If you ever worked in an environment where members of the team are not on the same page, have contradicting values, or have conflicting communication styles, then you know the negative impact bad team building has on the success of the company as a whole.
If you already have a team or are looking to start building one, the first step you took was possibly defining your personal values and the values for your company. This not only helps you create a clear vision for the future and the way your company operates, but it sets a clear tone for the culture you want to develop. When it comes to your company’s culture, write down whatever you intend it to be; however, it is ultimately defined and cultivated by the people you choose to hire.
So how can you ensure that team building emulates the culture you want to cultivate? Moreover, how can you ensure that the people you hire are assets as individuals and integrate well with the team?
Here are four effective team building tips to build a highly collaborative and cohesive team that greatly contributes to your business’s success.
1. Make It Clear to Potential Candidates About Who You Are and What You Stand For
If you want to attract the right people for team building and progress, it is important to let them know who you are upfront. This attracts the candidates whose values align with yours, and it weeds out the ones that do not. This is an important step to avoid major conflicts, disengaged employees, and high turnover.
A great start for painting a clear picture of your company’s ethos and values is by simply displaying them publicly on your website for people interested in working with or for your company to see before they reach out. Another great place to include your values and ethos is right in the description of your job posts. This also saves you time and energy in the hiring process and working with difficult clients.
2. Provide Opportunities for Your Employees to Connect in and Outside of the Workplace
Of course, always be mindful of boundaries and professionalism; however, creating opportunities for your employees to connect over non-work related topics and activities improves team building of stronger relationships and more collaborative teams. Creating opportunities to connect over personal interests and stories helps to support empathy and collaborative creative thinking. In addition, it improves communication.
Plan a weekly, quarterly, and yearly schedule of activities to create these opportunities in a consistent way. This gives your team something to look forward to. Depending on your budget and team size, some things to consider implementing are:
- Weekly team lunches or happy hours;
- Quarterly team outings;
- Weekend leagues or team sports; and
- End of the year or holiday parties.
3. Have Lunch and Learns
Having Lunch and learns is another effective team building tip. They offer a variety of benefits to your company, such as skills and knowledge development for your employees, team bonding, and connection. In addition, they ensure that your team is on the same page about important aspects of their individual roles and of the company as a whole.
Lunch and learns support educational topics related to your company, industry, or a specific skill set. They can also be fun topics chosen and led by members of your team. This gives employees chances to learn more about one another and their individual interests, as well as gives everyone an opportunity to improve public speaking and leadership skills.
4. Schedule Weekly or Bi-Weekly OKR Meetings
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) meetings are important in keeping everyone in your organization on the same page about you company’s headed direction and the goals that need to be achieved to get there. They provide clear and concise images for the road ahead and for what each individual, team, and the company is responsible for during that specific time.
OKR meetings are useful tools to give progress updates. In addition, they provide opportunities for your team to come together and celebrate their hard work. Use these opportunities to give employees public recognition and to let them give each other acknowledgements about their hard work and the ways they helped each other throughout the week.
Conclusion
Building a collaborative cohesive team and environment is an integral part of a company’s success. Whether your team consists of five hundred employees or two (including yourself), take the time to be strategic about team building. This results in high reward for you and your employees.
