The guide to improving team effectiveness in hybrid work setup

The age of hybrid work. A time when some of us are in the office, some are at home, and some are still trying to figure out how to unmute themselves on Zoom. It's a brave new world of collaboration, and with it comes a host of challenges for team effectiveness. 

As Amber’s Exit survey data reveals, 70% of employees that left an organization in 2022 felt that the team does not have a supportive work environment. And 55% felt that their manager has not been a good role model. 

An employee’s experience in an organization has an important influence on how effective they are as an individual and as a team. And it also play an important role when they choose to stay or leave an organization.

So, how do you build trust and rapport when you can't meet in person? How do you ensure everyone is on the same page when you're working across time zones? And how do you ensure everyone in the team trusts each other? 

In this blog, we'll explore strategies for fostering team effectiveness in this new era of work, so that you can keep your team engaged, productive, and maybe even a little bit sane.

What is team effectiveness?

As the name suggests, it defines a team’s potential to achieve the targets within a set time. You can call team effectiveness the measure of a well-functioning team. It matters because effective teams bring in desired results. 

Benefits of effective teams in organisations

1. Better engagement

Effective teams are more engaged at work and dedicated to their jobs. Better engagement means more interest in the work. 

2. Higher productivity

Effective teams are more productive, display enhanced employee performance, and enjoy higher job satisfaction.

3. Timely goal achievement

They achieve goals on time, achieve the desired results, and set performance benchmarks for the other teams. They serve as a role model for the rest of the organization.

Key factors contributing to team effectiveness

1. Effective Leadership

Your team’s success depends on how you lead them. And making the team effective can be a significant challenge for leaders like you. The team's diversity increases with time. The more people, the bigger the challenge. Plus, with hybrid teams prevalent across organizations, it often becomes difficult for leaders to manage their teams so that even hybrid employees engage well.

2. Open Communication

An organization that promotes open communication and feedback sharing enjoys higher team effectiveness.

3. Trust and Respect

When team members respect and trust each other, they perform better together. They share a sense of camaraderie and strive together to achieve shared organizational goals.

4. Goal Clarity

A clear structure for your staff to work towards helps organize their efforts. Your team’s endeavors take a new shape and meaning when they know the targets well. It also helps enhance their effectiveness as a group.

5. Role Clarity

Teammates believe in their work and its contribution to organizational goals when they know how it impacts the overall business functions. Clarity about their roles boosts their effectiveness as a team.

Team effectiveness only works when you can evaluate it regularly. Here are some tools for team effectiveness assessment that come in handy.

Tools to assess team’s effectiveness

1. Team Effectiveness Survey

This survey presents a series of questions to evaluate how your team fares with respect to effectiveness. This survey covers the following areas:

• Presence of a growth-promoting work environment
• Clarity on roles and responsibilities
• Level of open communication
• Team’s visibility and dedication to strategic goals
• Your teams’ accountability and collaboration level
• Team members’ knowledge and skills
• Presence of corporate policies and procedures conducive to success

It is designed for teams and companies of all sizes and types. You can run this survey in one group, across one department, or throughout the organization.

In these surveys, team members survey and share their teams’ feedback. It is recommended that these surveys are run up to four times a year to spot loopholes as they appear.

Benefits of team effectiveness surveys

Improved team performance:

These surveys gather your team’s genuine feedback and highlight the hidden reasons behind poor performance.

Help plan training:

Your teammates’ answers to the questions reveal the areas for improvement, which can help you design better training programs.

Facilitate conflict resolution:

These surveys reveal your team members’ underlying feelings. That gives you a heads-up on the brewing conflict within the team and signals the need for a resolution.

Highlights potential leaders:

They give you a deep insight into the employee’s mind, thus highlighting those who have the potential to lead the team. 

Limitations of team effectiveness surveys

The survey's effectiveness directly depends on the nature of your questions and their ability to pull the truth out of the employee. Plus, there is always the caveat that the employees may or may not answer truthfully.

2. Team Interviews

You can approach the team for a single interview or hold a one-on-one session for a more personalized conversation. Team interviews aim to gather intel on the strength of a team’s bond. Some topics you can pick in a team interview are:

• Advantages of strong teamwork
• How does the team connect with a new member?
• Their likes and dislikes about working as a team
• Any personality types that prove difficult to work with, and how do they manage such relations?
• How does the team deal with sudden employee exits?
• Their reaction to failed projects
• Their views on collaboration and team functioning

Team interviews bring many benefits to the organization. Let's discuss these in detail.

Benefits of team interviews:

Evaluates team’s collaboration levels:

Teamwork and collaboration are co-dependent. These interviews help gather insights into your team’s openness to cooperation and show your team’s effectiveness.

Deeper insights than surveys:

Personalised interviews get even better insights than surveys. You can better read the body language and grasp their genuine feelings one-on-one. This tool can help you more accurately assess your team’s effectiveness.

Limitations of team interviews:

Time-consuming:

Team interviews require you and the team member to pull out time from the schedule for the session. That can often become challenging to organize.

Can be overwhelming for some members:

Some employees may be more comfortable sharing their thoughts from behind the screen through a survey than sitting in front of their manager. Overwhelmed employees refrain from opening up about their genuine feelings. This can lead to inaccurate reading about the team's effectiveness.

3. Peer Evaluations

Evaluating their peers and their performance allows team members to assess team effectiveness. Teams perform better when they know the strengths and weaknesses of each member and how to work around them.

Benefits of peer evaluations:

Great motivator:

Peer judgment often provides a required dose of encouragement to the team.

Removes bias:

Peer evaluations prove that not just the manager but the whole team is looking at your performance.

Limitations of peer evaluations:

It may discourage some employees:

While this technique works for most, peer evaluations can be frustrating if there is bias and bullying within the team. The affected employee may be left out and receive a poor review if they don’t get along well with the other employees.

Not very accurate:

There is a chance this tool may become a team exercise to rate each other well, thus discarding its sanctity.

Strategies for improving team effectiveness

1. Address common challenges and barriers

Focus on the challenges highlighted in the assessment or brought to your attention. These can create impending barriers to the team’s performance.

2. Provide team members with training and development opportunities

Offer your employees adequate training to plug gaps in their skill sets to improve team effectiveness.

3. Encourage accountability and ownership

Promote a sense of accountability in your employees to enhance team effectiveness. They should feel that they belong and strive to achieve organizational goals.

4. Promote feedback and continuous improvement

Encourage your employees to share positive and negative feedback and try to address it immediately. You can conduct individual personalized sessions to gather their input or trust Amber, the AI-enabled chatbot, to do it on your behalf.

5. Promote diversity and inclusion

People from different genders, ethnicities, geographies, and regions in a team breed fresh ideas and creativity. They bring diverse skill sets and enhance the team’s potential to take on challenges.

6. Build trust and respect among team members

Teams function well when their members trust and respect each other. Invest time and effort in such team-building exercises that build mutual camaraderie.

7. Establish clear goals and expectations

Your team needs to know where they are headed. Having a clear goal gives them the direction to put the effort in and brings clarity to their functioning.

8. Enhance communication and collaboration

Open communication leads to effective collaboration among team members and improves team effectiveness. They work better when they can voice their concerns openly and feel heard. You can host anonymous, pulse, or eNPS surveys to give them a platform to voice their concerns.

9. Promote a positive team culture and work environment

You can build a positive team culture by celebrating employee achievements on time, lending technical and moral support when needed, and striving to improve work-life balance.

10. Develop strong leadership

Leaders impact a team’s effectiveness the most. Their approach to team building and nurturing each member affects the team’s and the organization’s performance. You develop strong leaders when you know and convey the significance of strong leadership effectively to the team. You nurture more leaders with adequate training, motivation, and guidance for the employees to take responsibility.

Organizations rely on teams for goal achievement. That’s why team effectiveness is a priority for leaders like you. Only well-functioning teams pave the way for success, both for the individual and the organization.