Nowadays, most if not all business owners and managers realize the importance of collaboration. With the help of teamwork, companies can maintain high productivity levels and achieve (or even surpass) their goals. Besides its well-known benefits, teamwork is also crucial for promoting workplace agility which, in turn, leads to even more benefits. Hence, here’s how you can achieve workplace agility with the help of teamwork.
1. Understand Workplace Agility
First and foremost, it is crucial to understand workplace agility is. By understanding what the term refers to, you will not only grasp its meaning but also better understand how you can promote workplace agility with the help of teamwork.
To put it simply, workplace agility or agility at work refers to an organization’s ability to work quickly without losing cohesiveness. Workplace agility is critical for increasing productivity and engagement levels as well as responding swiftly to crises and solving problems or adapting. Essentially, workplace agility lies at the foundation of any successful business and the team behind it. There is also something referred to as an agile environment. If your company promotes workplace agility, your employees can thrive in an agile environment thanks to:
- Flexibility in scheduling
- A flattened hierarchy tree
- Lower office costs
- Better overall well-being
- Reduced employee turnover
- Improved diversity
2. Open Up to Opportunities
An important part of real workplace agility is the absence of boundaries or, at least, a significant decrease in their importance or enforcement. In other words, you need to provide your employees with more freedom in all aspects of their work. This will help your organization open up to new opportunities that may have been overlooked or ignored before. One kind of freedom you need to allow is the freedom of expression. Creativity is what drives innovation and change, no matter which industry your organization is in. By allowing your employees to express themselves, you let them have an outlet to realize their ambitions and maybe even create something original.
Another kind of freedom that’s equally important is the freedom of experimentation. It goes without saying that businesses want to reduce risks which is why not that many companies are willing to experiment and try things that haven’t been done before. However, without the freedom of experimentation, there can be no innovation and no agile environment for your employees to excel in. In addition to providing your employees with such freedom, you should also ensure that they have the time to spend on new endeavors. If your employees are always busy, you might want to outsource some of the tasks they perform (e.g. by hiring a professional writer from the custom writing reviews site All Top Reviews to handle content creation). This way, they have more time to explore different ideas and try to implement them in practice.
3. Effective Communication
Communication is often underestimated to this day even though most professionals agree that effective communication is one of the most important things for successful teamwork and cooperation. In the post-pandemic world, more and more companies are focusing on robust communication because many teams have now become either entirely remote or hybrid.
- But how exactly can you ensure that communication is always effective? Here are some tips that you can follow:
- Create a process for communicating during specific situations, especially when it comes to handling crises. Document the procedure and inform all your employees on how they should act in such situations by providing them with a set of guidelines.
- Find the right communication tools to start using in your team. All employees should be comfortable using them, but in most cases, you will want to include emailing, video conferencing, and texting.
- Encourage giving and receiving feedback to and from your employees as well as between them. When thoughts and ideas are clearly communicated, it becomes much easier to act on the feedback and improve the way something is done or handled.
- It’s important to inform all new employees about the way communication happens in your company. By doing this, you will be preparing them to become an integral part of your team right away and start practicing such good communication techniques from the get-go.
4. Improve Efficiency
As explained earlier, workplace agility also means being able to react to difficult situations and solve problems quickly. This is only possible with improved efficiency of all the processes happening inside your organization. In other words, you need to speed up but in an efficient way. For instance, if your team is overloaded with work, they can’t be productive without burning out. One solution to this is to outsource some of the tasks your employees should perform. Content creation can be outsourced by hiring freelance writers from the writing services reviews site Top Writing Reviews, but you can outsource other tasks as well. On the other hand, you could hire more employees to your team, but not every company has the resources to be able to make this step.
If you nurture a specific type of company culture, you will be able to improve efficiency from the inside. Instead of trying to implement new technologies or change your entire system in a radical way, you need to work with your employees to instill certain values and priorities in them. If your team values collaboration and fast problem-solving, their efficiency will improve exponentially. Team-building events are great for building this team spirit in your organization that will make your employees a stronger unit. That being said, you should still show your employees that each of them is both a valuable part of the team and an individual. You still need to encourage independence and initiative by allowing individual or personal projects.
5. Utilize Resources Smartly
Last but not least, don’t forget to utilize your resources smartly. As mentioned earlier, good communication requires appropriate tools. However, this can be applied to everything within your organization as well. You need to use the resources and tools you have in a smart way rather than trying to find a magical solution to your problems.
Many startups and small businesses don’t have the big budgets that could make them succeed no matter what. That’s why your team is so valuable. It’s the people who can come up with original solutions to the problems at hand without having the resources to solve any and every challenge on your way. Be realistic about what you have and let your team be creative with the resources and tools available to your company.
Final Thoughts
All in all, teamwork definitely plays a critical role in promoting workplace agility. With its help, you can build your company culture from the ground up and create an agile environment for your employees to thrive in. Use the tips in this article to help you start promoting workplace agility at your own organization.
