A staggering number of 97 employees and executives find the lack of team synergy to be the sole cause for a poor outcome of a group project. Unfortunately, even though this factor is widely recognized, there is paradoxically not enough effort to try and make it right. Additionally, according to several surveys over 27 percent of all those who intend to leave their organization do this out of the feeling of alienation from their colleagues, executives and the company in general. Needless to say, this may cause you to lose some of your most promising employees. Luckily, all of this can be avoided by enhancing the teamwork in your office. Here are some tips.
1. Encouragement of social activities
Even though numerous guides are explicitly speaking against familiarizing with your staff members, encouraging your employees to engage in joint social activities has some advantages. By getting friendly outside of work, your team members may develop a sense of camaraderie that could in time start to show in the office. Furthermore, by learning what makes other people tick, one may get to understand their thought process a bit better, which can be responsible for much better workplace synergy.
2. Start a practice project
Another thing you could do is start a project (that is not vital to your company’s main tasks) and try to see how your team fares here. The safest choice would be to include everyone in your company’s marketing efforts. Making a short film or a commercial with your team may be the perfect way to improve your teamwork. Another reason why this is a good idea is the fact that you will give your target demographic a chance to see what your business looks like from the inside. Finally, if you are not completely comfortable with turning such a vital task into a DIY project, you might look for some professional counseling. Simply look for someone capable of providing your staff with a performance coaching course and enjoy the results.
3. Encourage active communication
One of the greatest assumptions in the workplace is that the greatest issue in communication is that between peers. While authority is important for a manager, those who try to enforce it through fear rather than through respect are in for a bad time. You see, the only good that this will do is make people uncomfortable with speaking up during the meeting. This, consequently, discourages office dialogue and prevents everyone from contributing. On the other hand, a lot can be achieved by being supportive. For example, you should abandon the idea of the customer always being right and defend your team when they are right. This way, they will see you as a safety net rather than a whip above their heads. 
4. Mediate in disputes
Finally, as a manager, it is your job to mediate in disputes between two opposed parties within your company. The longer you turn a blind eye to the existing problems, the greater the chance that the situation will escalate. Still, in order to learn of these issues in time, people need to feel free to come to you with their problems (which is something we discussed in the previous section).
Conclusion
As you can see, enhancing the teamwork in your office is definitely one of the most important tasks of any sensible manager. Still, it requires time, effort and even some professional counseling in order to yield the absolutely best results. Nonetheless, the ROI you will face will always be more than worth any effort or resource invested.
