Today’s teams are different from teams of the past: They’re far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership). But while teams face new hurdles, their success still hinges on a core set of fundamentals for group collaboration.

Disagreements in the team can cancel projects before they begin. The rules of collaboration will help you build an effective team of specialists of different levels — let's remember the most important of them.

Respect

This should go without saying, but it’s necessary to remind people sometimes. Apart from just being kind, it’s good business to treat everyone with fairness and dignity. This will encourage positivity, productivity and loyalty, and help ensure people are less likely to leave your organisation or department during tough times.

Feedback

Constructive feedback is actionable, objective feedback that employees can use to improve their work quality. Encouraging employees to give constructive feedback before teamwork begins may help teams use objective responses when reacting to pitches, suggestions and assigned workloads.

Because constructive feedback aims for work improvement, including this rule may help promote an amicable relationship between both team leaders and employees.

Meetings

The team meeting is one of the essential rules and should never be ignored. Each team is different from the other and brings different perspectives and learnings to achieve a common goal. Therefore, it is vital to have team meetings in a workplace, where team members can have conversations and keep themselves updated. Ultimately the goal is to complete the given tasks with everyone's joint effort. So transparency would always give room for better results.

Goal in Focus

A group of people working tirelessly without a clear vision will end up nowhere. Morale will decline and will drain energy. Great leaders always keep reminding themselves and their teams of the bigger picture. Individual agendas fall second in successful organizations, and the greater good is a priority.

Estimate your situation, keep a check on your resources, assign the roles according to the capabilities of the people, and remind them of the more significant landscape. 

Roles

Every member of the team needs to know exactly what he or she must do, on a day-to-day basis to make sure that the team achieves its goals. Without that clarity, team-member will work at cross-purpose and trip over each other. Note that large teams may be broken up into small sub-teams, which must also have clearly defined roles. All of this must be thought through carefully and continually refined as the team moves forward.

It doesn't matter if you're running a team or just performing some tasks. Remember that "productivity" is not equal to "results". The team that follows the rules of collaboration and spends less resources on achieving the same results will be truly productive.