in your team will help you make coworkers more respectful of each other regardless of their skills, knowledge, or background.
Another significant benefit of trust is reduced risks of a possible clash between cultures that can arise plenty of issues at the workplace.
3 Ways to Foster Trust in Your Team
Now we will discuss three practical ways to build trust in your team and ensure that everyone’s contribution is appreciated.
Get to know each other on a personal level
Understanding personal details about your coworkers is a proven way to foster respect and trust in your team. Try to introduce interesting icebreakers before you start the team meeting.
Catch sight of your coworkers’ personal lives before you move on to business updates. That way, the team will remain engaged throughout the entire meeting and even afterward.
Consider each other as unique individuals
Studies prove that managing the unique needs of your employees is a great way to develop trust. Consider everybody’s perspectives, pay attention to what they think, and try to integrate their viewpoints in the current team plan.
Organize brainstorming sessions and encourage team members to come up with creative ways of solving current challenges.
Appreciate the employee’s effort
Practice gratitude and say “еhank you” to your coworkers to show that you truly appreciate their contribution to the team. Even if they didn’t put in all their effort, this will encourage them to perform better and use their full potential, knowledge, and skills.
Giving and Receiving Feedback Helps Building Team Effectiveness
Effective high-performing teams always have some room for agile leadership development.
Companies should take care of their team members’ proficiency and knowledge and encourage them to grow professionally in order to keep pace with modern standards and trends.
The research (Weng & Mcelroy, 2010) demonstrated the strong connection between career growth and organizational development, meaning that having an opportunity to gain knowledge and improve your work-related skills increases the chances of achieving organizational success.
And giving feedback is one of the most powerful ways to help employees grow. The ways a company offers feedback to its employees significantly affect their engagement and commitment.
For example, outlining mistakes in front of their colleagues can promote team conflict instead of empowering the team.
In order to create a healthy feedback culture and encourage team members to incorporate the feedback in their actions, consider the following tips:
- Maintain a friendly tone in the process of giving feedback;
- Give feedback on one-on-one meetings instead of formal business gatherings to avoid team conflict;
- Try to create a safe feedback environment where employees are willing to receive feedback;
- Point out both positive and negative outcomes while giving feedback;
- Be empathetic and maintain a positive attitude.
How to Empower Your Team With Structure, Transparency, and Accountability
The modern workplace is accompanied by plenty of challenges and complex structures that can be hard for employees to understand. However, having a strong structure increases the chances of satisfying work performance.
A common understanding of your strategies, the company’s goals, and team members’ responsibilities also contributes to increased team effectiveness.
Explaining the structure of the organization and making it more transparent could benefit your team in several different ways and contribute to organizational effectiveness.
Give People Clear Ownership and Create Accountability
In terms of the team level, accountability means that the team follows the guidelines step by step, finishes the projects before deadlines, and meets the expectations of the leader.
In order to empower the team level, the leader needs to create accountability in each team member. Every new project should have one obvious owner, responsible for the success or failure.
This one person should be accountable for his or her duties both for day-to-day work and long-term goals.
Accountability usually develops trust between team members and increases team productivity.
The team can achieve success more easily when each team member is responsible for different tasks.
Ways to Create and Accept More Accountability
Proper delegation of tasks:
The leader needs to understand team members’ differences in resources and delegate the tasks according to their skills and knowledge. Try to make sure that each project has its clear owner, responsible for all the tasks.
Have clear expectations about roles:
Your team members need to understand what exactly you expect from them. When people are fully aware of their role, they feel more confident to take charge of the work. Besides, understanding each other’s duties and roles leads to efficient conflict resolution between the team members.
Set long-term goals and explain them to the team members:
Being accountable to your team means defining what you’re trying to achieve in the long term. Being aware of long-term goals will help the team members to understand what they are trying to accomplish by doing daily tasks.
It will also increase transparency and motivate team members to take care of their responsibilities.
Transparency
Transparency can be defined as open and honest communication with team members. Transparent work culture means that people have a clear image of the responsibilities and roles of each team member.
When the information flows freely between the leader and team members, the team climate usually becomes more cohesive, resulting in enhanced commitment and engagement of the members.
Leaders need to understand that being transparent doesn’t mean just sharing enough information. In fact, you need to create a culture of trust in order to let the team members feel comfortable while speaking publicly and asking questions.
Here are some tips to empower the team with transparency:
- Have realistic expectations.
- Be honest with team members to increase team leadership.
- Provide feedback.
- Share the information about the company’s goals and performance.
- Encourage communication between team members.
- Create a culture of trust.
How to Make Work Meaningful for Your Team Members
The meaningfulness of work is defined as the positive contributions of the job to one’s life (Mowday, Porter & Steers, 1982).
The studies prove that meaningful work plays a significant role in increasing the employees’ capacity to achieve the goals of the company. It helps people to be motivated in the process of performing the work and feel satisfied with an outcome.
According to Hackman and Oldham (1976), the meaningfulness of work is connected with various positive work-related outcomes. Considering this, helping team members to find the purpose of the work can contribute to increasing team effectiveness.
Leaders worldwide use several techniques to make the work more meaningful for their team success.
Below we will discuss some of the most frequently used strategies to increase the meaningfulness of work.
Developing a Customer-first Mindset
A customer-first mindset is a commonly used business plan, focused on customer needs. The main purpose of this plan is to enhance the company’s impact and make it more valuable for the customers.
The idea of a customer-first mindset is to create mutual understanding between employees and customers.
First of all, it’s difficult for employees to take care of customers’ needs when the company underestimates their requirements and vice versa – the customers can’t be satisfied when the employees don’t pay attention to their needs.
In order to develop a customer-first strategy, leaders use the following ways:
Understanding the needs of the target audience – identify who is your target audience, determine their needs and goals and recognize if your company is meeting their expectations.
Take care of customer service – the success of the company significantly depends on the proper customer service. Make sure that your clients can easily contact customer service if they have questions about your products, service, or company.
Obtain customer feedback – ask customers to take surveys regularly, receive feedback and incorporate it into your future plans.
Ways to Create Collective Purpose and Motivate Your Team
Studies prove that when a team is engaged by a collective purpose, achieving success is easier.
Having a collective purpose creates trust, transparency, and a feeling of being supported while performing your duties.
Therefore, developing a collective purpose can increase the motivation of the team members.
Here are some of the efficient ways to create collective purpose for the team:
Encourage social gatherings – each team member needs to feel that they are a part of the whole. Inviting team members to social events will develop emotional connections between them, strengthening the team as a result.
Offer opportunities for the development phase – from time to time people get used to their current responsibilities and lose motivation. In order to avoid the reduced quality of work, you need to provide opportunities for professional growth. The possibility to advance the skills will increase the motivation of team members.
Clarify the roles – define the roles and exact responsibilities of each team member. When a team has a collective purpose, each member needs to know how valuable is their contribution and what others do to achieve a collective goal.
How To Help Your Team Feel Its Impacts and Results
The team members need to feel that they are making progress in the way of achieving their goals. Explaining the result of the work and providing feedback usually leads to better performance.
Feedback from either authorities or colleagues can help the employees determine whether they are performing well enough to achieve collective goals.
It allows the employees not only to improve the mistakes and choose more effective strategies to fulfill the goals but also to feel that their work is recognized and appreciated by others.
As a result, they realize that their contribution can actually make an impact. In order to help the team members feel their impact, you should recognize their success.
Just add extra five minutes to a team meeting to note the accomplishments of the team productivity. Appreciate individual efforts, as well as collective success.
In this way the team will feel that their work is capable of making a difference.
Frequently Asked Questions About Team Effectiveness
What Makes a Team an Effective Team?
Accepting new challenges, a transparent working environment, and collective goals are some of the key factors that make a team an effective team.
Members of an effective team have well-defined roles, are focused on their duties, try to support each other, and appreciate their contributions.
Receiving feedback and incorporating it into work are other aspects of team effectiveness.
What are the Five Conditions of Team Effectiveness?
- Clear purpose – the effective team knows what they are aiming for.
- Accountability – team members must be committed to delivering their part of the work on time.
- Well-defined roles – team members need to understand their own and other members’ duties and contributions to the team.
- Effective leader – the effective team needs a leader capable of delivering the tasks efficiently, organizing, and engaging the team.
- Transparency – honest communication between team members will create the culture of trust.
What are the Six Characteristics of Effective Project Teams?
- Shared goals – members of the effective Project team have collective goals and agree on the ways to achieve these goals.
- Effective communication – the team members should communicate openly and timely in order to solve problems efficiently.
- Mutual respect – trust and respect of colleagues contribute to the team’s effectiveness.
- Optimistic attitude – team members who have positive predictions and a “can do” attitude about their work, usually perform better.
- Time management – an effective team pays attention to the deadlines and organizes the task in advance.
- Cohesiveness – having a strong emotional connection helps team members perceive the group as a whole.
Overall Conclusion Of Team Effectiveness
To sum up, team effectiveness plays a significant role in accomplishing broader team goals and achieving success.
Even though it’s getting hard to keep in pace with today’s challenging workplace, effective team leadership tries to maintain the focus on the key team’s objective and develop powerful ways to increase the overall performance.
Take care of measuring team effectiveness from time to time, making work meaningful to your team task, building a culture of trust, and supporting team members.
That way they can make a difference and develop team effectiveness.
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