Improving teamwork within your company

Teamwork is a key part of companies' success. When the work environment and culture are fitting perfectly, companies are seeing impressive growth.

To better serve customers, teamwork is a science that has been studied a lot. Recently, an article stated that teamwork vital points could be summarized to those elements:

• Communicate often. In a classical project team, a dozen or so messages per working hour may turn out to be the most efficient, but more or less than that and team performance can decrease.
• Talk and listen in equal measure, equally among members. Lower performing teams have dominant members, teams within teams, and members who talk or listen but don’t do both.
• Engage in frequent informal communication. The best teams spend about half their time communicating outside of formal meetings or as “asides” during team meetings, and increasing opportunities for informal communication tends to increase team performance.
• Explore ideas and information outside the group. The best teams periodically connect with many different outside sources and bring what they learn back to the team.

Based on those specific vital points, it is important that your company can improve.

At Crisp, we gathered some simple advices that will help you to improve your teamwork.

First thing first, let's see how we can improve employees within the organization, before diving into teamwork as itself.

How to improve teamwork skills?

One of the most valuable a team can have is the value of the team itself. However, sometimes teamwork skills may be lacking for some of your teammates.

Here are some quick advice that will help you to improve teamwork skills.

Get to know your colleagues

Being close and personal with your colleagues will increase the amount of love you have but also the knowledge you have about them.

Spend time together, take time to create common memories to be able to build better links between the member of your teams.

Especially if you're a remote company, creating shared moments over video conference tool is a must-have.

For example, at Crisp, we have Deliveroo Friday, which makes us sharing a meal alltogether, offered by the company.

Burst the abscess

Having trouble living with your colleagues because of repetitive abusive behavior? It's time to face reality and talk.

In the end, it's only about communication and sharing feelings.

Share skills among teams

Over my experience in previous companies, I worked with people that didn't have the skills I had and conversely.

Creating a dedicated time between teams from the company where a team member shares his knowledge about specific skills or projects he is working on is a great way to improve overall skills, increase awareness and get to know each other.

For example at Crisp, we share over a slack channel what we've been doing recently so everyone is aware of the progress of each team member.

Update team documentation frequently

Sometimes, products or services can be pretty obscure when they're complicated, especially for new employees.

By creating and updating frequently your internal documentation with up to date content, sharing events, improvement or even team leave, it'll be much better for everyone.

For example, at Crisp, we have an internal knowledge base built over Notion that helps new employees to discover the different tools and processes we have. It's also great for existing employees because it's the place we share infrequent answers to specific questions.

How to improve teamwork?

At first glance, teams have to be equipped with the right set of tools. Modern companies have embraced those highly effective tools that can turn an employee into 5.

Using these tools will help you to increase teamwork inside your company and have a positive impact on your customer satisfaction.

Benefits are numerous but are all the results of one vital thing: better collaboration.

Build a complete knowledge base

Modern companies have fully understood the power of self-service tools inside a company. It's working as a platform for both customers and employees.

Employees are improving teamwork thanks to a knowledge base because of the following things:

• Data is centralized and updated in real-time, which means they can reach out specific information at any time while answering a customer.
• Accessibility makes it much faster for employees to re-use available content and serve it to customers that have low-value, repetitive, questions.
• Customer satisfaction is on the rise thanks to better first response time.

There are many other great reasons why building a knowledge base will improve teamwork and benefit to the whole company.

Create a shared inbox

A shared inbox is something yet uncommon among companies, whether they're modern or not. Lots of them are still struggling with multiple communication channels.

A shared inbox lets' you centralize your messages inside one inbox, whether it's emails, chat messages, WhatsApp, or Messenger, all messages are centralized.

Employees are improving collaboration thanks to a shared inbox because:

• Everything is centralized, meaning all the needed data is also in one place.
• End-up the thrill of unfinishable email threads and forward, employees can write notes inside the same conversation and improve teamwork, in real-time.
• Optimize ownership between teams through assignment

Building up teams around tools is a great start but that is not always sufficient. It's even more powerful to create the right process to overcome a special situation.

Here are some advice we have applied to our own organization at Crisp. And it's just so much more efficient like that.

Setup the right process

Building a company equals the ability to replicate processes at a high cadence. To do so, companies have to meet a lot of requirements.

To improve teamwork and beat competitors, companies that are the most successful are the ones that have good processes upon key actions.

To save you some time, here are our top 3 new processes you can apply to your company now to improve collaboration:

• Finishing up with meetings

Meetings are a real pain in the ass, really! Most of the time, it's unnecessary and people are always doing other stuff.

It's even more dangerous because it gathers multiple people in one room for a long period, meaning they're not creating anything and decreasing the value the company is building.

A good start to end up with meetings is to create a culture of notes. Writing content and sharing content among the different people involved in the decision will make everyone much more efficient, and here is why:

1. You'll have the ability to take YOUR time to review the document, get the information, and share it with your team if needed, not relying on a piece of notes badly written during the meeting. Results? Improved knowledge sharing
2. You'll not own 5 people in the same room for 30 minutes, everyone is free to jump on the document if needed and read/share all the information.
3. You'll be much keener on sharing a document over email that would take you only 5s rather than spending 30 minutes for nothing.

There are many other reasons why companies should stop doing meetings but those ones might give you a bit of sense to start to think about it.

• Summing up conversations

Having a shared inbox is great and lets you centralize all your different channels over it.

That might not be enough. Lots of teams are working in different timezones, especially modern companies that have been able to spread their service, thinking globally from day 1.

To improve collaboration and take your customer experience to the fullest, ask your agents (also known as operators) who are handling customers' conversations to sum up conversations. Here is why you should set these things up over your company:

1. It'll save a lot of time for your agent or your dedicated team. Instead of spending 10 minutes reading what went wrong, simply read the main information and take decisions about it. You're giving responsibility to everyone.
2. It'll increase the quality of your answers thanks to better context and information shared over the specific thread.
3. Increase ownership by mentioning the right people that should take the lead in the conversation. People are more able to take decisions when they know they have the ability to do so.

There are many other things you could set up inside your company to improve collaboration. Those are just nice and modern starts.