What´s wrong in this picture? Teamwork without proper guidance leads to poor decisions and safety violations such as the picture above. Effective teamwork can benefit a company with improved communication, broader collaboration, and a greater sense of accountability to the group. But there are barriers to effective teamwork that managers need to be able to identify and eliminate. These include poor communication, unclear goals, lack of manager involvement, and big egos.

So, what is teamwork? The dictionary defines teamwork as a cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause. Safety is the common cause that this paper will focus on. Safety is defined as the state of being safe, freedom from the occurrence or risk of injury, danger, or loss.

To keep safe teamwork alive and well in the workplace, it is important to consider these fundamentals:

Make safety a priority, keep the workers informed, provide excellent training, select the right equipment, emphasize employee participation, encourage suggestions, and reinforce safe behavior.

Give positive feedback for safe performance and use feedback to correct unsafe behavior and redirect risk taking, as well.