In order to have a high team performance in the organization, first of all, leaders should clearly define the company mission and vision so that teams can understand what the company expects from them.
After clearly justifying the company objectives, you need to make sure that your employees know their job description clearly, be aware of their responsibilities, and know how they should perform as a team. However, it is unrealistic to expect high performance from the team without a team leader who manages the whole process well. Therefore, the team leader has the biggest role to form the team correctly, analyze the pros and cons sides of the team, and closely follow the contribution of each individual in the team to the work processes. In other words, the team leader is the captain of the ship. Analyzes team members well, ensures team unity, and manages the whole process perfectly.
Even if all these conditions are met, it is possible that the performance of the teams may be low. Let's take a look at 2 approaches that may help improve both your team and company performance.
1. Strong Team Collaboration!
Lack of communication or miscommunication among the team may damage the team's and company’s integrity. The best way to increase team performance is to make information flow agile and to make communication channels accessible properly.
As the new communication and collaboration technologies become an integral part of our corporate life, it is much easier to achieve high performance among teams. Cubicl, the task management software, helps teams work and collaborate better, schedule dependencies and milestones, monitor all the processes well by organizing and prioritizing related tasks on a single platform. The task management software has many features that help organizations and teams increase their performance. Here are some of the benefits;
- Plan your projects, get reports and statistics about tasks completed, time spent on tasks, and team member performances. With the help of Interactive Gantt Chart, Calendar and Task Reports features it is super easy to stay organized, eliminate overlapping and duplicated tasks among teams.
- Simplify routine works and highlight new roles with task assignments. Create your tasks and track them by status. Determine the dates of your tasks and follow the progress from scratch. Customize Kanban, Recurring Task and Reminder features help your team to store important documents and never miss out due dates again.
2. Team Size Means A Lot!
There is an ongoing argument regarding the effect of team size on performance at an organizational level. Many researchers prefer to take this topic into consideration from a psychological aspect. The studies have shown that people are more likely to underperform as the number of people in the group increases. In other words, when the team gets bigger individual performance decreases. But why?
Social psychologists explain this by referring to “social loafing”. Social loafing refers to the tendency of individuals to perform less when working collectively as part of a group. People in a large group loaf more because of the diffusion of responsibility. When the number of people increases in a group, an individual is prone to put less effort into the work. The reason, he or she thinks that there are many other people who can perform on behalf of him or her. We can take this circumstance from a different angle as well. People tend to think they would not be noticed in a large group of people. Social psychologists call these people “free riders”. People who benefit from the group but give little or no return.
So, splitting large groups into smaller groups results in a performance increase in these groups. Forming smaller groups causes individuals to perform better as they know the individual contribution means a lot in the small group than in a large group.
Take-Home Message!
Managing people is not an easy task. The synergy between people in a team, the attitude of a team leader, the complexity of tasks, and many other variables have a big influence on the success of a team. However, putting aside these variables, the performance of a team is very much related to the points that we mentioned above. Let me highlight them one more time.
- Define an accurate company objective
- A team leader who knows how to manage people
- A task management software that best suits your business
- Forming the team wisely. (Do not forget to check out the “team size means a lot!” part.)
Here are a couple of ideas you may use to boost team performance in your company. Even though the way you apply these approaches to the business may vary, make sure it will turn out well in the end.