You need your business to be successful. And the best way to do that is to get your team working together to support your business needs. As a business grows, this becomes increasingly difficult. Here are ten ways to improve your team culture and lead your business to success.
What Is Team Culture?
Team culture describes an organization’s vision, values, principles, mission, and goals. How a team fits into your organization’s culture will relate to how well your team leader builds an atmosphere of openness and trust.
Each department has a different independent team culture. But that’s not to say the culture of the organization itself doesn’t have an influence on how team culture forms. If a team’s values don’t match the values of the organization, then this will cause conflict.
And that’s where a leader will need to be flexible and make adjustments to the team’s values.
Why Does Having a Strong Team Culture Matter?
Strong team culture is one of the most critical values that can make or break your organization’s success. You can create a team of idea makers that create endless suggestions for products. But you will have a useless team that does nothing but come up with ideas for products, but none will be successful without passion.
Passionate employees that share values and have an open environment are the result of strong team culture. With the company’s help and its team leaders nurturing this free environment, success will follow. This places employees in a position to test ideas and execute those that will net the organization the best results.
10 Must-Follow Tips to Improve Your Team Culture
Here are ten concrete actions you can take right away to build a more robust and successful team culture:
1. Empower Your Team
Share responsibility by empowering workers to make decisions. Team members who feel more empowered are more likely to engage with projects. As a result, you’ll see more success across your company.
As a leader, you may feel that having more control over team decisions will bring a better result. But, taking a hands-off approach will promote a work culture that values an individual’s desire to learn.
Self-driven workers will reduce the time needed to oversee your daily duties.
2. Build Feedback Culture
Through a regular verbal feedback system, members can engage in a conversation to improve on weak areas. A conversation offers team members the chance to share performance assessments with less of a critical eye.
The traditional written assessments leave much room to be misunderstood by colleagues. That’s why you want to build a habit of informal feedback. Employees are less stressed and less likely to be misunderstood when discussing performance.
Regular feedback strengthens team culture by creating a deeper relationship among team members. The foundation of a healthy relationship is honest and thoughtful suggestions over a list of weaknesses. In turn, this builds trust, and employees can grow from this shared experience.
3. Lead by Example
Don’t assume leadership is about delegating tasks alone. Instead, your job is to model the behavior you wish to see. You do that by mentoring team members and acting as a channel between team members.
Employees should see you as an asset. Don’t make yourself known as the rule maker and deadline setter. Instead, establish your role as a communication asset and pass along team updates. This will help connect team members and avoid distractions from more important duties.
4. Create Common Goals
Objectives that teams can work on together will help them grow as a team and as a company. Group identity is the foundation that strong team culture builds on and the shape it takes depends on your goals. Without members getting to know one another and fostering these relationships, team culture won’t exist.
5. Form a Kinship
Getting to know team members over a drink at the bar or by celebrating life milestones together builds team bonds. As a result, they are better suited to help identify each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Once you identify weaknesses, members can offer advice on troublesome tasks and provide help on challenging projects.
Comradeship is often overlooked. Many see it as something that should happen outside of company time. But investing early on in supporting these bonding opportunities will provide huge results in the end.
For one, your team will be more comfortable with each other. This will make it easy to share ideas and feedback. It also helps them avoid miscommunication as they’ll have a better understanding of other team members.
6. Know Your Role
If you have regular meetings, ensure everyone present has a role. Whether that is taking notes, keeping track of time, or leading the conference, each role builds towards a positive team environment.
Having an established position for each team member promotes better teamwork while allowing them to reach a common goal together.
7. Establish Clear and Defined Goals
Collaborate with your team and regularly communicate company goals that you establish with employees’ skill set. Meeting the objectives should be challenging enough that the employee can grow from the experience. If employees are always completing objectives quickly, then you need to increase the challenge.
By selecting specific goals, team members can work independently on parts of the team project, requiring less oversight by the team leader. Besides, you are helping employees grow as a professional and boosting productivity and performance by increasingly challenging them.
8. Prioritize Employee Needs
Strengthening the workplace and creating a strong team culture requires promoting a culture of caring, compassion, and loyalty. Remember, clients aren’t permanent. They will come and go over time. But your employees are by your side. And you want your employees to enjoy their work, so they remain loyal.
Once you make it clear to your employees that you’re putting their needs first, this will stick in your team’s minds. Happy employees lead to a healthier work environment, leading to growth and greater results for the entire company.
9. Don’t Get Caught up in Measuring Results
Don’t get caught up in the need to measure how much work your team finishes daily. Instead, focus on improving and rewarding the quality of work they do.
Quality over quantity is often best practice as you want the work your employees do to reflect on the quality of your company and the products you produce.
10. Provide the Team a Budget
No team can be successful without a budget to fuel their daily life in the workplace. Teams should regularly discuss issues in the workplace and decide if using the budget is the best option for everyone.
For example, concerned team members have to bring water to keep them hydrated since there is no drinking foundation at work. A solution could be reached to allow for part of the budget to be spent on a water cooler and a monthly water delivery service.
How Do You Create a Healthy Team Culture?
In many businesses, team cultures can become unhealthy by focusing on getting higher results and better sales reports. This leads to burnout, unhappy employees, and a hostile work environment.
Often the cause of an unhealthy workplace is a lack of attention to underlying problems. An effective way to keep tabs on unaddressed issues is through team assessments. By having employees engage in assessments, they can provide focus feedback aimed at improving the workplace.
Teams can share their insight into what is working and how they can better use their strengths in the company. Management can then use this information to improve the workplace environment and make them feel heard.
Another way to create a healthy team culture is through shared respect among your fellow team members. Leaders command respect. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t return the respect to your employees.
Shared respect promotes a healthy team culture by giving the impression that you’re in this together and trusting each other to do your job.
How to Avoid Toxic Team Culture in the Workplace
Toxic work cultures continue to cause trouble in the workplace. This causes higher employee turnover, dissatisfaction with work, and low staff morale. To keep this from happening in your company, follow these tips.
Give Credit Where It Is Due
The workplace is competitive enough. Don’t let other workers take credit for others’ work. Keep tabs on the work people complete to ensure you know who has done what. This way, you can give credit where credit is due.
Build Employee Morale
When you notice an employee is underperforming, don’t demean them. Instead, pair them with a mentor that can provide them with a guiding hand. This will help develop a friendly work environment that is not built on competing against one another. Instead, it gives an excellent opportunity to guide hard-working employees to success.
Remember that strong work cultures are not built overnight. But, by taking small steps each day to create an atmosphere of openness, you’ll inspire trust. And that will go a long way toward driving your business forward and cementing your legacy as a thoughtful leader.
Improve Your Team Culture Today!
Using these strategies, you can effectively enhance your workplace culture. Watch as your employees go from loathing the drive to work to skipping into the office every Monday. Meanwhile, with these systems in place, your business can rapidly reap the benefits of more productive, happier employees.
