Every organisation has its objectives and goals to achieve, which measure the level of success of the business. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measuring financial success, production of goods, delivery of services, and so on. Regardless of what these are, results are realised through the actions of the team or teams in the organisation.
Every person in the organisation has a vital role to play. If their role wasn’t important, it wouldn’t exist. Most organisations run to make money after all. Team Building ensures that these roles fit together and complement each other to optimise the performance of the business.
What is the Point of Team Building?
A team is a group of individuals working together to achieve a common goal or meet a common purpose. How well the team works together determines the level of success.
A group of individuals working on their own agendas will achieve less than a team that is working together. One person’s work might hinder another’s. In some cases, the work is better completed by more than one person, so there is a need for a team. Even where a person needs to work on their own, a team needs to understand how interruptions might impact their work and hence when to interact with them and when not.
According to the Tuckman model, teams move through four stages of development. Forming when they are first together. This is followed by a Storming phase, where individuals start to work out how they interact (positively and negatively) together. At this point there is a lot of friction and disagreement, and team performance is generally below the potential output. The third stage is Norming, when people know how to work with each other, and performance improves. Lastly the team reaches performing, where performance exceeds expectations as the team members know how to get the best out of each other.
Team Building can accelerate this process and help the team move to performing, hence getting better results for the business as well as developing a better workplace.
In a large organisation, an employee may belong to several teams: their department, their division, the state team, the national team, and the overall group or organisation.
Working across departments, as a divisional team ensures that the larger team considers each other’s work and how they interact.
This is where team building becomes even more critical to your business.
Team Building enables your employees to work complementarily and achieve a greater outcome through engagement and looking after each other’s needs. Where team building is successful, the team members feel a sense of belonging and build a level of trust, ensuring that they are always considering their colleagues in terms of safety and general wellbeing. A well-developed team finds ways of optimising their work to the overall benefit of all the team members and the organisation.
So where do we start with Team Building? How can we encourage a team to bond and work together?
- Firstly, provide a sense of common purpose. Link this to the business goals and values so that everyone is working to achieve a shared goal.
- With this, now Communicate this purpose regularly and encourage the workforce to talk about how their role contributes to the success.
- Link the roles so that everyone knows how their own role interacts with that of their colleagues’ and how they can help each other.
- Look for input and ideas on how to do things better. Openly discuss the risks, constraints and frustrations that people experience in doing their job. What actions by others, in doing their job, cause issues to employee’s jobs? How can these be overcome?
- Brainstorm how improvements can be implemented and how the team members can mutually help each other in their work.
- Provide realistic measures that report overall performance across the team, rather than at individual level. Link rewards to the team performance so that by working together, everybody wins.
Show the workflow graphically to emphasise the dependency between the various tasks. This will demonstrate how not completing a specific task can have knock-on affects to other people’s work and delay the outcome of the overall product or service. Show how poor housekeeping might delay things, as the next team downstream has to spend time tidying the work area in order to achieve their result.
Team Building is about helping the employees understand each other. Developing relationships so that there is a level of care in their colleagues wellbeing and safety, and they understand more about their lives and “what makes them tick”.
Through team building, team members can understand each other’s perspectives, appreciate their backgrounds and appreciate their behaviours. Developing a level of empathy can ensure that relationships are formed, and a greater level of respect and trust is built.
Successful Team Building can deliver significant benefits to the business. It develops a greater engagement across the workforce and a sense of belonging. This, in turn, means that team members consider their colleagues and speak out to bring about improvements. They also identify risks and hazards which may harm their colleagues and also impact production. They will think about how their work can enhance a colleague’s work and set them up for success rather than hindering their outcome.
In other words, they look after their teammates.
When a team is engaged and feeling that sense of belonging, the team members are less likely to look for new jobs, and the attrition rate, absenteeism and presenteeism all reduce. The costs of recruitment and cover for absent employees, as well as the loss in production of a disengaged employee, can be significant, so any reduction in these areas can provide a significant benefit to the financial costs of the business.
