Everyone knows that great teamwork is necessary to successfully facilitate complex corporate initiatives, but there's so much more to it than simply throwing together a group of your best employees. Gathering up your star performers is certainly a good start, but there many more steps you can take to optimize productivity and ensure your team is operating at maximum efficacy.

A proficient company owner or manager will take a hands-on approach to team building in order to get better results out of their team projects. With that said, here are five tips and strategies you can use to make your corporate collaborations more fruitful:

1. Use Team Building Activities

You might think that things like games and challenges are a matter of enjoyment & leisure, but numerous corporate studies have proven that team building activities can improve team dynamics, boost output, and reduce the incidence of workplace conflicts.

Team Tactics is one of the UK's leading corporate hospitality service providers, so you may want to contact them for help with arranging activities for your next team building event. As a leader in the field, they can help your teams develop and learn the traits and skills needed to become more productive.

2. Bring in an Experienced Leader

In the corporate environment, it's always best to have someone at the top who holds everyone else accountable and manages the direction of each project. You might not already have someone in-house who is the right person for the job.

That doesn't mean you need to get rid of your current team, it just means you might need to hire a leadership specialist to come in and be the cornerstone. Bringing in a new leader from outside also has the effect of putting everyone on their toes because they know the new guy is keeping track of performance.

3. Pay Attention to Social Dynamics

Personality dissonance can be very subtle in the corporate setting because nobody wants to openly express their dislike for a co-worker. While everything may seem okay on the surface, a closer look at the body language and attitudes of your employees may reveal that they're not quite meshing with their teammates.

Based on your observations of social dynamics, you may find that it’s best to re-arrange your teams into different groups. You don't necessarily need everyone to love each other, but they should be compatible enough to cooperate without issue.

4. Establish Efficient Processes

The productivity of a team will only be as efficient as the processes that the group carries out. Examine your order of operations and see if there are any opportunities for optimisation within your process map.

Process mapping should be a top priority at the initial stage of team building as it gives your staff a foundation upon which to construct their own innovations. If a team is just following a scrambled or free-flowing line of steps without any established outline, there's no way their efforts will be as efficient as a group that's executing a proven process.

5. Practice Employee Monitoring or Results Analysis

The only way to know whether your teams are living up to their full potential is to monitor their progress. That doesn't mean you need to stand over their shoulder, but every task and objective should be measured and quantified by consistent metrics so that employee performance can be assessed in retrospect.

All Great Companies are Built Around Solid Teamwork

If you look into the history of major corporations like Apple and Microsoft, the one attribute they all have in common is a strong team mentality. When you have a unit of professionals putting forth a concerted effort to achieve a common goal, your company is far more likely to succeed.