These days, most employees tend to stick to themselves when they are busy working. They will be glued to their computer and might even put in some headphones so that they can concentrate better. You might like this solitary work as you can be happy knowing that your team are all focused on the job. However, a lot of recent research has actually shown that it is much more beneficial for organizations to promote teamwork and collaborative projects. There are various reasons for this, but the main one is that it helps employees bring many different ideas to the table and can also encourage them to be a lot more creative in their thinking.

Are you ready to encourage more teamwork in your own office? Here are some ways you can do that.

Open Up Communication

One of the first things you should do is to try and encourage more open communication within your team. If they are willing to speak to each other, then they can reach out to one another regarding any problems or questions that they might have. And then your employees will be more likely to work together to solve any issues rather than coming straight to you for help.

Make Sure Everyone Is Involved In Making Decisions

When you need to make an important decision regarding your team, it is a good idea to try to involve everyone. Then each of your employees will be able to have a say. The more opinions put forward will mean that there are more factors that you can use to come to a decision. As a result, what you decide will be a lot more informed and will hopefully be welcomed by the majority of your employees.

Use Collaborative Tools

There are also a lot of great collaborative tools that you can roll out for your team to use. Both Slack and SharePoint Online are great tools that your team can use online. Slack gives them the chance to chat and ping across messages to each other. It also makes sharing documents and files a lot easier too. SharePoint Online can help them collaborate better as it efficiently shares files and other resources. Plus, you can put everyone’s to-do list on SharePoint Online so everyone has a great idea of what everyone is working on.

Encourage Social Events

One further way to promote teamwork within the office is to encourage all of your team to be friends and hang out with each other after work hours. You could even host some social events on behalf of the company. For instance, many companies now host Friday evening drinks in the office once everyone has finished for the week. Other kinds of team dinners and away days can also bring everyone a lot closer together so that they can really bond and learn to trust one another.

These are just a few of the ways you can encourage your team to work and collaborate better together. You’ll then see a spike in the quality of their project work!

Infographic created by Team Bonding, an in person team building activities business