5 Ways to Drive Teams to Work Together

If your business needs to run efficiently, you may need to look into ways to improve communication to keep pace in this competitive world. Small to medium-sized business resources are limited so they must review how they work with their teams from time to time.

Here are 5 suggested ways to keep your team working proactively:

1) If your employees or contractors are on the move or generally work remotely, they may need access to certain information to stay productive.

Using their wifi there are a number of "cloud" systems available to help your team stay pro-active, such as:

* Microsoft SharePoint/OneDrive for Business

* Google Drive

* DropBox

2) If you have a sales team, inside the business or outside working remotely, they will need some information relating to your clients, their emails and quotations to follow up.

You can help these teams by providing them with a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), where all the current and back information is stored relating to a specific client.

There are a few systems which can be used to collate emails, correspondence and also connect to their social media profiles, for example:

* Capsule CRM

* Microsoft Dynamics

* HubSpot

* Insightly

3) Working with teams, especially your contractors who are working virtually (ie from their own office), customers or employees to get everyone together to boost efficiency is challenging, but not impossible. However, you can achieve this by means of creating a smooth collaboration service.

There are a number of ways to do this which could be to have everyone reporting on their tasks which is seen by the "team". You could use a simple system for everyone to use by creating a spreadsheet to include information you want to know, or you could be more sophisticated and use a Project Management tool like:

* Task Manager

* Basecamp

* Asana

* Microsoft SharePoint

Each of these tools have areas for instant chat so communication with the team becomes effective and cuts down on emails.

4) Still working with teams and methods of collaboration; open up doors for employees or contractors to communicate and share documents with each other on joint tasks. There are a number of ways you can do this.

Make use of video conferencing and teleconferencing; make intelligent networking work for you and your team. Encourage each member to talk to each other on specific tasks by using theses tools. There are various types of systems to use, such as:

* Join.me

* Zoom

* Skype

* Free Conference Call

* Google Hangouts

5) Creating team calendars is a very useful tool, it can help with knowing who is working on what sub-task at any specific time, availability of staff and contractors and also invite certain personnel to meetings, for instance.

I use a calendar system that is relatively easy to set up and a link is sent to everyone so it is available for the team. However, you must remember that some calendars do not have a privacy setting so their own discretion must be exercised as to how much information is put on the calendar for all to see.

A few calendar systems to consider are:

Google calendars

Your own domain calendars

Outlook

Online calendars

TeamUp

I hope that this has given you food for thought on the best ways of working with a team who are in-house, virtual or even a bit of both.

If you need any help in setting these up, then I will be happy to assist you and your team. Just give me a call on 07918 667509.

Take care

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