The Benefits of Working As a Team
By Marc Mays
Working with other employees makes a business much easier than it would be otherwise. If you spend more of your time fighting with your team or working at cross-purposes, then you would probably be better off alone.
Here are some of the benefits which you will experience when you work with your co-workers as a team:
- Better synergy
While some ideas are fairly good in their initial form, working with co-workers enables your ideas to be even better. This makes it more likely that your company will succeed, resulting in accolades for all involved (see below). This synergy can even result in learning opportunities which would not be possible if each team member were looking out for their own limited interests. In this way, all team members can benefit, even if later on they each go their separate ways to pursue better opportunities. Better synergy can be a great lesson which team members use long after they finish working for a particular organization.
- Fewer occasions of political infighting
When you work well with co-workers, you spend less time fighting with them over limited interests which do not help your company. This means that your future as an organization has better prospects than when you are competing over individual self-interests. By itself, this can determine whether or not your company survives, or prospers. A positive result for your company makes everyone look good. Failure of the company results in a black mark for everyone associated with it.
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Less stress
When everyone is focused on a common task, it makes for a much lower stress environment than when everyone is competing against each other. Lower stress has other benefits as well, such as lowered risks to health, improved life outside of work, and improved productivity from additional discretionary output by team members. Given all of these benefits, it is surprising when team members still insist that they are better off working alone than together.
In short, when you work with your co-workers, it is more likely that you will experience better synergy, less political drama, and lower stress overall. This not only makes the work environment a pleasant place to be, but it also results in better business results, especially when the future of the business depends on how well employees work together. This helps the entire team when the results are successful, and hurts everyone if they are associated with a failing effort.