The new era of team building
The new era of team building
COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY
One of the most crucial parts of your business is to build a great team.
How do build an amazing and motivated team in the dynamic of today’s challenges?
How do build the needed trust between employees in the team?
How do build the needed trust between the teams to work together to reach the company’s targets and vision?
How to create a supportive environment in the workplace?
Why is so important?
- Bad communication could create a toxic environment and unnecessary stress.
- Bad communication can destroy your team.
- Lack of communication can affect the execution of the teams’ work and your business activities. This could cause delays, and have bad effects on the quality of your products and services.
- Bad communication or lack of it could lead to bad management and teams decisions.
What are the characteristics of effective communication?
- Timely – If employees don`t communicate the information with your team on time this could cause a lot of delays and could be critical for the team`s and even the company`s work.
- Clear – if employees and the management don`t send a clear message and communicate clearly there is a big risk of misunderstanding and low performance.
- Open – share the needed information to support the team and have a better understanding of what, how, and why they have to perform the work. Be open to feedback from your teammates or other teams and try to understand their point of view or the challenginges they are facing.
- Kindness – be kind and show genuine care for others.
One of the challenges is: How to make sure that what we are saying and our message would be heard and taken into account?
As a Site financial controller, I was assigned to the responsible person (acting as Site financial director) on an Internal control survey. The survey was big with a lot of questions and information to be uploaded, including all the activities and management on the Site. I had to control the process, support, explain and make sure that each of the participants/ responsible managers for the implementation of the internal rules in their teams. The interesting and challenging part was how to motivate and keep accountable employees on a higher level in the organization chart to perform the required work while having a lot of work and stress on their shoulders to meet the targets of the project?
Here is how:
- Great team of professionals – without the team it would be difficult to complete a survey that is not in your area of work.
- Smile – the smile not only opens doors but has the ability to pass through walls. When approaching the person brings positive energy to the room.
- Kindness and understanding- genuine care. Try to understand the other point of view and their situation, and offer help or support. Sometimes people have a lot of stress or work on their shoulders and if you add more stress definitely won`t help to meet the targets together.
- Appreciation of the other person’s time – short and effective meetings with prepared variants of actions will save you time but stay open also to other proposals as well.
- Flexibility – give room for different ways or time targets and follow the progress to be able to perform the work in the most suitable way for the team members.
- Support – be there to support the team with information, explanation, technical support, and any proper or applicable support you can perform.
The results?
Our project was in first place in the completion of the survey made on all company`s projects around the world. It was a difficult time for all the team facing a delay at that time but together we made it to the top of this assignment.
The New Era of managing employees
The New Era of managing employees
The most important and hardest part of one business is the relationships with the people in it. Many surveys and research shows a high amount of stress and toxicity in their workplace. In the desire for good results companies sometimes could create an environment that interferes with the employees from performing at their best.
What we can do to improve the working environment and create a supportive one? What does the new era of managing employees mean?
The short answer:
- Trust,
- Fairness,
- Empathy,
- Leadership,
- Collaboration,
- Communication.
To create a supportive working environment, those elements have to be well established in the company.
HOW YOU CAN IMPROVE THOSE AREAS?
You can start by defining what are the problems and what has to be improved with:
TWO-WAY FEEDBACK
Most companies have quarterly or yearly reviews for their employees but how good is the feedback from the employees if any?
In order to prevent unpredicted situations and surprises, you need to know how good is the working envierment in your company for which you need such feedback from your employees. How you can do it?
MAKE A QUIZ.
We have quizzes for our client’s satisfaction. Why not for the satisfaction of the people that take care of your business?
Make a weekly or monthly survey with 5 to 6 predefined questions. For example:
- How satisfied you are with your work?
- How satisfied you are with the work environment?
- How satisfied you are with your team collaboration?
- How satisfied you are with the collaboration with the other teams?
- How supportive is your manager in your professional development?
- What are your remarks, recommendation, proposals, and possibility for improvement?
Send it at the end of each week or month via your internal system or e-mail.
If you have an average or less than the average satisfaction level you need to have a discussion in that area to define:
- What exactly has to be improved?
- Why?
- How?
I would recommend the results to be accessible only to your HR team as you don`t want some problems to be lost or to be created more.
The target is to be notified as soon as possible for the first sights of bad work conditions, behavior or problems.
Such surveys also build trust with your employees showing them that you care about their work experience and their satisfaction working for your company.
For more information:
Why is important to reveal your employees’ potential?
Why is important to reveal your employees' potential?
Are you using the full potential of your company?
If you don`t have a program to release the full potential of your employees may be not and you are missing good opportunities.
What does this mean?
We are used to thinking regarding our employees as a workforce that can perform only the tasks related to their positions, education, and experience. What stays hidden is their potential in different areas. Your employees could be multitalented, having interests and talents in different areas that could actually help your company grow and expand in many areas. The fact that at age of 31 years only 2% of 98% at the age of 4-5 years old people remain creative geniuses means that in 96% of the people their creativity is waiting to be awakened and at least 96% of your employees are sleeping creative geniuses.
This means that if you reveal your employees’ potential and weak up their creativity you will be able to grow and develop your organization in ways you haven`t imagined or considered so far. From your everyday processes to new products or services, new areas, or creating a new market niche that could actually increase your revenue. And as the human potential is infinite you will open the door for infinite opportunities for your company as well.
From where to start?
Your employees are human beings. They have dreams, personal life, and their own life plan and vision that includes their personal and professional life that you have to respect. So before start making plans for your company`s workforce, working positions, and promotions, you have to make sure that the plans of your employees are matching with your plans for them in your company.
How?
Start with an honest coaching session with them. Make sure that during the meeting you will build trust between you and your employees by the following steps:
- The employees should know that whatever they share in the meeting with you will be confidential and they won`t be punished for their words, plans, or vision. Make and do it in real. No judgment, no punishment. The worst thing is to lose the trust of your employees.
- Prepare an internal agreement that protects their information and rights.
- Ask questions to define what are their common goals related to your company:
- What is their lifetime plan regarding their work and career?
- Do they have other areas of interest?
- Do they want to develop their skills in other areas or businesses?
- Do they want to start their own business? Even if the answer is yes this doesn`t mean that the employee won`t work well or perform well. Even the opposite. Those employees will want to gain a good experience, build a legacy and good name that will help them when they start their own business. So it`s not necessarily a bad thing and the good thing is that you will have time to find a new person on time. Ask your employee when he/she plans to start their business and to train the person that will replace them. Again their best interest is to leave a well-trained person at their place.
- In what business area do they want to have their own business?
- Is it related to your business? If it is you can even become partners and expand your activities.
- What do they think of their work in the company?
- What do they think of the environment in the company?
- Do they have any challenges? Don`t be fast to judge them. Often the problem is in the process not in the people. Try to find the real reason that causes the challenges, problems, or delays, if any.
- What causes the challenges, the problems, or the delays at work?
- Are they interested in another scope of work in the company?
- What they would change, add, develop, create or expand in and out of your company? Whether you like the answer or not do not judge the employee. Your main task is to listen, understand your employee and look from their perspective and point of view.
- Why they would the mentioned changes?
- What are their professional dreams?
- What kind of hobbies do they have as children?
- What were their favorite games?
Invest some of your time, the time of your HR team, or the direct manager (depending on the structure of your company) in developing the potential in your employees and you could end up with the best investment you had ever made after the investment in you and your company.
If you don`t have time you can join the company`s Business coaching programs or contact the responsible coach Svetla Staykova.
