Team collaboration within your development team is essential as it promotes seamless coordination and good working relationships among team members. This can allow them to perform their best and complete their responsibilities efficiently. Moreover, when your staff members are working as one, you can have a more engaged workforce and increase the levels of trust within your organization. Thus, reaching a goal becomes easier.
With that, here are some tips you can consider when improving collaboration within your dev team:
1. Adopt Gamification Techniques
Gamification has been a trend because you can turn a job process into a game. By applying this approach, you can enhance the social networks among your team members while they’re working. It also allows them to have fun at the workplace while becoming more engaged with their colleagues.
Competing in the workplace doesn’t have to be so serious, and you can allow your employees to have fun and laugh with each other while competing. You can use gamification when setting expectations, making them learn new skills, during employee training, or for unusual indoor team-building activities. Regular engagement activities where employees can socialize, have fun, and thrive in their roles can help boost productivity and efficiency in your organization.
2. Appreciate The Craft Of Each Individual
While you may be working towards a goal as a team, acknowledging individual outputs can improve other team members’ desire to make a difference. They’re more likely to exert more effort since you recognize their skills or outputs. On the other hand, they may be less likely to do more or better if their contributions go unnoticed or they aren’t appreciated. They may think that their efforts aren’t making any difference, so they may as well slack around.
You can show interest in each other’s roles by showing them their technical solution. Ask them what they’re most proud of, what tradeoffs they made, how flexible it is, and how they built the solution. For instance, you can engage them in conversations about how they fix a bug, the root cause, and the like. Whether these things are familiar to you or not, letting them communicate about their passion and work can set a foundation that they can talk to you. And so, the next time they think of solutions or recommendations, they’re more likely to share them with you or your team because they know you’ll listen to them.
3. Create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
When creating KPIs for your dev team, consider focusing on user-centric KPIs and not on conventional ones. The metrics should include bounce rate, session duration, user engagement, and conversion rate. These metrics can help team members know where to focus and be on the same page: enhancing the user experience (UX).
For instance, your project is to create landing pages for a new campaign. Instead of creating KPIs that focus on days to make it live, developers can focus on creating great landing pages from the user’s point of view. They won’t think about the days they need to complete it, but they’ll think of ways to create user-friendly pages.
Don’t let your team members focus on the number of projects they completed in a quarter or the time spent on finishing the project. Let them dwell on factors that can make their work more excellent since some projects may require deploying more codes, more trials, and the like until they come up with a great solution.
4. Implement Verbal And Face-to-Face Communications
Nowadays, the advent of technology makes communication more manageable in the workplace. You can choose from many software and apps where your team can communicate quickly and efficiently. However, most developers are likely absorbed in repetitive technical tasks, technology, and code, which can make them forget to communicate with their team members. And if you let this happen, the communication in your team may suffer.
With such, you may have to consider face-to-face communication. It may mean using video cams while in a meeting or working on something. That way, you can see each other and easily convey feelings and thoughts. When team members know each member, you can promote trust and empathy.
Moreover, face-to-face communication makes it easier for the team to present and discuss details about the project. Since everyone can speak, team members can voice their recommendations that others can fill in or support. Instead of sending each member an email about problems, discussing it with the team on a call can be quicker.
5. Use The Right Tools For Collaboration
Since your team may consist of remote workers and others are in the office, you might as well invest in the right digital collaboration tools. That way, working together will be much easier wherever each member is. Many collaboration tools are available online, but choosing the most appropriate for developers is best. You may also want to consider collaboration tools that have everything from versioning to code repositories and file sharing to communication.
Conclusion
Your dev team can do much more when each member works together to meet the goal of a project. When collaboration is part of the game, all is possible. One knows whom to reach out to for specific problems if one can’t resolve such. Moreover, performing one’s best isn’t a problem when everyone is in sync.
Cover Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash