Technology Helps Teamwork Produce
Teamwork can supercharge productivity, when the team has the right tools and technology to work with.
Here’s a guy who found the existing tools inadequate. So he built his own, made it adaptable to other businesses, and sells it to them. Good teamwork requires good tools. Be sure to give them the right ones!
Read on for the whole story.
Teamwork Requires Tools to Produce Results
How productive would the team in the picture be if they had no hammers, saws, drills or screwdrivers? Skills and ability are, of course, important. Only with the right tools though can the skills and ability be effectively applied.
Teams can do more than the sum of what the individual members could do working solo…IF they have appropriate tools for the task at hand.
Collaboration is Vital in Business
Peter Coppinger is the CEO of a company aptly named Teamwork, He tells the story of how he came to realize they needed to develop a teamwork tool.
In a complex business environment, nobody has all the answers. Collaboration with others inside and outside the company is vital to obtaining optimum results. Here’s a reading recommendation that elaborates on this concept. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan wrote Who not How. They explain that striving to learn HOW to do things can limit your productivity when there’s a WHO to do it more expertly. Hire the WHO and concentrate on your areas of expertise.
The members of a team must communicate with each other to do their work effectively.
On a worksite like the one in the picture, communication is face-to-face.
In a business environment, team members may be separated by thousands of miles.
Technology Assists Collaboration
As Peter’s company grew, teams expanded internationally. They found that a real-time document management system was needed to keep everyone up to date.
They sampled all the software available and found the one that showed the most promise. Even it turned out to be hard and confusing to use. When it’s hard and confusing to use something, people tend not to use it. That results in people not being “in the loop” on important information.
New Solution Required!
Teamwork learned that other companies were experiencing similar frustration with the available technology. So, they saw a business opportunity. They developed a clearly defined set of requirements for Teamwork Spaces. Once they had that they turned the project over to an Irish development team to build it.
Coppinger was initially reluctant to let the work out of his own shop. However, he realized that collaboration is at the center of everything the company does. So farming out the development of the technology was the right thing to do. They made sure that the app developed by the Irish team was easy to use for people at all levels in the company, and for outside collaborators.
With their old system, people didn’t always keep up with information they needed to know. Sometimes management couldn’t actually tell who was up to date on that information. So they put the Required Reading feature front and center on the new dashboard.
Teamwork, living up to their name, is all about helping every team member contribute to the work they’re responsible for. When they found nothing on the market to make that happen, they built it! Sometimes you need to make your own tools. If you can sell them to others, so much the better!
A few key points from the article:
- Teamwork is key to productivity.
- Teams need tools (in this case, technology) to maximize their productivity.
- When the right technology is not available, build it!
- If others are suffering the same woes, sell the technology to them!
Note: Archived issues of The Unity Community are available here. Search that page for keywords representing your particular interest. Most articles offer suggestions for ways of improving business and personal relationships. Keep in mind that business is done by…people. Every business concern is essentially an inter-personal concern.
A “Shot in the Arm” Every Week!
Eric Lofholm is my friend, mentor and sales coach. He hosts a 30-minute motivational call every Thursday (recently changed from daily). The call is at 7:30 AM Pacific time. Register for it here. You’ll find instructions on how to join the call on Facebook, Zoom, by phone, or in a recording you can access on your time.
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Collapse of Christianity? – Published 30 August 2021
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