Many businesses are welcoming employees back to the office after a significant period of working from home. While they might think this can improve productivity, there’s also the risk that your team may feel unfamiliar. Over the past few years, your business may have undergone an array of changes, and personnel changes through turnover could be a significant factor in affecting workplace chemistry.
This turnover means that you could be welcoming back a group of strangers. Since they have not worked together in a professional capacity for so long, they lack chemistry and teamwork. Such an issue could be catastrophic for your business and you need to learn how to make your team work better together if you want your business to thrive.
Outline Everyone’s Roles
There may be several employees vying to be in charge of projects or considered the de facto leader in your absence. While this kind of ambition can benefit them, it can also cause problems across the workplace. If you determine roles and responsibilities early on, you let everyone know where they stand.
Doing so means everyone will know what they are expected to do in the workplace and focus on that rather than trying to climb and crawl over one another to get to the top, which can create a toxic–if competitive–workplace.
Encourage Socialising
While you cannot force your employees to spend time together, you can still encourage them to socialise and highlight the benefits of getting to know each other both during and outside of work hours. A break room is a good place for employees who would otherwise not interact to spend time together.
Likewise, regular Employee Nights in more casual settings can help everyone become more comfortable around one another, which will reflect in their behaviour at work as they now feel on a different level.
Normalise Asking For Help
It can be tricky to ask for help in new environments. No one wants to seem incompetent, but this also risks mistakes that could severely impact your business. You can avoid these issues by normalising asking for help. Direct any new employees toward team members who have worked with you for a long time and know all the ins and outs. You can also establish an open-door policy, where anyone can drop by to ask for assistance or clarification for you directly.
Try Different Team Combinations
Sometimes, you get lucky and everyone in your office works together seamlessly. However, this is not always the case. There can be issues if two of your employees have significantly contrasting personalities. While they will still be professional, there’s a risk that they are not as effective or productive.
Trying different team combinations can overcome this, especially if you want to throw a great business event that requires various ideas and personalities to succeed. It can also encourage more socialisation and can make your team more comfortable working with others rather than their office friends.
Prioritise Communication
No business can thrive without communication. Thankfully, there are many avenues to ensure everyone is in the know regardless of where they are or what they are working on. Establish a culture of communication to make it easier for team members to share ideas and information. Through this, you avoid embarrassing scenarios or mistakes when dealing with clients and customers.
You can also make sure that any supervisors pass on information to everyone, even if the information is not always relevant to them. A weekly email roundup may also be effective to keep everyone in the loop.
Consider Dress Codes and Uniforms
If you work at a retail store or your workplace is customer-facing for the majority of your workday, dress codes, and uniforms can enhance the professional aura you want to achieve and ensure everyone feels on the same level. A uniform approach has proven successful with the likes of IKEA, where even the store managers dress the same as the newest holiday temp, as this creates consistency throughout.
When you have decided on a colour scheme for your uniform, you can use https://matohash.com/pages/custom-embroidery to stitch your logo onto the shirt and provide them to your employees.
Get Feedback
Feedback is a vital aspect of running a successful and positive workplace. You can collect feedback from your employees and also your customers. This is beneficial as it provides an essential and separate perspective about how your office or workplace looks to others. Both employees and customers can highlight issues that affect your company’s image or the atmosphere.
But it isn’t all negative. Some feedback can demonstrate what you’re doing well, especially if some of your team members have gone above and beyond for a customer or client.
Develop a Vision That Works for Everyone
Everyone needs to be on the same page at your workplace. If they aren’t, there is a risk of your days becoming disjointed. Ultimately, everyone should be working towards the same goal, and it’s up to you to establish what that goal is. However, you may also have employees at varying stages of their careers.
Because of this, you cannot choose a hard-and-fast vision that demands everyone to get on board. Instead, take the time to develop an effective strategy that considers all needs and positions to ensure a fluid and balanced work environment.
Stop Your Micromanagement
Your business is your brainchild, and you have a specific vision for what it should be. Often, this approach means that you hover around employees during projects. You make suggestions or changes, and they feel like they don’t have any autonomy about what they are doing.
Micromanagement can severely damage workplace morale and impact teamwork. So, take a step back and trust your employees to finish the project to the highest standard. You can still look over the project upon completion or ask for updates, but giving your team more freedom will yield better results.
Boost Workplace and Business Transparency
Transparency is a lot like communication, yet other factors make them slightly different. You must be upfront about what your business is doing and your plans for the future. The more your team knows what to expect or what you are working towards, the easier it will be to keep everyone on the same page.
Furthermore, you cannot hide issues from your team. If you encounter an issue with bad clients or security, you must let them know because it will not just affect you, but could also affect them and their livelihood.
Continuously Work On Problems
No business is perfect, and you will continuously encounter issues throughout your existence. Rather than believe that solving one problem solves everything, you and your team must continuously work on various problems that arise in your workplace. It’s your job to identify issues your company faces and show proof that you are trying to fix them to keep the workplace running smoothly and help maintain excellent teamwork.
Prevent Cliques
Like school, workplace cliques can lead to bullying and substantial office disruptions. No one likes bullies, but all it takes is one bold personality to cause problems throughout your business. You need to nip this in the bud as soon as you see any evidence.
Since you have encouraged communication, your employees should feel empowered to speak up. However, you cannot expect this to happen all the time, so keep an eye out regardless.
Give Everyone the Chance to Develop
Many of your employees will search for professional development opportunities and you can offer these opportunities to help them become the best they can be while also ensuring they give everything they can to the business. By ensuring professional development, you can generate a team full of highly professional, passionate, and ambitious individuals that learn how to operate as a team.
If you have promising employees who struggle to play nice with others, this opportunity could be what changes their approach and transforms their attitude towards working with their colleagues.
Celebrate Wins Together
Wins bring teams closer together and arranging team celebrations after completing a substantial project or winning a huge project can make everyone feel like what they are doing is working. Celebrating the exciting wins will also make it easier to handle disappointment.
You won’t win everything, and this can impact the mentality of those who are not all in on your company’s success. If you establish a culture where all wins–even the little ones–are celebrated, you will find yourself surrounded by a positive team.
Outline Workplace Rules
There is always the risk that one employee will try to take advantage of the positive environment, especially if they are new and just don’t get it. Most of the time, this doesn’t affect anyone else, but there’s always a chance that it could snowball. You can avoid this by establishing workplace rules as quickly as possible.
Simple things like inter-office relationships should be discouraged in case things get messy, while flexible hours or remote working are other factors you can highlight to ensure everyone knows what they can do within reason.
Teamwork
Teamwork makes the dream work, and as a business owner, it’s your job to ensure this dream remains as such and does not morph into a nightmare. By understanding how to boost teamwork and ensure your employees are comfortable around each other, you can see them easily take your business to the next impressive level.
