And that starts with having a cohesive team in the first place, one that's It includes activities ranging from team meetings to employee birthdays to fitness challenges. Our company's biggest cultural win was the addition of three-time nap will make my already-gritty employees even more hardworking.
Table of contents
Listed below are 50 ideas to jumpstart your thinking. Not all teams are the same. Come up with a plan that works best for your team and the team you want to build. As a member of a team, I want to feel comfortable with my coworkers in order to be productive, enjoy my work life, and do my best work. Common ideas include overnight retreats, dinners outside of work hours, and happy hours or other events that center around alcohol. Another common misstep includes events that push personal boundaries, such as anything that requires people to be partially clothed saunas, hot tubs, etc.
As an employee, I want to understand the impact of my work to be able to feel motivated and properly prioritize my time. As an employee, I want to feel supported in developing new skills in order to increase my confidence, impact, and motivation at work. Companies often offer low-value opportunities, like after-hours networking events where alcohol is the primary component. Another potential issue is any pressure to do time-intensive professional development outside of work hours. As an employee, I want to have energy in order to focus on doing my best work and live my best life.
When teams are struggling, many companies opt to pressure employees into spending unstructured time with coworkers in high risk situations. This can manifest as overnight retreats, events outside of work hours, and events that center around alcohol. As a new employee, I want to feel comfortable in my new environment so I can ramp up and quickly start providing value. A team dinner outside of work hours, followed by bar hopping.
If these event ideas ever start to feel overwhelming, remember that sometimes the best culture is a minimum culture. Most employees want to be able to provide value and be motivated.
Creating Strong Team Culture
Very few adults need their workplace to poorly facilitate their social life. Focus on supporting employees in their work and everything else will take care of itself. Sign in Get started.
- What is team building?.
- Women, Get Answers About Your Money: Because There Are No Dumb Questions About Personal Finance.
- 50 Ideas for Building Team Culture More Effectively.
Have you ever stopped to ask why? Do team members seem demoralized? Do people want to feel more collaborative in order to do their best work? An example problem statement might be: People on x team want to be able to enjoy their time in the office and feel motivated in order to do their best work. This practice consists of brainstorming through a chat program, which circumvents many of the face-to-face problems. The following rules are also recommended:. The Help Scout team prefers HipChat for this sort of quick communication, and the app is also perfect for setting up the electronic brainwriting sessions mentioned above.
Great teams benefit from having an analytical thinker. When it comes to assembling a great team, this study from Carnegie Mellon University suggests that having an analytical thinker on the team is a must to balance out big-picture strategists. How is an analytical thinker defined? The study described this person as someone who pays close attention to "process focus," which is the art of identifying and focusing on the sub-tasks needed to achieve the goal.
Creating a Healthy Team Culture | STEPS Forward
In other words, this detailed-oriented person sweats the small stuff; they're a great complement to the broad thinkers who concentrate on executing overall strategy. They key is to educate team members on appreciating the process of creation, which can help negate potential disputes. When the entire team understands the nature of the details, this analytical thinker can thrive without being at odds with those planning out strategy.
As a software company, we can offer a candid example--adding "this one button" or "that one little feature" is almost never as easy as it sounds. Very rarely are these small changes actually small , and big picture people need to be in tune with this side of an analytical thinker's work, so that misunderstanding's and disputes can be avoided.
Forming "micro-cultures" can be bad for teams. Varying degrees of friendship are bound to form within teams. Research shows that it's common for closer bonds to be formed among team members who share similarities based on their social identity and by the department they work in e. In a psychological study on getting the most out of multidisciplinary teams , lead researcher Doris Fay found that multidisciplinary teams produced better quality innovations than more uniform teams, but that this boost in performance was only consistent if there wasn't a problem of teams fracturing into smaller subgroups.
Team leaders need to ensure that each member feels committed to the unified cause and that everyone on the team has a voice. While private friendships are obviously fine, office cliques and inter-departmental rivalries aren't ideal for a positive, goal-minded environment. Teams need "social sensitivity. Recent research on this topic shows that the ability to read co-workers' emotional states is pivotal in determining a team's success.
Detecting when co-workers may be frustrated, busy, confused or embarrassed has proven helpful to a team's cohesion. Seemingly small things--such as being able to take turns while speaking --can go a long way toward increasing social sensitivity among teams. You may not be surprised to hear that women are often more attuned with this trait than men. This may be why additional research suggests that teams that lead company boards with at least one woman represented will regularly outperform all male boards. Either way, this is an important trait to establish in your company culture.
Check out how the Buffer team promotes these values by encouraging employees to 'default to transparency' and to be a "no ego doer" when working with others. The best teams have extroverts and introverts. Many companies actively encourage their employees to open up and be more extroverted. But be careful of this mentality; even though introverts don't tend to make as strong of a first impression as extroverts, they have proven to be key members of teams. Research shows that although introverts "start off with the lowest status" i.
These underrated quiet types offer a unique way to balance a team, so be sure that any 'wallflowers' on your team are given a chance; their reserved nature may just mean that they are shy, not that they have nothing to contribute.
The best activities are those that the entire team feels proud to participate in. Research even suggests that helping others makes you feel like you have more time on your hands! The Help Scout team recently assisted the Cradles to Crayons project to help support a great cause in our community, and we all found it to be an incredibly rewarding experience that encouraged conversation outside the workspace. Sports make for superb outings that allow employees to work together and get physical exercise. However, Ballard warns that always playing the sport that the CEO likes may make the activity feel like an obligation.
Also, pick your sport carefully: Simple, casual trips like visiting a park or museum or going to a baseball game can work wonders for your team. Quality workshops give teams the opportunity to stay up to date with education and develop professional relationships in new settings--all without the stigma of going it alone or the awkwardness of trying to network solo. Eating regularly with your team allows for casual conversation in a comfortable environment, letting team members get to know each other outside of work.
As a remote worker, I don't get to see the Help Scout team every day, but when I'm in Boston we spend lunchtime together and I regularly dine out with individual team members. A study from MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory shows that when it comes to predicting the success of a great team, the most important element is how well the team communicates during informal meetings: Let remote workers know they are valued. Remote workers are especially vulnerable to being looked over and not feeling appreciated for the work that they are doing. Teams need to make sure remote workers feel supported and appreciated, even if they aren't in office.
2. Public shout-outs.
Find solutions for seamless work coordination. A much-needed tool for any virtual team is the ability to view, organize and change deadlines through a project management system that the entire team can access. Sharing calendars and project updates can get messy, and the best solution that our team has found is Basecamp. The simple question "What did you get done today? Our team currently uses and recommends P2 , which acts as an internal "bulletin board" for our team to write and read longer updates about what's been accomplished that week.
It also runs entirely on WordPress, so it's easy to set up. Studies on the concept of "social loafing" show that in brainstorming groups, creative people often won't fully exert themselves because they feel that others are likely to pick up the slack bystander effect , anyone? In a group brainstorming session, the rest of the group has to wait while a peer shares an idea.
- A Social Media Primer.
- Ten steps for cultivating strong relationships in the practice.
- Introduction.
- !
- Hint: The answer is not more happy hours;