How to turn ’Staff’ into a great team

HOW TO TURN ’STAFF’ INTO A GREAT TEAM

We often hear from our candidates and employers about the struggles with teamwork within the workplace. We’ve put together our thoughts on turning your Staff into a well-gelled team – we all know it’s not an overnight job.
It takes patience, time and a great effort to get people working together as one. But it’s certainly isn’t impossible, Jurgen Klopp for one will tell you that. If you find your organisation is made up of individuals who only speak to each other when they need to, and barely know each other’s names, The OHubs tips can help to change this.

Encourage employees to get to know each other
It takes time to get to know someone and doing it in a working environment is not always the easiest way. As the leader of the group take it upon yourself to organise social events outside of work. This allows employees to get to know each other in a more relaxed environment and establish common ground between one and another. As employees get to know each other better they will share their interests and experience at the company, all of which help employees bond with each other. Once people feel more comfortable around each other outside of the office, working together won’t be so frosty.

Explain each department’s role
Communication is key in any company. Helping employees understand what everyone’s roles are eliminates finger-pointing when issues arise. Staff knowing each department and individual’s roles and responsibilities will have a better understanding of who should be doing what. This removes tension and confusion and instead encourages open communication between departments, helping everyone to work collaboratively in the most efficient way. When nobody talks to each other a lot of jobs tend to be repeated – wasting everyone’s time.

Praise the team
After a group project has been successfully completed the first thing to do as a leader is praise the group as a whole for their combined efforts. Letting the team know they did a good job as opposed to highlighting individual performances will make people feel good about working as a team. This can be an email or calling everyone into your office congratulating them on their success. The shared sense of accomplishment will bring people together, boost team morale and lead to a better functioning workplace.

Encourage collaboration
Where possible encourage people to work on tasks together. This will not require you to think of entirely new projects for people. Simply brief a project into a team rather than an individual. Create a system that pairs employees up based on the skillsets required for the job at hand. Better yet, when asking for feedback from different departments request that the whole team get together and share their thoughts and reply as a group.

It is important to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is getting teamwork in the workplace. This is going to take time and some patience while bonds between people are formed. As the leader, it’s important to unite your employees and remind them they are all working towards the same outcome.