2 What employers say

There are many reasons why employers value teamwork. First, listen to Rebecca Fielding talking about the importance of teams in the workplace. Rebecca is the Founder and Managing Director of HE and early careers consultancy Gradconsult, and has worked with a wide variety of employers recruiting graduates into their organisations.

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REBECCA FIELDING:

There are very few roles now in the UK that you will be allowed to simply sit at your desk or sit in your lab and work on your own without working in partnership, or across disciplines, or across areas. Be that in academia, or be that in health care, or in the commercial world. Everywhere now is multidisciplinary. There are very few careers or roles that are an island and able to simply work alone. So that's the first reason why teamwork is so critical. There are simply very few roles where you get to work alone anymore.

But the second reason why is that organisations know that a team, when it brings together the sum of all of its parts and its contributions from all of the different people who are involved in a piece of work, is vastly more powerful and able to deliver a great deal more than individuals can on their own. And so the reason why it's so important to employers is, A, they've got very few roles that stand alone. But B, commercially, we need those people who can work together, because when they do, it delivers much better results for everyone involved.

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Rebecca talks about the importance of both the collaborative and commercial perspectives, and the research literature also explores the many ways in which teamwork impacts positively on the working environment. For example:

• Performance – Laughlin et al. (2006) found that groups of ‘three, four, and five outperformed the best individuals’ when solving a letters-to-numbers coding problem, attributing this performance to ‘the ability of people to work together to generate and adopt correct responses, reject erroneous responses, and effectively process information.’

• Creativity – Stolaki et al. (2023) examined the effects of collaboration (among other factors) on the team performance of over 200 university Informatics students, finding a significant positive effect on creative performance.

• Job satisfaction – Bragadottir et al. (2023) surveyed nursing staff across Iceland, receiving 567 survey responses. Their findings showed a significant relationship between teamwork and job satisfaction in medical settings, and their conclusion cites research from the US and Singapore that identifies the same association.

While the evidence for the benefits of teamwork to employers and organisations is clear, not everyone has the skills or confidence to perform well in a team without support.