One of the most important ingredients for success in business is teamwork. If you don’t help your team stay together, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to solve workplace issues instead of getting work done. Cooperation and positive workplace relationships can make life easier.
Your team members won’t know and trust each other just because they work together. So you need to build a workplace bond─ but you can’t do it overnight. Here’s how to build your team, strengthen workplace bonds, and make life at work more enjoyable.
Let’s begin!
Have Strong Leadership
An effective team needs strong leadership. Your ideal leader shouldn’t be a dictator but rather a person who provides as much insight as needed while helping coworkers to develop their own abilities.
A leader, like Craig Kielburger, should provide vision and objectivity while at the same time inspire trust and confidence. It’s good to exemplify the conduct you expect to see in your employees and mentor individuals who are struggling. Also, help team members locate new opportunities and projects that build upon their strengths.
Prioritize Teamwork
This is one of the best team building tips, yet many businesses often ignore it. Teams perform well when top management demonstrate collaborative behavior themselves and invest in supporting social relationships.
At the most fundamental level, your business’s success or failure reveals the ideas of the leaders in the company. To build a collaborative team, you need to make teamwork a key objective for your team. You should help your employees see how top executives in the organization bond and interact to achieve goals.
You should openly commend teams when they bond together to complete a task successfully. Also, encourage your employees to share ideas that will be incorporated into your organization’s mission statement.
Hold Individual Meetings
Holding regular individual meetings with coworkers can help build their confidence and improve relationships. To build your team, reach out to team members. Hold brief sessions with an underlying agenda where individuals share their opinions, concerns, and ideas.
You may provide regular feedback regarding their personal development. Any feedback should be constructive and specific.
Speaking of feedback, many leaders don’t act on feedback. Feedback should be two-way traffic.
Always implement agreed-upon ideas—whether it’s from you or from a team member. This way, you’ll create an environment where employees feel heard and that creates a sense of employer/employee connectedness.
Use Praise
Praise ─when it is genuine─ can be a great motivator, as it nurtures positive emotions and can enhance performance. Also, workers who receive regular praise and recognition tend to be more engaged with their coworkers.
You should be able to notice an individual person’s contribution to teamwork. Identifying the effective ways a team member contributes to the performance of a team and sharing this knowledge with team members can boost their positive emotions.
Know Employees on a Personal Level
While you need to maintain a professional employee-employer relationship, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find time to know the individual behind the work. Go all-out to treating your team as people, not just worker bees. The goal is to become interested in team members’ lives outside work.
Do they have a family? What are their personal and professional goals? What is it they like doing outside of work?
These are some of the questions that can help you understand your team on a more personal level. This helps them be conscious of their individual preferences and actions which forms a much stronger bond between you and your employees.
Also, do something thoughtful like acknowledging their birthdays, and notice when something is off. If one of your employees is uncharacteristically upset or overly tired, ask if they would like to share and listen. Each of these circumstances offers an opportunity to boost team bonding.
Be Accountable
As a leader, you need to hold team members accountable for their job and responsibility on the team. You should treat everyone with respect to foster teamwork and help build your team.
Be clear about the work your employees are expected to do and hold them accountable for their actions. It’s a lot better when members of your team follow through with what they are supposed to do.
Do Team Building Activities
An office environment that’s fun is often more productive since employees don’t feel underappreciated and overworked. Team building activities can help bring joy to the office. The ideal team building should be interesting, engaging, and doable in a group.
The advantages of specialized fun and games go beyond building a team that has a strong bond. Team building activities enable participants to develop critical work skills.
When training is infused into the fun exercises, the training becomes a “money-saver” for your company. This is because you won’t need to hold separate bonding and training activities.
Try having events like regular office parties, a weekly potluck or casual days. The idea is to create a fun environment that encourages a sense of friendship that will help in building a stronger workplace.
Monitor and Review
Building a collaborative team is a continuous process that needs constant attention and evaluation. For instance, you need to measure the results at specific intervals of time when you set objectives.
Building an effective team means you need to use common metrics like financial indicators. This helps to assess the success of a group and each member in it.
Evaluate your teams by asking yourself questions like what’s working well, what has the team achieved, or what aspects of teamwork should they improve.
Build Your Team to Be Strong and Efficient
It’s not only businesses that need teams to do great things. Any organization requires well-functioning groups to achieve their goals. This means a collaborative team will undoubtedly beat a disconnected team.
To lead a team of highly motivated individuals, you need to build trust and loyalty within the company. Hopefully, the team bonding tips above will help you build your team around trust, commitment, and support for each other.
For more tips and advice, check out the rest of our blog.
