Inefficient collaboration in the team? – A guide with tools and tips for teamwork in business

When was the last time you were annoyed by inefficient cooperation in the group and wished you could do the work alone? Most of the time it is not because of the group, but because of the organisation of the collaboration. In this article, I show a tool and some tips on how to organise efficient and goal-oriented collaboration in the group. I also share some tips on working in a team, which have cost me a lot of frustration and extra work in the past. So you can look forward to the next teamwork in business.

The problem with teamwork

Our everyday business is characterised by group work and cooperation. There is hardly a task that we solve alone. Most tasks today require the cooperation of several people, because the tasks are still too complex for individuals, even if they are divided up and reduced as much as possible. So teams are a reality – and I’m not talking about the Microsoft product. And the need to work together in groups will continue to increase in the future. Because the more complex the tasks to be solved, the more different perspectives and skills are needed to solve the task. But we all know from our own experience how tedious teamwork can sometimes be.

• The goal of the project is not clear and all members define it in their own way, working a bit in a different direction and on different goals.
• It is not clear who exactly is on our team and what his or her role is. Certain people may constantly ask themselves why they are there. This does not promote motivation and initiative at all.
• There are endless discussions during the collaboration.
• Resources are lacking or obstacles and changes emerge during implementation that jeopardise implementation.
• Conflicts, mistakes and different points of view are not discussed and accompany the team like a low-hanging fog.

The list could go on and on. And surprisingly, even the best people do not guarantee pleasant and efficient cooperation or success of the joint project. This actually already shows that the problems usually do not lie with the group or the members, but in the way the cooperation is organised or in the common understanding or culture in the team. Because efficient cooperation only results when the people act as a team – when the employees become team members. I’m about to show a simple graphic tool to get rid of many of these problems in a simple way.

Working together itself takes work

Herbert Clark

We have all also experienced that teamwork requires more effort than doing the same work alone (if this is possible). Teamwork requires a coordination effort because you have to maintain a common understanding and overview of the work between the team members at all times. This takes time. As a young engineer, I tried to do as much work as possible myself, especially when everything was going well. Because this seemed to me to be by far the most efficient way of working. Only when ambiguities arose or interfaces had to be discussed did I seek out other people. And then I was always frustrated that we had to start at the very beginning and needed a long time to coordinate and understand each other. I have learned from such experiences continuously and at the end of this article I have summarised some tips.

What is important for teamwork

From my point of view, there are two elements that are important when working together in a group. I like to compare teamwork to a house: a house has walls, doors and windows which are concrete and visible. In teamwork, this corresponds to the content of the work (goals and work steps) as well as the visible processes and the organisation of the cooperation (responsibilities, tasks, meetings, procedures, etc.). Both are clearly visible to the outside world and may even be written down. In addition, there is also the space inside a building. It is not visible, but it is the more important part of the house. The equivalent in cooperation is the team culture or the climate of cooperation. It is often not directly tangible and very rarely written down, because it is in the team or in the people. It is about people being able to contribute, being supported and getting something back from the collaboration. Both parts of the collaboration – the visible and the invisible – need to be built and nurtured side by side. In the following, the two parts of the organisation will be described in more detail and in the next chapter a tool will be presented on how the visible part of the collaboration can be coordinated very easily.

The work: challenge and minimal processes must be clear

• Clear and consistent goals – for the project and broken down to the individual team members. The importance of goals as signposts was already examined by Richard Hackman as a pioneer of organisational development in the 1970s. Good goals are also motivating, interesting and linked to the persons’ personal task or goal (Find your WHY).
• Clear and accepted responsibilities (function chart) and tasks – Each member agrees to be part of the team, to take on certain tasks and to contribute resources. By seeing the personal contribution to the common goal and being given responsibility for it, even activities that seem boring at first sight can be motivating.
• Regular updates are planned. Work is often done alone, but all team members and other stakeholders need to share a common view of the project: what is the other person doing, what am I doing, how does it all contribute to the goal? This common understanding needs to be continuously updated during the project, then there are fewer surprises and problems in the implementation.
• When working together, minimal processes are needed. Who is responsible for certain decisions, how decisions are made and problems solved, and how to get better. Often, facilitation of meetings or certain processes also help. These processes don’t even need to be written down. But it is important to talk about them and agree on them in the team.

People: creating a safe and supportive space for collaboration

• Team culture: how do people treat each other?
• Psychological safety: can I ask questions, contribute my opinion or new ideas and make mistakes without being harmed in the team?
• Conflicts: They are unavoidable, but they can do a lot of good. How to proceed?
• Communication, sharing knowledge and information, supporting each other
• Use and value the contributions and strengths of team members
• Team cohesion: In the end, everyone feels responsible for the overall solution, it is not just a compromise.
• Reflect on group processes and develop them further: what is going well and what can we improve?

Team Alignment Map: a simple and helpful graphic tool

So how do you coordinate the visible part of the collaboration and create a common understanding of the project? A new but very simple tool is the Team Alignment Map by the same authors as Business Model Canvas or Value Proposition Design. The tool is presented in (Mastrogiacomo & Osterwalder, 2021) and can be seen in the figure above. And working with it is quite simple.

It is important that the cooperation is planned together right at the beginning and later also regularly discussed and adjusted together. And the Team Alignment Map is ideal for this.

The person in charge gives the mission or purpose of the collaboration and determines a duration in the header: Aim of the project – WHY are we doing this project?

Then the team members can fill in the columns below together from left to right.

• What are the tasks or contributions: WHAT are we doing to achieve the set goal? Who can contribute what to the success of the project? It is very helpful to have the project team make this planning and these decisions themselves. This is because it encourages participation from the beginning and leads to more responsibility for the end result. Large groups can be divided up for this purpose.
• Commitment: who does what? In the end, it is also clear who belongs to the team and who is probably not needed.
• Resources: It is also an important process to work this out together – what is needed? who can bring what and is it even available?
• What risks or unforeseen influences should we expect?

At the end of the planning process, one can try to translate as many elements as possible from the back two columns (resources and contingencies) into activities with a responsible person as well.

This tool can and should also be used later during the collaboration to map the current status and maintain a common understanding and overview. It is important that updates are shared with all team members. After all, good collaboration happens when everyone’s tasks and responsibilities are transparent and understandable and all the basics are in place. If you would like to check how clear this is for the different team members in your team, then use the evores compass as a team. The evores compass is a free online tool to make cooperation and corporate culture visible in your team. More information and registration can be found here.

Achieve trust and security: Build and maintain a supportive team culture

Trust and security are particularly important for the space of cooperation (the invisible part). A supportive team culture is needed as a basis for cooperation and communication. Decisions have to be made, conflicts and mistakes should be discussed and solved. It is always important that people are not punished if they make a mistake or raise a new idea or concern (see also article on Psychological Safety in the Harvard Business Review).

First of all, there needs to be an awareness that such a space of cooperation and a team culture exists at all. It defines a large part of the cooperation such as cohesion, appreciation, mutual support, communication and exchange of knowledge and information, etc. It is not directly measured, but it can be observed very well through the behaviour of the team members. Corporate culture cannot be measured directly, but it can be observed very well through the behaviour of the team members. And on the other hand, the behaviour of team members and thus the culture can be influenced by a variety of incentives, processes, rituals, etc. The most important step is to realise that there is a team culture and how important it is.

Accordingly, it is very helpful to jointly define minimal group processes right at the beginning of the cooperation: how do we proceed in case of a conflict, how do we decide, how are problems solved? Who moderates meetings and who is responsible for the results at the end? These processes should not be inflated. Normally, only a minimum of processes is needed and it is often already sufficient to have talked about them at all. Such minimally defined processes often also make meetings significantly more efficient and increase the productivity of the team as a whole.

Cooperation is not about winning or being right, but about achieving something together and being happy in the end. A person’s opinion in this context must not be confused with the person himself.

Truth needs absolutely no defence. Light and sound do not care in the least what you or others think.

Eckhart Tolle

It is important that all people can regularly (anonymously) comment on the team culture so that improvements can be made as soon as something goes wrong. Again, use the free online tool evores compass regularly to make these points visible in your team.

Personal tips for improving cooperation

In the following I have summarised some tips from my own experience, which cost me a lot of frustration and additional effort before I discovered a possible solution.

• The foundations must be laid at the beginning of the collaboration. This saves a lot of time and frustration later on if the team moves in the same direction right from the start (blog post project start). And sooner or later you have to talk about it anyway.
• There always has to be communication and coordination – especially when the project or cooperation is going well and everyone seems to be able to work. This is much easier than sitting together only when things go wrong.
• It is not enough for one person to have the overview of the project and orchestrate the contributions. All team members need to have some understanding and know what the other people are contributing. This strengthens the sense of belonging to the team enormously and improves contributions and coordination.
• It is practically impossible to take care of the content, the decisions and the moderation of the process at the same time. The tasks have to be distributed among different people. This insight was an important reason that I founded evores.
• Collaboration in a group is great, you can tackle much bigger and more complex problems in a group than alone, you can achieve more robust results. But the collaboration has to be well organised and managed.

evores supports you in introducing these tools in your team or project and in shaping collaboration. So that you can work together more efficiently from now on. If you often work in interdisciplinary teams with different functions and perspectives, then the following blog post will interest you.

More information

All information on evores compass

Book about Team Alignment Map: Mastrogiacomo, S., & Osterwalder, A. (2021). High-Impact Tools for Teams. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Download the Team Alignment Map and additional material in different languages for free

The secrets of good teamwork, Richard Hackman – Article Harvard Business Review

Psychological safety and how it can be achieved – article from Harvard Business Review

Importance of culture in highly efficient teams – article from Harvard Business Review

Collaboration in diverse interdisciplinary teams

Collaboration in international teams

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