Though the skill of teamwork is inculcated in us from a young age, as we grow up and enter the corporate world, this most important skill slowly tends to fade away and is difficult to sustain because of the complexity of our tasks and our lust for personal, individual growth.
But fostering and nurturing a team culture in a corporate environment is very essential and is desirable too. A great organization is built because of the great efforts of the people involved in it. The collaborative efforts of your employees, working together towards achieving a common goal is what will make you win. Merging extraordinary talent creates energy and proves to be highly productive. Once you have just the right set of people who are willingly ready to share your dreams and be determined towards fulfilling them, the way to success becomes quite easier.
Here are 5 simple yet most effective tips for you to have an extraordinary team culture –
1. Provide Team Resources.
No task in this world could be done without proper and adequate resources, and so achieving an efficient team culture requires some basic resources too. A designated place to meet regularly, where they can go through the whole process of innovation and getting brainstorming ideas is one of the most basic requirements of any successful team. Also giving your team proper space, making it clear that it is okay to fail sometimes is something which can boost the morale of your team a lot. Providing them with realistic deadlines, not exposing them to the intense pressure of high expectations, always supporting them with their creativity and teamwork rather than running behind perfection, these are some of the simple yet most valuable resources you can provide your team with for an efficient outcome. After all, not all resources are compelled to be tangible!
2. Assign Them Realistic Yet Challenging Goals
Setting a goal is always helpful in keeping a team motivated and focus its concentration completely towards achieving the goal. If a team is supposed to be valuable to every individual member of it as well as the organization as a whole, it needs to have clear and challenging goals. Assigning your team serious and important assignments and projects time-to-time with proper guidance and a blueprint of how to achieve them is very important if teamwork is to be valued.
3. Organize regular informal team meetings
Having a rigid structure or to be dictated by the management is not always helpful. Instead, employees should be encouraged to form groups and make sense out of their tasks and make decisions accordingly. It is usually observed that more amount of work is done with greater efficiency by informal teams than the formal ones. Too much pressure upon the teams to work hard and in a particular way by the management often prevents the actual potential of the team to emerge and get utilized. An informal communication within the team as well as outside the team boosts the performance of any team to a large extent.
You can regularly organize informal team meetings where the team is given complete liberty to express themselves, their ideas, their emotions, their vision towards a particular project to make sure the team works efficiently.
4. Promote The Zest To Own Responsibilities
A team can only be successful in achieving its common goals if each and every candidate understands his individual responsibility and willingly works hard towards getting his own task right. Teamwork is more like a jigsaw puzzle, the responsibility of each member being individual pieces. A single piece is useless, but when all the pieces are put together correctly, the puzzle is complete! Similarly, individual success of any team member is worthless for a team as a whole. The more the team owns up on taking responsibilities, the more the team can enjoy success as a whole. A sense of working ‘for’ each other is desirable and should be inculcated within your team members rather than just working ‘with’ each other.
5. Make it ‘All About The People’
Good quality teamwork is always like simple mathematics- you need to add investments, divide work, subtract conflicts and bad practices and eventually after all this is done, success gets multiplied! People always form the core of any team and a couple of great teams, build a great organization. So in the drive of achieving success and building a great organization, you need to have your major focus on satisfying the people involved with your organization. The members of any team are mere humans after all, and all the humans are driven by ambition along with inspiration, have high self-esteem, want to grow and become independent. Make sure you have every aspect of your workplace calibrated in such a way that all these parameters are fulfilled.
Having an effective collaborative spirit and a strong team culture is not as easy as it seems. It needs efforts, from everyone, including the executives and the superiors. Teams need to be valued, challenged, guided and nurtured to make it productive over a large span of time and lead an organization towards success.