How to Organize the Office to Encourage Teamwork

You put a few dozen people in a small office and there’s a good chance that even the most easygoing individuals with a laid-back attitude towards the majority of life’s problems will start to build up some resentment against each other.

After all, no matter how much some of these people may enjoy their job, there’s a variety of different stressful scenarios that can occur, from having to meet the most unreasonable deadlines to dealing with irrational suggestions and demands from the clients.

Also read: Office Design Trends That Can Transform Your Workspace

Nevertheless, just because it is impossible to eradicate all of the negative tension, that doesn’t mean that you should simply give up on the idea altogether and let it run its course. There are plenty of different ways you can organize your office to improve teamwork and a variety of approaches you can take that will promote better cooperation and communication between your employees.

Gear Up

Unless you are running some kind of a hipster paradise in the middle of nowhere with nothing but Mother Nature surrounding you, the atmosphere around the office will always heavily depend on the sort of equipment you have in there. An automatic iced tea maker, for instance, will go a long way in terms of improving the productivity of your colleagues during those exhausting hot summer days.

With the help of this seemingly simple kitchen appliance, you will be able to keep your employees much more fresh and energetic, and there’s nothing that encourages teamwork more than an energetic atmosphere around the office. Of course, nobody is saying you have to stop at the tea maker since there are plenty of similar appliances that will help you foster a much more collegial environment, from a mini-brew to a soda maker.

Build a Break Room

Continuing with the theme of office equipment, there’s nothing quite like a proper break room to show your employees that you care about them as well as promote teamwork and improve communications. Neal Jenson from the Huffington Post would like to remind us that there are a great number of benefits you can receive by creating a break room in your office. The importance of taking a break from your work every now and then in order to boost your overall productivity is something that should probably go without saying.

Also read: Breaks at Work: Helpful or Hurtful?

But, as important as individual brilliance can be, you can’t run a successful office without some esprit de corps and, as we have already mentioned, a proper break room is exactly what you need to foster it. You can run cook offs there, organize ping pong tournaments, have people compete against each other in a number of different video games, or bring up some board games and have people bond over them. After all, what better way to encourage teamwork than to pit people against each other in all kinds of competitive team games?

Create a Positive Work Culture

According to William Craig at Forbes, one of the best ways to improve teamwork is to create a positive environment where people will feel encouraged to get to know their colleagues on their own without the managers and supervisors trying to force it onto their employees. As people spend time with each other and get acquainted with their coworkers, they will feel much more open towards sharing their ideas with their colleagues and embarking on all kinds of different projects with them.

Besides, even if teamwork isn’t really that necessary in your line of work, new research suggests that happy people tend to be 12% more productive and, generally speaking, people tend to be much happier in a positive work environment where they can talk to each other and trust their colleagues, knowing full well that they can rely on their coworkers in terms of professional issues as well as their personal struggles.