Work effectively with your team

There are some tips I always hear when it comes to working effectively with people in your workplace that sound really straightforward, but are also easy to forget.

Here’s two main tips that I found very helpful and believe it’s important to keep in mind:

Understand the project’s goals

To do so it is important to take a simple step that can easily be forgotten: ask questions. Make sure you and your team are on the same page and don’t hesitate to ask questions to the people involved.

You know when you are at school and teachers say there’s no stupid question? Keep that in mind, because it is best to make sure you fully understand the project’s goal and, therefore, deliver your work aligned to them, than to make mistakes that could be avoided.

On my work at C&A Brazil, I usually work with paid media campaigns and recently I was involved on a new project which I wasn’t entirely on board. At first, I just tried to start working but soon enough I realized I was focused on paid campaigns goals, but on this new project I had to go deep into Business Development, a B2B arm, so instead of focusing on media low cost KPIs only, I needed to negotiate with other companies to come up with the best benefits to the final customer, also taking in consideration the business revenue.

To fully comprehend the new path I needed to take, it was essential to align all the details with the team involved.

Keep records of your work

Another important thing to do is to keep track of your work. Who you talked to, what are the next steps, who is the owner of that task, what you should expect from that and especially the deadlines for each of them.

I started to work on this kind of status summary when my manager implemented and guided me through this process for a specific job. Since then, I have been keeping it as part of my daily routine and it’s been essential to maintain things organized and to have accountability for each task. This type of organization also helps to make a smoother transition for new people joining the team.

As I said before, these are two main things I believe are essential to to work effectively with our team, and the golden rule for both is communication. Communicate clearly, take notes, ask questions… all of this can help us in our tasks to deliver quality work.