It’s not always easy to lead a team, especially when everyone comes from different professional backgrounds and experiences. Take a look at our 6 Habits to Improve Your Work Team for some tips on how to not only make your team more productive, but happier, motivated and engaged.
1. Facilitate Team Building (Regularly)
It isn’t difficult to see why team building has transgressed from trend to integral and common workplace strategy, with research demonstrating a direct positive correlation between integrated and connected work teams, and workplace efficiency.
As well as fostering team integration and, well, building, team building allows stronger individual connections to be made between team members, significantly increasing work happiness and subsequent productivity and motivation. While this sounds preachy, it’s also incredibly true and simple; teams who get to know each other more tend to like each other more, and end up working together much better and more comfortably!
2. Ensure Better Team Transparency
While having a large team undoubtedly has its perks (larger teams are home to a more diverse group of people, making for more varied and creative ideas), managing a large team can get tricky pretty easily. While not every member of your team may work with each other, it’s still vital to make sure everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing and working on to avoid miscommunication, confusion, and seven email threads addressed to Suzie from graphic design when they should have been sent to Tom from UX.
To avoid this, set up weekly rundown meetings in which each team member very briefly explains their week’s plan and objectives - this way everyone knows who to reach out to for help or with a particular query!
3. Listen, Rather Than Talk in Meetings
While you may feel inclined to direct ideas and tasks towards your employees during both team and one on one meetings, ensure you set aside a substantial amount of time listening, rather than talking. Leading the conversation with statements such as “so are you enjoying your current project?” may feel like second nature, however avoid leading questions such as these, as it inhibits employees from focusing on what they want to focus on.
Instead, see where your team members direct the conversation (rather than deciding this for yourself and asking generic questions) in meetings - doing this will let you more successfully gain an understanding of their current stressors and pain points, letting you address these more specifically in the future. Employees who feel their specific work grievances have been met will feel, on the whole, happier and more motivated, subsequently positively influencing the rest of their team.
4. Understand Employee Stress
Technology makes it increasingly difficult to switch off from work, with employees checking their emails and receiving work related notifications well after they have left the office for the day. This, along with typical day to day workplace strains, leads to workplace stress being at an all time high - and a stressed employee leads to an unhappy and lethargic employee (and team).
To avoid demotivation and unhappy employees at all costs, familiarise yourself with the difference between positive and negative workplace stress. Know that while implementing positive work stressors (such as prompting your colleague to get something urgent in at the end of the day) has the power to motivate individuals and the team around them, negative stressors (like expecting your workers to complete a two day project in one day) does the complete opposite, leading to burnout and unmotivated employees who subsequently drag the rest of their team down with them.
5. Understand Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is often overlooked but is vital in getting your employees to love and do their jobs well, and refers to the level of emotional attachment employees and members of a team feel toward their colleagues and jobs.
While the sentimental cliché “Do what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” sounds a tad too idealistic (even if you find your dream job, you’d still probably rather be on holiday at the beach somewhere), it holds relevance to an extent, especially when looking at employee engagement. When your colleagues genuinely feel engaged with the business, passionate about what they do and who they do it with, they’ll want to do it well.
Better yet, those who feel more engaged subconsciously motivate and lift up others in their team, leading to better team communication and higher employee (and customer) satisfaction.
But how to increase this magical employee engagement, we hear you ask inquisitively? Fostering business understanding and alignment through meeting helps, but you’ll need to transgress from lecturing in a stuffy board room to motivate your colleagues. Taking part in team building activities helps employees feel more comfortable and familiar with those they work with and is a great start, however getting your colleagues involved in actual meaningful business processes (even if they’re not leaders) is a sure-fire way to get them feeling like they have made an impact on the company, and subsequently much more engaged.
6. Get Everyone Involved (Not Just Leaders)
Instead of hand balling your colleagues a new list of projects every other week, get them actively engaged with, and excited about the company they work at by giving them a space to voice their opinions and ideas.
Organise team events that are specific to your business; get your team involved in brainstorming activities that will actually directly affect company decisions, and make sure your employees know that their opinions and ideas are valued, and are directly influencing business processes. This all ties back to employee engagement; teams and individuals who are engaged and directly involved in a business feel more motivated and happy to do their job well (rather than just completing planned out tasks), and subsequently inspire others around them to do the same.