Why Is Teamwork Important?
Working effectively as part of a team is incredibly important for output quality, morale, and retention. My professional experience involving teamwork has primarily been within software engineering, but most of the lessons I’ve learnt from working with others are not limited to engineering.
From the perspective of efficiency, a traditional argument against staffing large teams comes from ideas referring to the unit of work that one person can accomplish in one month. The basic premise against group tasks relates to the notion that a software project that takes one person a year to complete can have its timeline shortened to a single month simply by staffing the project with a dozen workers. The problem here is that, upon seeing projects falling behind, many managers want to put schedules back on track by adding more workers to the project.
The problem with this approach is that each additional engineer added incurs both communication and coordination needs with everyone else on the team, and so the time to complete a project doesn’t necessarily decrease in line with increased staffing. This leads to the scenario that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” (1)
Because of this line of reasoning, managers sometimes over-correct and attempt to maximize efficiency by staffing single-person projects, which would effectively reduce the communication time down to zero. Some companieseven emphasize in their promotion processes that a staff member has to demonstrate sole ownership of a work project, thereby incentivizing engineers to prioritize individual projects so they can raise their profiles and increase their chances for promotion.
Nevertheless, the reality is that there are a number of downsides and risks to working alone that affect output quality and morale, such as these:
Firstly, working alone makes it harder to