5 Signs Your Team’s Collaboration Is at Risk (And What to Do)
What makes a team great? Why is it that you can give two teams the same amount of time, the same resources, and get two vastly different outcomes? While an individual collaborator who’s a bit of a savant can make a big difference, it’s more about how the team comes together. That’s why a leader needs to watch out for the signs that a team isn’t collaborating as well as it could.
But what are these signs? And what are you supposed to do when you spot one? In this post, we’ll go over five of the most common things to watch out for and what you can do to get your team back on track.
You’re paying too much for your tools
Picture this. It’s the end of the month, and you’re going through your team’s budget. Or, if you’re at a larger organization, you get a ping from the accounting department. Either way, you see the spending for tools and software going up every month. And yet, despite all the promises each tool makes on its homepage, you don’t see a noticeable improvement in productivity.
If your team’s productivity isn’t increasing proportionally with how much you’re spending on tools, there’s a problem. A dysfunctional relationship with your tool stack means you could get the best tool on the market and still get disappointing returns.
What to do?
The good news is there’s more than one solution for this. The first thing you want to do is put the brakes on buying new tools until you can start figuring out the problem. From there, examine each new request carefully. Is the new tool your team is asking for really going to make a big impact? Or is it just a nice-to-have?
You might run into a situation where your team has more than one tool serving a similar function, like project management. This is less common in small teams, but as your team grows, individual preferences become more varied.
You could try to force everyone onto the same tool and eliminate the tool gaps that emerge that way. Or, you could use automation or integration solutions like Unito to close the gap between your tools. You might not reduce your tool spend, but you’ll definitely increase your team’s productivity. Here’s why.
Tasks keep falling through the cracks
Things happen. People lose track of things, emails go unread, or a task gets assigned to the wrong person It’s normal for a task or two to go undone once in a while, its due date slowly disappearing in the rear-view mirror. But if it keeps happening, your projects can slow to a crawl, and your team might drop the ball on an important initiative.
Whether it’s missing deliverables from someone on your team or an uptick in follow-up requests from other departments, alarm bells should come on if this keeps happening.
What to do?
If important work seems to disappear between the start of your project and the due date, you’re dealing with one of two problems. Either:
- Your project planning isn’t on point: If you don’t spend enough time figuring out who needs to do what before kickstarting a project, everyone will be playing catch-up. One way you can mitigate this is using a work breakdown structure to make sure everyone knows what needs to get done when.
- Your task management system is struggling: Already have a deliberate, detailed plan in place before you start and things still don’t get done? Then you need a better way to keep track of work on the fly. Maybe you should be making better use of your project management tool’s features — such as dependencies in Asana or checklists in Trello.
Your team can’t go on vacation
How often does your team take time off? Is their vacation piling up? They might not come outright and say it, but a big blocker for them might be the amount of work they have to handle. When just a week off means a week of prep work and a week of catching up, even a short stint in the Caribbean doesn’t seem as attractive.
That hesitancy isn’t the only sign to watch out for. How long does your team spend catching up when they come back from vacation? Spending the first day back going through new requests and emails that piled up while you’re away is pretty normal. If it takes more than that, you might have a problem.
What to do?
One of the best short-term solutions for this problem is preparing a vacation handover before anyone takes time off. You can do this easily using a word document. Just have whoever’s going on vacation write down all the things they’re responsible for during that time off. They can designate someone to handle non-urgent issues that come up while they’re away, and outline which emergencies are worth contacting them for. You can also do this in your project management tool of choice.
Another factor to consider: how much work is funneled through a single person? If someone on your team never seems to go on vacation, there might be too many projects depending on their input. That’s a sign you should lighten that person’s load.
Onboarding new members takes too long
Every team needs to grow eventually. Depending on your goals, that can be a blessing or a curse. When you’re part of a software team with just a couple of developers, adding even one extra member can dramatically increase your output. But if the mere thought of adding a new member to your team makes you anxious, you might have a problem.
Workflows are like chains: they’re only as strong as their weakest link. Often, the newest addition to your team will be that weakest link until they’re fully onboarded. If it takes weeks or months for your newest member to know exactly what’s going on, your processes might be overly complicated.
What to do?
If you haven’t already mapped out what a new hire needs to do to get fully onboarded, do so. Ask the people on your team what they think a new person in their role needs to know before they can get started. Then, map that out in your project management tool. Revisit and tinker with this model every time you hire someone new.
Otherwise, ask yourself which processes and workflows you can streamline. When a new hire has to go through five different people to get approval for a new project, it’ll take them forever to complete their tasks. Find the redundancies in your processes and eliminate them.
Your processes are too rigid
How well does your team adapt to change? Do they pivot and get things done or does everything come screeching to a halt? This can be tough to identify unless you’re watching out for it. But can you think of a project or an initiative where something unexpected happened? How did your team react? Hindsight is 20/20, and if you haven’t already run a retrospective on situations like this, now’s as good a time as any.
Another way you can identify these problems is looking at feedback from your coworkers. How often do they grumble about shifting deadlines? Do they mention roadblocks that keep coming up in their work? Remember that rigidity can be present at the leadership level, too, and can affect how your team works.
What to do?
One of the best ways to find places where your processes are too rigid is asking your newest hires for their opinion. Your team — and its leaders — can develop blind spots as they get used to “the way things are.” A new team member, who brings a fresh perspective to your processes, should be consulted frequently. If they keep asking you why you do things a certain way, you probably need to examine the way your team collaborates.
Keep it together
Collaboration is essential for any high-performing team. Even if you’ve got a few rock stars on your team, they can’t do everything on their own. That means getting everyone working together smoothly is one of the best things you can do to help everyone reach their goals. Remember to check how much you’re spending on your tools, pay attention to missed deadlines, ensure people feel like they can take time off, streamline your onboarding process, and keep your team agile. That way, your team will hit fewer snags and get more kudos.