The whole is more than the sum of its parts. In any organization, the total value an organization can reap from the work of a cohesive team is significantly more than the sum of the contributions of each individual.
The operative term here is “cohesive team.”
A study found that 73% of transportation safety incidents occur on the first day of an unfamiliar crew flying together because people haven’t yet had the chance to learn to work with each other effectively. NASA finds that fatigued teams that have worked together in the past make fewer errors than rested pilots who’ve not worked together.
However, the familiarity of the others in the group is just the beginning. Group cohesion is influenced by a wide range of factors. Let’s learn more.
How to Improve Group Cohesion
Summarize this article for me pleaseUnderstanding Group Cohesion
As a business leader or manager, one of your primary responsibilities is to build and nurture a cohesive team that exceeds expectations. Here’s how we define group cohesion, why it is important, and how you can achieve it.
What is group cohesion?
Group cohesion is the ability of group members to efficiently and effectively work together towards a common goal.
Some of the factors affecting group cohesion are:
- The trust and respect that employees have for each other
- Shared knowledge about their work, projects, and the organization
- Values they believe in and practice
- The ability to give and receive feedback and work on it constructively
- Psychological safety needed to resolve conflicts
Why is group cohesion important?
It’s simple. A cohesive team works well together and creates higher value quicker. The compounding benefits of a cohesive team are plenty.
Speed: When teams share knowledge and understand each other, the time taken to process ideas/plans is reduced dramatically. No time is lost in explaining/clarifying/repeating/reiterating.
Quality: Conway’s law famously states that organizations design systems/software that are copies of their own communication structure. When there is group cohesiveness, communication is smoother, complexities are better managed, and eventually, product and service quality is higher.
Productivity: Team spirit thrives in consive groups. People help each other. They fill each other’s gaps because they have better predictability, which ultimately helps improve work performance.
Employee experience: A cohesive team has a common vocabulary, values, and vision. Its members are able to communicate effectively and resolve problems. They respect each other and enjoy working together. All this dramatically improves employee engagement, team morale, productivity and retention.
Problem-solving: Cohesive teams are better problem solvers. They have pre-established processes to identify the root cause and address problems. If volatility or chaos ensues, they are able to regroup quickly and overcome challenges as a team.
Above all, group cohesion makes work enjoyable. It eliminates the annoying, high-friction aspects of working with people while retaining the good bits, like a strong sense of joint value creation, accomplishment, and purpose.
If you’re wondering how to create cohesiveness among your team, we’ve got you covered.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Improve Group Cohesiveness
While a cohesive group offers extraordinary benefits, it’s not easy to build one. Improving group cohesiveness involves efforts across systemic, organizational, and behavioral parameters. Let’s look at a few.
1. Make communication contextual
Unless teams are brainstorming or ideating for new projects, all communication is contextual. For instance, a tester might want to clarify something with a developer on a specific ticket. Or the project manager might have questions about a team member’s pricing estimates.
These conversations need to happen in the context of that particular task. Enable this with a robust project management tool like ClickUp.
Use the description field in ClickUp Tasks to include all information/resources you have. Leverage the checklists for points to remember or acceptance criteria. Nested comments within the task are a great way to have conversations in context.
When text isn’t enough, use ClickUp Clips to create and share screen recordings instantly. Transcribe them with timestamps and search inside recordings with ClickUp Brain. Automatically convert these Clips into tasks or manage everything in the Clips Hub.
2. Unify conversations
If you’ve ever worked in a distributed team, you know that your messages are also spread across emails, Slack, private messages, in-person conversations, and more. This fragmentation is the enemy of cohesiveness.
Unify all project-related messages with the ClickUp Chat view. From here, you can manage all your conversations. Mention team members, assign comments, share project links, and add lists or even code blocks.
What’s more? Create Chat views for any work in ClickUp, control access, and be notified of important messages in real time. With ClickUp Collaboration Detection, you can also identify who is online and chat with them when you need.
If you’re new to team management, try the ClickUp Team Communication and Meeting Matrix Template.
- Customize it to your needs and set up robust communication structures
- Define the team’s roles and responsibilities
- Publish the guidelines and boundaries for how to run standup meetings
- Convert conversations into tasks
3. Build shared knowledge
In a fast-moving, agile world, documentation is sometimes seen as less important than writing code. Therefore, a lot of information remains in the minds of team members and often leaves with them. They either forget over time or just take it with them when they leave the organization.
Avoid this by creating dynamic knowledge repositories for effective team collaboration. From company values to deliberately unresolved bugs, document everything with ClickUp Docs. Make this information available and accessible to every stakeholder and collaboratively edit the document in real time.
You can also use ClickUp Whiteboards to visualize and communicate your ideas. Bring your teams together, share a whiteboard, add several types of elements, and edit collaboratively. Convert action items into tasks and effortlessly integrate them into existing projects.
4. Goal orientation
A cohesive group can avoid distractions and focus on what matters. They are clear on their team goals, monitor them regularly, and recalibrate their work based on progress.
With ClickUp Goals, you can set targets for individuals and teams in the form of tasks, numbers, or money. For instance, the quality analyst can set a number target for the bugs they resolve. Sales teams can have monetary targets. Finance team goals can be yes/no targets for completing compliance tasks.
5. Make your systems cohesive
Even the best project management tools are not always comprehensive. So, teams use specialized tools for task management, whiteboarding, communication, ticket management, time tracking, knowledge management, etc. This forces them to practice constant context switching. And a team that jumps across tools throughout the day to get work done is unlikely to rate high on effective team cohesion.
To avoid this, set up a cohesive digital workplace where you can keep all tasks, projects, and communication on one platform for fully collaborative and efficient teamwork.
What’s more? On a virtual workspace tool like ClickUp, you can also gather valuable data about your tasks and performance for reviews. Customize your dashboard to your needs, whether it’s team workload, sprint burndown, sales overviews, or personal productivity.
6. Nurture your company culture
The above five systemic changes will help you set a strong foundation. However, to keep your team sustainably cohesive, you need behavioral changes.
Transparency
Enable open and honest communication in your organization. Be willing to give and receive feedback. Encourage every person on the team, irrespective of hierarchical level, to speak their mind.
Without transparent communication, there will be assumptions and misunderstandings. Transparency will foster trust and iron out inefficiencies in the process.
Knowledge sharing
Teams that openly share what they know create a common context within themselves. They share a vocabulary. For instance, productivity for one developer might mean the number of lines of code written, while another might think it’s about the number of hours worked.
In a cohesive team, these kinds of conflicting opinions don’t arise. Each team member understands what efficiency, productivity, quality, and goal achievement mean.
Empathy
Every individual is unique. Especially in knowledge work, the personality type of each team member plays a key role in how they approach requirements or solve problems. Create a culture of empathy in your organization where each individual feels comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work.
Whether someone is an extrovert, shy, enthusiastic, low on confidence, or whatever else, appreciate their personality and engage with them meaningfully.
Use personality tests like Myers-Briggs or 16-personality to understand your teams better. Based on this knowledge, create group decision-making techniques that are empathetic and effective.
Conflict resolution
Friction is necessary for progress. Team members who unquestioningly listen to their manager do not add any value. Great organizations comprise team members with informed perspectives who feel empowered to raise important questions and probe to find answers.
This is bound to create conflict in a team. Incumbents might dislike the opinions of a newcomer. Some might be surprised or even shocked at hearing the opinions of diverse candidates. New points of view that challenge the status quo will be met with resistance and defensive arguments.
A cohesive team understands that such conflicts are expected. They also know how to resolve these conflicts and move forward as a collective.
Off-work bonding
To understand someone as a person, you need to also know them outside of work. This is where team-building activities, team lunches, and off-site events help. Schedule regular opportunities for team members to spend time together in an off-work context.
Encourage team members to understand each other’s interests, preferences, priorities, and personal needs. For instance, someone might be the primary caregiver for an unwell elder, another might be a softball coach on the weekends, and a third might be an avid reader of mystery novels—all of this information helps you build a deeper, more holistic understanding of your colleagues.
This can seem challenging in the hustle and bustle of everyday work, but you can overcome that with the ClickUp Team Management Plan Template.
Schedule activities like team lunches or wellness checks on your team calendar. Celebrate success (even the small wins) regularly as a team. While making plans, ensure that you prioritize these events. Don’t cancel team-building activities when a problem arises.
Bonus read: How to build a high-performing team
7. Keep at it
Team cohesion is an ongoing activity. It is a fragile combination of process-oriented and behavioral factors. And though it is intangible and can’t be easily measured, the effects of bad team cohesion will take a while to become apparent.
For instance, a newcomer can throw off team dynamics. When someone who did a lot of emotional labor in keeping the team together leaves, cohesion can fall apart. This can also happen when the manager changes.
In essence, as a team manager, you need to dedicate a good part of your work to building team cohesion.
Observe: Spend time looking at the way team members work together. Notice gaps in collaboration.
Reiterate: As part of team management, nurture organizational culture in active and passive ways. Lead by example and be transparent. Embody the behaviors you expect your team to follow.
Interject: When team members are struggling to resolve conflicts among each other, interject. Offer coaching and mentoring to iron out disagreements.
Listen: Seek feedback from team members and work on it together, fostering better team cohesion. Take responsibility for onboarding new employees, collaborating with other departments, mediating client feedback, etc., so you can manage any disruptions to team cohesion that might occur.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBuild Cohesive Teams With ClickUp
In today’s battle for top talent, hiring is a challenge. Finding the right people with the right combination of skills and behaviors is an uphill battle. Yet, you can’t breathe easy once the team member joins.
In fact, as the team manager, your real work begins there. One of your key leadership goals is to set them up for success as an individual and an integral part of the team. You must ensure that they fit into the team seamlessly.
While a lot of this is behavioral and happens offline, you can implement a team management tool like ClickUp to support the team. With real-time project collaboration and communication features, ClickUp powers you with everything you need to manage a cohesive team.
Build great teams. Try ClickUp for free today.
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