Our parents could barely dream about being happy at work. They were satisfied with a monthly pay and some thought the job wasn’t that bad after all. In opposition, our generation feels entitled to be happy. Are we ignoring reality or seeing it for what it really is? Can we use collaboration technology to turn this potential into a sustainable realistic scenario?
Effective communication does wonders to your business. It’s a game changer: it transforms the way people work together, how they interact; it substantially decreases redundancies and the delayed offset of work-related conflicts.
Effective communication is what you want in your personal life too. It’s why a lot of people will like you. People like others to listen to them, and effective communication helps you be clear, concise, and “spot on.”
So you’ve just put together your dream team and Shaq and Kobe aren’t playing nice together. There is so much potential, and you just cringe when untapped resources go to waste. No matter how professional each individual is, teams will always have miscommunication problems. Personality clashes, power issues, and lack of clarity over team goals will always make collaboration and communication difficult with some members. Let’s say that your superstar team is above that. Bad things can still happen: important emails ending in the spam folder, people forgetting about meetings or missing deadlines.
Deadlines are the clenching teeth of the cogwheels of civilization. You probably have some experience with meeting deadlines. Nowadays, however, it’s all about teams meeting and beating deadlines.
Truly remarkable achievements are most often team results. Gone are the days of patent-office clerks submitting world-changing papers on theoretical physics. And even Einstein needed help from expert mathematicians. Ironically, perfecting teamwork is a challenge in its own right. This is why we’ll be covering several important topics on the matter. This is our “perfecting teamwork” series.
All meetings are much like performance shows where people come in and take their usual roles. There’s always someone who monopolizes the conversation and couldn’t care less about your agenda, the typical colleague who never speaks up, or the one who would literally agree to anything you say, right? That’s because each team gathers a wide variety of personalities and communication styles. So how can you encourage all attendees to engage in the conversation and contribute within a given time frame, so that when the meeting is over you have a clear outcome?
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Conflicts at work are something we often deal with, as positive and agreeable as we might be, but that’s not necessarily bad. A constructive work conflict is even a desirable condition to every productive team because it leads to more valuable solutions. As a leader, you should encourage them. However, sometimes these disagreements go beyond the constructive line and become a damaging factor in your team.
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In a culture where speaking up and sharing ideas are highly praised, an introvert may find it difficult to thrive. That’s why we need to find effective ways to make introverts on our team feel valued and heard.
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People work harder if they know compensation is waiting for them at the end of the line. Yet, studies show that shortly after getting a financial incentive, actually in less than a week, people lose their motivation and their energy levels go down. Financial compensation is a two-edged sword, and should not stand as the only motivator. Truth be told, meaningfulness and recognition matter more. People want to be recognized for their efforts. They need to know if and how they’ve contributed to the team’s success. And they can only find out, if they receive feedback. Regularly, honestly, and with care.
In any process, team or business, feedback is many things. A necessary ritual, a moment of truth, a condition to progress, and sometimes a dreadful experience. This article explains the why, when, and how of giving and receiving feedback. Because, whether we like it or not, people need to know that their work matters, that it has meaning.
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Imagine yourself going in all those every-day meetings. It’s supposed to start at 1 PM and somewhere around 1:10 everyone is finally in. Someone is trying to make the projector work. The presenter is searching through her files for the presentation. Everyone else is checking their email, social media or just chatting on their phone. The meeting is finally starting with a quick intro from the presenter. Half of the audience is still typing frenetically on their phone or laptop. Sounds familiar? Probably that’s because inefficient meetings are far more popular than we’d like to think. But there’s a cure for this epidemic of bad meetings and I’m here to share some solutions with you.
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Ask any team leader, manager or business owner if they think employee engagement matters anymore. I’m quite sure they’ll all say that it does. We’ve reached a point where we don’t need a hard solid proof to believe that higher levels of engagement increase well-being, performance, and employee retention. We witness everyday how an engaged team delivers better results in terms of revenues and profits.
But what exactly is employee engagement? In this article, we’ll try to answer questions like this one and find out some tested methods that can help your team become more engaged and, of course, deliver better results.
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