“In business, great things are never done by a single person. They’re done by a team of people.”
This quote by Apple founder Steve Jobs became a guiding principle for a lot of companies. Although employees form the backbone of any company, they reach their true potential only when they work together as a team. One of the major challenges that most business leaders face is keeping a team together despite their diversity of skill and temperament. Every team must be cohesive to achieve their high-performance state. However, it is easier said than done. Keeping a team together requires efficient communication, collaboration, common goals, and employee rewards. Getting all of these together is tricky. Because of its business impact, companies are actively seeking methods for improving team cohesion.
In this blog post, we will discuss what makes an effective team cohesion, and strategies and best practices that you need to follow to improve cohesion between teams.
What is team cohesion?
Team cohesiveness is the measure of how well your team can collaborate and work towards a common goal. It is becoming one of the key business metrics to assess a team’s capability to work well together and make individually identifiable contributions to a project.
Although companies may be tempted to let the spirit of being a team develop naturally and over a period, it is highly unlikely to happen. As a business leader, you are responsible for fostering trust and interpersonal relationships among team members. It is only when they treat each other as a team, they will work as a team.
Team cohesion stresses the importance of team members trusting, supporting, and collaborating. Teams need to build a very strong sense of ‘we’ and should be willing to work for the team instead of focusing on themselves.
A team that doesn’t work together could potentially damage not just the project, but also your reputation as a corporate entity. Therefore, companies are formulating different methods for improving team cohesion.
10 strategies to build team cohesion in the workplace
Define & practice company values
Every successful business stands firmly on its company values and employees follow them religiously. By imbibing your company values as your team objectives, you can see a tremendous improvement in team cohesion. By making your team understand that they are working towards a common goal of the company’s vision, you align their expectations and responsibilities accordingly.
Plan training & development programs
Effective team cohesion comes from constant reinforcement. You can do this by conducting regular training and development sessions. When every member of a team feels confident of their and their colleagues’ capabilities, they start to respect each other. You can offer employee rewards upon successful completion of training to encourage engaged involvement.
Encourage communication between team members
Another important method for improving team cohesion is to encourage communication. Teams work better together when they can communicate with each other without any challenges including functional issues. You must provide your team members with resources they would need to reach out to each other seeking help or to brainstorm.
Celebrate success as a team
Wins matter regardless of how small or insubstantial. When you do get some victories, make sure you celebrate them with your team and as a team. You can use such occasions to impress the significance of your work and how it will help them and the company. You can make tweaks to your employee rewards program to accommodate these celebrations.
Focus on diversity of skillset
When building a team, you need to focus on building a group that has diverse skills, experience, and proficiency. Such diversity sparks innovation by introducing multiple viewpoints and personalities into healthy team cohesion.
Give everyone equal opportunity
Your delegation of work or tasks within your team sends out the signal of your team members’ standing within the team. You might not intend it to be that way, but your team might feel otherwise. Therefore, a proven method for improving team cohesion is to define the clear objective of the task and why it is delegated in that fashion.
Build trust among team members
Creating an environment that allows your team members to trust each other is the most important method of improving team cohesion. When there’s trust within the team, communication and collaboration happen without judgments.
Resolve conflict quickly
It is pretty common to have disagreements when you are working together. But these conflicts must be resolved before they fester into something bigger and affect the entire team. If your team is disagreeing over something work-related, you can use it to build a culture of analytical approach in your team.
Plan fun activities with the team
One of the important methods of improving team cohesion is to use a non-work environment to build relationships between team members. You can do this by organizing outings, team lunches and even starting a separate inner circle for book-reading or sports. You can also host small competitions or games and present souvenirs or memorabilia as employee rewards.
Make feedback a common practice
Feedback can be very useful method for improving team cohesion and understanding your team members, their issues, and opinions better. It will also allow you to highlight positive points and discuss improvement areas. But remember that feedback is a two-way street. You need to be equally open when taking feedback.
Keep your team aligned for success
Often, we focus so much on productivity and business growth, that we fail to pay attention to people who are doing it all. It is only when the team members come together that the magic happens. But team cohesion doesn’t happen in a jiffy. It will need a lot of work and you, as a business leader, must employ several methods for improving team cohesion.
In addition to the 10 proven methods for improving team cohesion in the workplace, using an automated channel partner incentive platform like Zaggle Propel can also help to foster a sense of unity among teams.
Zaggle Propel is the go-to platform for improving team cohesion and motivating your employees. Its seamless onboarding experience, peer recognition & nomination-based rewards, social timeline feeds, and more helps increase engagement between team members.
