For companies to sustain and scale, a strong balance of teamwork and agility needs to be instilled within every organization.
The present Covid-19 crisis has disrupted a lot of industries and is still continuing to inject economic breakdown within the organizational operations. A lot of people are losing jobs while a few are insecure about the future. Companies are facing troubles with influx of the cash and business opportunities. While some of the existing customers are walking away, few new onboarding are compromising with project kick-off payments. This is a situation of uncertainty, but there’s also a positive side towards it. The government has been readily helping SMBs to large enterprises in every way possible.
In this time of crisis, business ethics and employee management skills are being tested more than ever. Without a strong workforce, it is almost impossible for any business to succeed. Regardless of how good your product and customer service framework is, a successful teamwork cannot be compromised on. And as much as important is a robust teamwork, operational agility needs to be prioritized equally.
In both tough and happy times, balancing teamwork and business agility is of utmost importance.
Benefits of Teamwork
Fostering Growth
Creativity flourishes when people come together to share ideas and exchange their opinions. When one person meets the other to discuss on same topic/ issues, both of them will gain fresh and different perspectives based on their personal experiences. Also, people learn how to become more receptive and mindful to newer ideas when the work in teams.
Strengths Speaks Volumes
Each person is blessed with different talent and skills and when multiple people come together as a single entity they can complete each other. Every individual will teach their teammates a new skill and therefore, combined together, they can deliver exceptional results.
Trust Building
When the results are exceptional and the work gets appreciated, co-workers will develop a sense of gratitude towards their peers seeing the end result as a sweet fruit bearing. Employees will learn to trust each other with a particular task someone is good with. This enables everyone to focus on their best part while gain a bird’s eye view of others.
Conflict Resolution Skills
It is very rightly said that “if you want to go fast, travel alone. If you want to go far, travel with someone.” Strong people stick to each other because they can focus on bigger picture. For example, if everyone within the team shares a same value of delivering the project before deadline, they will resolve petty issues and conflicts within themselves without any grudge of negativity. This will create a healthy work atmosphere and help people adjust with each other during challenging times.
Calculative Risk-Taking Approach
When teams are satisfied with each other and have developed enough trust, they can think out-of-the-box and take calculative risks to succeed faster and in a sensible manner. Impulsive people tend to jump at the first thought that comes to the mind, but when people work together, they can teach each other how to balance their reflexes.
Agility
Businesses those who adopt newest trends and know how to blend in with opportunities, can not only sustain but scale too. The marketing framework is evolving and so is the operational. While the traditional marketing got significantly replaced by digitization and automation and mobility took over the legacy systems. In contrast to current enterprise management tools that offer intuitive solutions and business process automations, earlier businesses used to maintain typical accounting software that required a lot of human intervention with no to very little scaling capabilities. Being said that, companies adopt modern solutions, sustain even the toughest and unprecedented situations.
Balancing Teamwork and Agility
Businesses should maintain a certain level of transparency and communicate effectively about the present standing and future holdings of plans and revenues. When the business roadmap is effectively communicated within teams, they will be in a position to chalk out the approach to reach the end goal. Also, based on prior experiences, teams can contribute in altering or modifying project/ product showcasing and positioning in a better way.
Tips to Balance Teamwork and Agility
- Ensure effective communication about the long-term goal and short-term goals.
- Address major concerns and issues immediately, while park the petty ones for later.
- Adopt sprint planning in order to get larger part of the work done in smaller chunks.
- Build a healthy rapport with team leads and their subordinates.
- Practice daily stand-ups along with weekly/ monthly/ quarterly meetings.
- Give regular feedback/ reviews to team leads and ask them to do the same for their juniors.
- Plan for some fun games and outdoor activities to help employees connect with their peers outside of work.
- Get into a habit of extending token of appreciation for every successful stint.
Summary
Running a business is no less than putting up a live show. The only difference with the latter one is, it gets over after sometime. Entrepreneurs are expected to stay informed and receptive of newer and more relevant opportunities round-the-clock. Business leaders should be able to strike the right balance between teamwork and operational agility to achieve overall business success. It is important to maintain an effective communication and transparency about business’ long-term and short-term goals with the required departments. In order to address major issues, adopt sprint planning that will help break larger parts of the work into smaller chunks. This will save time on reviewing and reiterating the product/ feature in case revisions are to be made.
