3 Team Collaboration Tips Every Project Manager Should Know

Depending on the length of your project, collaboration can become stale. Members of the project team may find their own clicks, and certain members may want to always have the same responsibilities.

However, project management is susceptible to change, and regardless of what changes occur, your project management team needs to work together towards success. As a result, every project manager should know these three team collaboration tips.

1. Use Tools to Improve Communications

Once upon a time, email was the radicalizing force in the workplace. Today, email is dead. When a message is sent through email, it’s more than likely going to end up in the trash or never read at all. Regardless of corporate policy, email has become nothing more than a junk folder, and your employees deserve more than a mindless, electronic message. As a project manager, you need to use some sort of communications tool to ensure all the members of your project team stay on the same page, and tools that enable interaction between members of the project team can ensure your level of communication is detailed and timely.

For example, creating online documents that can be edited and managed by multiple users concurrently is one way all members of the project team can work together and communicate. As a result, unnecessary delays can be avoided, and vital information in the course of the project can be shared quickly.

2. Get Creative With Your Brainstorming Techniques

As a project manager, it’s easy to want members of the project management team to come up with new ideas for your project.  However, brainstorming is hard. When put on the spot, it can be hard for introverted members of the project management team to express their thoughts and ideas, and as a project manager, you need to make brainstorming sessions more creative. This same concept can be applied to meetings with your project team members.

For example, you may ask members of your project team to create a list of questions you would like to know about a specific part of the project. The team member who gets the most questions written down within 10 minutes gets to go to lunch early. Essentially, you are offering a motivational incentive to employees for expressing themselves, and even introverted members of the project team will want to be rewarded.

3. Balance the Workload

Some members of the project management team may be more skilled in specific tasks. Johnny may be better at scheduling, and Steve might be better at resource allocation. However, doing the same tasks day in and day out will lead to lower job satisfaction and foster a hostile work-environment. Additionally, your employees want to feel the workload is being distributed fairly.

Just because one person turns in work consistently on time does not mean he or she should be passed over in favor of an employee who turns in work several days in advance. The key to understanding the difference is learning to value the amount of work each employee does equally, and project managers must carefully balance the workload to ensure everyone has a fair shot at advancement in the company.

Keeping everyone on the same page can be difficult in project management. Some team members may be responsible for overseeing huge sections of your project, and other team members can be overly shy. Regardless of how each team member feels, everyone needs to work together in order for a project to be successful. As a project manager, you need to ensure your team collaborates, and you can achieve this feat by learning and using these three tips.

Key Takeaway

• Your project team and workers should have an accessible, simplified way for communicating that does not involve email.
• Encourage team members to participate in brainstorming sessions that foster creativity to build rapport between team members.
• Evenly distribute and assign responsibilities to ensure no one is overworked.