The benefits of teamwork and collaboration are huge.
And, if you currently have the feeling that your department is running into challenges with regards to:
- Idea generation
- Inclusion
- Motivation
- Morale
- Productivity
Then teamwork could be the catalyst you need to kick-start a new, more productive era where you create things that your audience will love.
In this article, we are going to look at many of the research-backed benefits of teamwork and collaboration, and show you just how powerful they can be for your marketing team.
1. Your Marketing Ideas Will Improve (Dramatically)
Ideas are the beating heart of your marketing.
You need a steady flow of good, creative ideas for everything you do. From social media updates to blog posts to YouTube videos, all of them rely on good ideas.
But where do good ideas come from, exactly?
Well, the author Neil Gaiman says that ideas come from confluence: when two previously unrelated things come together to form something new.
One of the best ways to foster confluence is through teamwork and collaboration. Studies by McKinsey suggest that if you can put together a diverse group of people with different:
- Backgrounds
- Experiences
- Insights
- Perspectives
You can ramp up your department’s creativity by up to 35% by creating a quasi perfect storm for idea generation.
Better still, if you can keep your teams small, you could reap even further rewards. Current research shows small teams can take advantage of:
- Agile thinking
- Better communication
To find fresh, innovate, and more creative solutions to problems than larger teams can. Plus, our in-house survey shows around 83% of people are happier working in small teams.
As long as your environment is psychologically safe, you can use teamwork and collaboration to fuel your marketing teams idea generation and create campaigns your target audience will love.
2. Team Communication Can Increase Productivity By 25%
We all know that communication in the workplace is essential. But did you know that it can dramatically increase productivity?
Researchers from The Group For Organizational Effectiveness performed a meta-analysis of data to see how communication in the form of regular:
- Briefs
- Debriefs
Impacted a team’s overall effectiveness across a large range of projects and activities.
What they found was that teams who regularly used briefs and debriefs were 20% to 25% more productive than teams who did not employ them.
Upon seeing this research, NASA decided to implement briefs and debriefs with some of their high-stakes teams. They gave their teams a safe space to:
- Discuss the project’s current needs
- Review previous steps
- Analyze successes and failures
- Share insights and ideas
- Tackle sensitive issues
In doing so, they saw several beneficial results.
Not only did productivity increase in-line with the predictions of the meta-analysis, but they also saw an increase in trust between teammates and focus on specific tasks.
All of this, we assume, resulted in more celebrations like this:
You can apply these insights to your marketing team on a weekly, monthly, or campaign-led level.
Let’s look at a social media team as an example: there are lots of moving parts in their work and they need to quickly respond to current trends a data.
As such they may benefit from having weekly:
- Briefs: about the current needs, goals, and experiments across all feed this week
- Debriefs: about last week’s data, insights, and experiment results
This approach can easily be tailored to fit the needs of all teams within the marketing department, and can even be used in online and offline situations.
And, with the potential to add 25% to your yearly productivity, it is definitely worth a try.
3. Teammate’s Respect Can Fuel Desire, Enjoyment, And Output
Teams can have a really positive impact on your employees’ psychology.
People placed into positive teamwork environments can often experience higher levels of:
- Motivation
- Job satisfaction
- Productivity
Simply put, they want to work harder and get more done.
When TinyPulse surveyed 200,000 people from over 500 organizations, they found that, despite their diverse backgrounds, they all shared one common goal:
They wanted to earn the respect of their peers.
People were actively willing to go the extra mile to help secure that respect and ensure they were not the person who would let the side down.
This can also stem from people’s desire to be active in their roles and have made a real contribution to a team’s success.
When we asked our employees about what makes them happiest at work, every single person said that they were at their happiest when playing an active role in their teams.
4. Workflows Can Improve Quality And Reduce Errors
There are few feelings in marketing worse than publishing a piece of content filled with errors.
But, let’s face it:
Today’s market demands that you put out a lot of content and, sometimes, quantity takes priority over quality. Not ideal, but that is the real world.
Team-based workflows, though, can provide a really effective solution to this problem.
Research into the impact of workflows shows that by having clearly defined roles, responsibilities and processes teams can:
- Increase the quality of work produced
- Decrease the number of errors made
There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, workflows are agreed upon by all of the people involved. This provides a level of ownership over the workflow — or their individual stage — that increases adherence.
Secondly, when your team has a predictable and repeatable system that follows a clear set of rules, team members are better able to:
- Plan ahead for the work
- Understand their specific role
- Estimate the time needed to complete a task
Each of these benefits has a direct impact on the third reason that workflows are so useful: because they dramatically reduce stress.
Having a well-defined, predictable system provides a lot of breathing room to get work done. And, when people are relaxed, they can better check for errors and invest in quality.
For example:
We find that social media teams who employ a workflow — like the one we have outlined here — can still create and publish at a high level, but see a real improvement in their work’s quality.
5. Collaboration Helps Freelancers And Remote Workers Feel More Involved
Isolation and loneliness are real problems in the workplace. But, there is evidence to suggest that these problems hit remote workers and freelancers the worst.
When VitalSmarts surveyed over 1,100 remote employees, they found them to feel overwhelmingly “shunned and mistreated” by their employers and colleagues.
This feeling had a direct impact on the workers’:
- Productivity
- Deadlines
- Morale
- Stress levels
It also directly increased costs to the employer while decreasing levels of employee retention.
There are numerous factors that influence this problem, but many of them stem from the increased distance between team members and their teammates or workplace.
However:
Collaboration could solve many of these problems by bringing workers closer together no matter how far apart they are geographically.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has a fully remote team across 66 different countries.
To combat the negative effects of remote work they regularly use tools such as:
- Slack
- Zoom
- Editable public ledgers
To help their teams work effectively on projects, ensure high levels of communication, and clearly display the impact of someone’s work on a project.
They also encourage:
- Video calls to simulate face-to-face interactions
- Annual meetups in affordable locations for all employees
Automattic also provides a budget for their employees to work from co-working spaces and coffee shops to ensure they have human contact if they need it.
This helps create a real sense of belonging and active contribution to a team, even if your teammates are four time-zones away.
You can scale this approach to fit the needs of your team and your remote workers. But, the more you include them, the better the results are going to be.
The Benefits Of Teamwork In A Nutshell
With this article, we wanted to highlight some of the most powerful benefits of teamwork for your marketing department.
When you start bringing people together, you will likely see:
- Better ideas
- Higher morale
- More productivity
- Reduced stress
- Higher quality work
But that is really just the start of it; there is no end to the possible benefits of bringing your brand’s best minds together to work on projects.