If you want your organization to run smoothly and meet its goals, you must foster a workplace environment that supports group cooperation and collaboration amongst colleagues. Cooperation amongst teammates within the office can help to increase the level of participation from your employees in decision-making.
Cooperation can further improve interactions amongst all the levels of your organization and allow everyone to work together towards achieving common goals. That is why it is essential to encourage group cooperation within your workplace. You, as a leader, can perform many activities to ensure that there is full cooperation and collaboration within your workplace.
Group Cooperation Can Lead to a Successful Business
Encouraging group cooperation within the workplace signifies that you take your employees’ ideas, opinions, experiences, and skills into consideration. Allowing your employees to work together openly can help you align your goals and processes in a better way. That way, you can create a workgroup that is highly effective in achieving common goals.
Group cooperation has become an essential part of the work culture these days. Collaboration and cooperation spur creativity, which increases productivity and enhances employee satisfaction. If you have the right mindset and follow the best practices, cooperation can be a critical contributor to your business’s success.
As a Leader, How Can You Encourage Group Cooperation?
Sharing Common Goals with the Team
As a successful leader, you need to find or create for your team common goals that can benefit them across boundaries. You can choose to work for those projects in which people or teams across your organization can contribute, cooperate, collaborate, and win together. Such cross-boundary effort can help you in creating alliances and strengthening the bond between your employees.
Sharing the Spotlight with the Performers
While it is inspiring that leaders nowadays share their spotlight on successes, this is something we have been promoting heavily at Dovico for a very long time. That is because we understand that our true power lies in making others around us successful. Dovico believes that everyone is a leader and that it is the job of a leader to help create and enable more leaders.
For instance, my job profile here at Dovico is that of a Marketing Team Lead. It’s my job to ensure that each of my teammates has the space to be a leader in their work. This means that it’s my job to ensure everyone has full autonomy over their work, and in turn, get to own it. I’m not necessarily here to keep people between the lines and do their job. No, they are mature enough to know how to do that. It’s my duty to ensure that they have no barriers or walls between them and their best work.
Providing Adequate Information Required To Work Together
If you want to encourage cooperation within your workgroups, you must provide the necessary information to work together with your teams to get the best out of them. Of course, it is not possible to share all information with your team members. For example, you can openly talk to your employees about where your company is going, how your business is doing, and what your most critical priorities are. Then they will feel that they are also in the loop and are a part of your organization.
Encouraging Team Members to Socialize Outside Of Work
When your employees are within the office premises, they are more focused on the myriad of tasks they have at hand. That is why co-workers hardly get any time to bond with each other on a personal level in the office. However, it is also important to inculcate a sense of bonding within these people to achieve group cooperation and collaboration. Therefore, the best way to achieve it is to encourage your employees to socialize outside the office. Participating in various social events can help in breaking down their barriers and improving their collaboration.
Fostering Clear and Open Communication
All your team members know exactly what is expected from them individually. However, they still need to work together, cooperate, and share ideas in order to complete the project successfully. There are many ways in which you, as a leader, can get them to start interacting with each other and cooperate more effectively:
- Each employee should understand the importance of the different roles involved in any project and how they fit together to make each other possible.
- Every co-worker should have equal opportunities to give advice, ask questions, and seek help when needed.
- All team members should be able to use collaborative tools that can help them in passing along information, updates, and feedback.
- Effective teamwork is possible only when co-workers trust each other and bring their problem-solving skills to the table.
Taking Team-building into Account While Hiring
If your organization takes cooperation and collaboration amongst your employees seriously, then you should take team-building qualities into account during your hiring process. Recruiting smart people with suitable education and relevant experience in the field is not enough.
While selecting new joiners, you must take into account their potential in adding value to your team. Asking the right questions while interviewing can be very effective in choosing the right candidate for your company. For instance, you can ask candidates about their experiences of effective teamwork in their previous organizations and find out right away if that person is a good fit for your overall vision.
Conclusion
To be a great leader, you need to have the right mix of empathy, vision, focus on performance, and other things for achieving success. However, a major part of your success can be determined by the cooperation and sharing mentality fostered by you towards your employees. If you are good at making your office staff feel a true sense of belonging towards your company, then you have already won the game. That is because if people in your office are more satisfied, they are more likely to achieve their desired outcomes, and you, as the leader, are admired and valued more.