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Strong team cohesion shouldn’t be taken for granted. By improving communication and creating good relationships between staffers, you can reduce micromanagement, increase productivity, and create a positive work environment.
In this article, we’ll talk about a few signs that indicate good team cohesion. After that, we’ll share a few tricks that will bring your team closer together.
What Makes a Cohesive Team?
Recognizing a strong, cohesive team is much easier than you might think. These characteristics will show you whether your staffers gel together the right way:
Fast Conflict Resolution
Conflict in the office is essential for the company’s progress, but it isn’t always easy to solve. Employees with good cohesion are more empathic toward others and more flexible in changing their opinions. They prioritize the best possible option for the company, even if it means going against their idea.
More Unity
When solving problems, employees within cohesive teams are willing to submit themselves to the process and the greater good. They support each other, serve as tutors for others, and even create strong relationships outside the office.
Higher Accountability
As these employees focus more on team and less on personal accolades, they have much higher sense of accountability. They will admit their mistakes, while simultaneously avoiding excessive punishment and criticism of other team members.
How to Improve Cohesion?
These are the best tricks for improving internal cohesion between employees:
1. Organize Events
Staffers need to spend some time together to be on the same page. They should socialize off-work and learn more about other people’s hobbies and preferences and what makes them tick.
As a manager, you would be wise to organize various teambuilding events. Barbeques, basketball games, and hiking are just a few ideas you might explore. We suggest you make these events a regular occurrence, while also allowing staffers to miss them if they have other obligations.
2. Give Team Awards
It’s a common practice to give individual awards and EDCO trophies to best performing employees. Awards such as “Employee of the Month” can ignite competitive spirit and make staffers push harder toward company’s goals.
While you shouldn’t necessarily eliminate individual prizes, you should also consider introducing team awards. Not only do they increase the sense of unity, but they also make people more proud of their work. Team awards are especially effective for businesses with numerous teams and departments.
3. Introduce Better Goals
Companies have goals on a monthly and annual basis, as well as for individual projects. Alas, managers often make the mistake of not formulating these goals properly or making mistakes when assigning roles and responsibilities.
Because of that, you need to be accurate when giving tasks to your staff. Create a hierarchy for each project and assign responsibilities publicly. That way, everyone will understand their assignment, and employees won’t have to step on each other’s feet. With well-structured goals, your staff will learn to work as a unit and avoid unnecessary conflict due to misinterpretation.
4. Buy Advanced Software
Communication and cohesion go hand in hand. A good team should have several channels of communication at their disposal, making it easier to share project progression, feedback, and files. Ideally, you should get solid paid tools so your staffers have extra features and functionalities to make things easier.
5. Build Trust
Although good communication is paramount for building trust, there are other tricks that can help out. For example, your team leaders need to be as transparent as possible regarding the project’s goals and progress, but also company’s current state. If employees don’t trust their team leader, they won’t feel safe sharing information, which will also affect their productivity.
Managers should share their ideas publicly, even if they’re bad. Furthermore, they should provide updates all the time so that the employees understand their situation.
6. Provide Training
Sometimes, there’s more to good communication than simple willingness. Certain team members might be introverted and have a hard time adjusting to the work environment. Instead of punishing these individuals, we need to help them through training and workshops.
Additional training is also crucial for improving skills, which will have a trickle effect on team cohesion. Other staffers will now understand they can rely on this person, which will build trust between them.
7. Define Values
For many employees, company values are an extremely intangible concept. Because of that, you as a manager should explain to staffers in which direction the company is going and what it stands for. Every new member should be on board with the brand’s policies and properly understand them before starting their first shift.
8. Give Authority
Empowering employees is another fantastic trick for improving cohesion. Give good employees more and more responsibilities and diversify their tasks. In fact, you should even give them the authority to make their own decisions and discover the best working methods for them.
Conclusion
Cohesive teams work on a much higher level compared to those that aren’t. They can execute tasks much faster and with fewer errors, while also improving the overall workplace atmosphere. As long as you follow instructions from this post, you can create a team that will best represent your brand and fulfill long-term goals.
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