Why Is Teamwork Important? 11 Solid Benefits for Your Business
Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”
The importance of teamwork is undeniable as it’s the foundation of any organization’s success. A business owner with a great vision should never underestimate the power of teamwork. Yes, you cannot expect your business to grow without the cooperative effort of the whole team to achieve a common goal.
You might now wonder what exactly the role of teamwork in your business is. Is it worth the time and effort to invest in team building? The answer is yes. As a business owner, you need to focus on building engagement among your team members for the best performance.
Let’s dive into finding out the actual meaning of teamwork and how beneficial it is to prioritize teamwork in your business.
What is teamwork?
Teamwork is “the combined action of a group of people, especially when effective and efficient.” Notice how it includes the words “effective” and “efficient”. Basically, teamwork requires a united group of people who share the same interest and bear the responsibility of working together to achieve a common aim.
Looking at teamwork a little bit deeper, you can see it not only develops the bonding between the team members but also makes the progress easier and faster. Teamwork brings people closer in a sense of emotion and helps them realize the importance of each individual. Teamwork can also guide the group through challenges and obstacles that one individual cannot overcome. Without teamwork, none of these benefits would ever happen.
Why is teamwork important? 11 benefits that strong teamwork spirit can bring
If you start making teamwork the center of your business culture right now, you are sure to reap the benefits. Let’s look over some proven benefits of teamwork in the workplace.
1. Improves work productivity
Teams that work together effectively tend to be more productive in achieving company goals. According to Gallup.com, a highly engaged business unit could increase the total profit by 21%. Teamwork motivates everyone to communicate better and more efficiently. This will often lead to minimizing processing time and delays, eventually resulting in higher quality output.
2. New and more creative ideas
“Behind every genius is a team. When people play off each other’s skills and knowledge, they can create solutions that are practical and useful,” says John J. Murphy. This applies even to Albert Einstein for his theory of relativity, which was discovered thanks to the support of his friends and colleagues. So does any business genius in this world, there isn’t one successful without the help of many other team players.
Teamwork is the work of a bunch of different people that would always bring out a rich diversity of fresh, creative, and unique ideas. When you make your office a safe space for your team to work together and express their invaluable idea contributing to your business, this is when your business is undefeatable.
3. Diverse perspective on the same problem
Each individual has their own unique perspective. Different teammates will look at hardships and challenges in their own viewpoints and figure out their own solutions. This is the most necessary aspect of teamwork. Your business will never be stuck in the same problem or making the same mistake ever again if teamwork is a part of your business culture. Together, there is no mountain high enough to stop you.
4. Greater synergy
The nature of a team is diversity, from the team members’ skill sets, knowledge levels to different backgrounds. When this diversity is combined, it can produce a greater sum than the work of individual efforts. Teamwork can enhance collaboration among members as they learn from each other’s mistakes and victories.
5. Sharing workloads
A recent study from Gallup points out that 23% of employees feel exhausted at work very often or always, while another 44% say that they sometimes feel like they are worn-out at work also. So what caused this? The answer is the heavy workload that they have to deal with at work almost every single day. Obviously, sharing the load with their teammates is the ultimate solution.
As a business owner, you will not want your employees to feel like quitting their job immediately if given the chance. Instead, you should focus on creating a healthy working environment where teamwork is enhanced, keeping the high productivity along with the decent amount of workload between the employees.
6. Work as a team, grow as an individual
Each individual has their own strengths and weaknesses. Imagine you have 5 core employees who always work separately. Each of them will continue to show off their strengths and suffer from their weaknesses since there is no one for them to learn from.
As you start putting them together as a team with high efficiency, they will start sharing their lessons, experiences with each other; correcting each other’s mistakes. Sooner or later, they will start to improve their performance as an individual, which will eventually result in improving the performance of a whole business as well.
7. Increases employee satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is a crucial part of a successful business. Great teamwork can make any employees happier with their job. When the workplace allows them to have mutual respect, honest feedback, and openness to experience, they are more likely to be less stressed and more productive. Productive and happy employees is a worthwhile asset for any business. At the end of the day, this benefits the company and each individual in it as a whole.
8. Enhances Flexibility
When working in a team, besides finishing their tasks, employees have to learn to be ready to cover the other members’ tasks if needed. By creating strong teamwork in the office, each of the employees will get to be more flexible in their role. This enhances flexibility among the team and forms an adaptive team that can easily face any challenges that arise.
9. Sense of appreciation and recognition
One of the easiest ways to boost the employee’s confidence is not just rewarding for their effort but also showing appreciation towards their work. This is yet another thing that an environment with a strong teamwork spirit offers.
Each team player doesn’t need to accomplish a big project alone to be appreciated. They only need to be a part of a successful team to receive the recognition. Their small contribution to the whole team effort is already enough. This way employees will be motivated to work even harder as part of a team to gain more success for them and the whole organization.
10. Creates healthy competition
As great teamwork can create an A team with many amazing employees, the staff will start to compete with each other to prove their ability and chase the opportunity of promotion. A business owner with a vision should know how to provide the launching ramp with the right challenges to promote these kinds of competition. In this way, team performance can keep moving forward and developing even better.
11. Strengthens workplace relationships
Finally, when the employees are getting along as a team that works well together, they will start to upgrade their relationships into trust and friendship. And this is not anything else but a huge benefit for your business since research has proven that employees who develop good workplace relationships tend to:
Aren’t these the personality traits that every employer aspires their employees to have? It’s a work of magic if you start to highly value teamwork in your workplace from now on.
Start inserting the magic “teamwork” key to your business’ door now!
There’s no doubt that prioritizing teamwork would bring nothing but tons of benefits to your business. From a short term advantage of improving your employees’ performance as a whole to a more fixed, long term advantage of increasing your company’s profit, it would be a waste of resources if you denied its importance.
Don’t hesitate to begin deploying your plan on making teamwork part of your company culture. And just in case you don’t know where to start, read this post for more tips on how to improve teamwork in the workplace.
