Encourage Teamwork to Motivate Millennial Workers

These days, fewer employees want to come to the office and work for 8 hours with their head down. If you are looking to motivate millennial employees, consider incorporating collaborative projects and promoting teamwork in the workplace.

Millennials have grown up in a completely connected world. From social media to video games, they are rarely alone. This need for connection and collaboration has transferred to their working environments. Just like a rock star who takes some time to pursue a solo career, only to find themselves reuniting with the band, millennials want to work together.

7 Ways to Promote Teamwork and Bring Your Employees Together

You realize that your business or department would be doing better if employees worked as a team rather than in silos. But how do you encourage teamwork in an office setting and limit the drama that occurs when employees have more contact with one another and are responsible for a collaborative project?

When you promote good teamwork, you can instantly begin to improve workplace culture across generations. Below we explain how to build teamwork in the workplace and ultimately bring your millennial employees together.

1. Share the Company's Mission

If your employees don't know why they are doing what they are doing, if they don't understand the big picture of the organization, they're likely to get stuck in the details of their daily tasks. This means that while they may want to do an excellent job in their role, they don't understand how their role fits into the grand mission, and how they can work with other employees or departments to reach the company's goals.

2. Clearly Communicate Roles & Responsibilities

When employees don't know what is expected of them, they'll find it difficult to succeed in their position. Even more detrimental to a team environment, they won't know where their job ends, and another employee's job begins. This could lead to confusion, disagreements, and unnecessary drama. Every employee should know what they are supposed to do.

3. Value Every Employee

While every employee should know what their exact role is, they also need to understand how they fit into the big picture, and most importantly, that every employee is valuable and appreciated.

For example, if you treat your tech people like lower class citizens because they don't bring in the money like salespeople, they will not only resent you, they will also resent their sales counterparts.

Every employee should be treated as an irreplaceable piece of the larger organization.

4. Encourage Collaboration

You can say that you want employees to work together, but if you don't show them with your behaviors, they won't feel as if they can.

• Create communal workspaces for employees to get together and share ideas.
• Offer bonuses or prizes based off of teamwork, rather than keeping them for more traditional goal achievements.
• Maybe even offer the flexibility to work when it is convenient for both employees to get together.

The goal is to show your employees that you approve of and appreciate teamwork.

5. Don't Micro-Manage

Micromanagement is the kiss of death for any manager, but especially those dealing with millennials. If you spend your days watching over their shoulders, nothing new will ever be created. Allow your employees the freedom to work together, brainstorm and present new ideas, and fail.

6. Utilize Technology

Have you figured out yet that millennials really like technology? While in-person meetings will never become extinct, many millennials prefer to communicate through social media channels, project management programs, and instant messaging apps.

These tools will allow them to keep in touch, divvy up the workload, stay apprised of what the other person is up to, and capture any brainstorm results.

7. Hire "Teammates" Not Just Employees

Encouraging collaboration begins with the very first interview. If you hire people that don't play well with others, teamwork may be an unattainable goal for your organization. However, if you preface job interviews with your thoughts on teamwork, you'll be more likely to hire correctly.

Whenever possible, invite other team members to the interview so you can see the interactions and decide if the potential hire would be a good fit.

Make it your long-term mission to improve teamwork amongst your millennials and older generations in your organization by following the tips above. After all, you are a rockstar leader.

Marvelless Mark® remind his clients that millennials want to be a part of a "band" at work. Encourage teamwork, and you'll see your millennial workers blossom into rock stars.

"As good as I am, I'm nothing without my band." Steven Tyler

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Mark Kamp® aka Marvelless Mark® works with organizations who want their teams to achieve immediate rock star results. A Keynote Speaker/Entertainer/Author, Husband, Father, and child of God, his primary message, “Opportunity Rocks®” gives attendees a fresh new perspective on Sales, Marketing, and Employee Performance. Fun and engaging, Mark combines the success secrets of your favorite rock stars with just the right amount of entertainment to transform your employees into business rockstars. Learn more at www.OpportunityRocks.net.