Cultivating a positive team culture is a top priority for many organizations looking to retain their top employees in today’s market. Building teams that are productive, and working towards a common goal leads to a thriving organization.
As a leader, you may be searching for ways to build a culture that helps to develop and retain your workforce. This article will help you understand how to build a culture amongst your team that does just that.
What Is Team Culture?
Team culture refers to the behavior, values, attitudes, and ways of working that a specific team within an organization shares. Building a positive team culture is important because it fosters collaboration, respect, and a harmonious work environment, promoting employee satisfaction, development, and therefore retention.
5 Ways to Foster a Team Culture That Develops and Retains Your Workforce
As a leader, you must have a strong understanding of the desired culture and purpose of your organization. With this understanding, you can follow these suggestions to work towards building an environment that focuses on the satisfaction and growth of your workforce.
1. Ensure That Your Employees Have an Understanding of the Organization’s Culture and Purpose
Research done by Gallup shows that employees’ understanding of their organization’s purpose and culture is directly linked to business health. Understanding their organization’s purpose makes them feel as though their job is important which leads to a:
- Reduction in absenteeism
- Drop in patient safety incidents
- Improvement in work quality
Effectively communicating your organization’s values and ideal culture is a great first step toward aligning employees with your goals. When a team believes in these principles, they strive to embody them in everything they do – from communicating with co-workers to developing marketing campaigns.
2. Encourage Open Communication Among Employees and Leadership
The culture will constantly change and evolve with your organization as it grows and new people join the team. It is important for leadership teams to ask employees for and provide regular feedback and communication to truly understand how employees feel about their jobs and the organization.
Open communication can be established through regular check-ins, open-door policies, team meetings, and communication tools. It is also beneficial to offer employees ways to give anonymous feedback to one another through 360 Degree Reviews, or Employee Engagement Surveys. These surveys measure workforce sentiment to help organizations understand what their employees really think.
An organization with open communication channels and systems can provide leadership with a snapshot of employee commitment and their intention to stay in their roles. It can also help align leadership initiatives with what employees feel is important. Additionally, this approach rewards them with actionable insights into areas of strength and development, ultimately enhancing engagement, productivity, and performance.
3. Ensure Employees Feel Heard By Acting on Learnings
For success, a team culture requires leaders who not only encourage the sharing of new ideas but also welcome, value, and honor them. Leadership should act on feedback, team meeting discussions, and employee engagement survey results, and acknowledge their employees by publicly implementing strategies to address topics presented by them within budget and reason. If organizations cannot act on something deemed important by employees they should communicate the strategies to take action in the future.
There is no point in encouraging open communication to improve team culture if your employees don’t feel heard or see the value through action.
4. Invest in Employee Development
Without investing in employee development, retention is difficult. In fact, organizations that invest in this, are reported to be twice as likely to retain their employees. To foster development, leadership should identify training needs, provide constructive feedback, set goals, offer access to resources, and track and reward growth. A team culture in which employees are continuously advancing in their jobs is often a positive one.
Using TalentClick’s Participant Reports, such as the Attitude-Values-Personality Assessment assessment, you can provide your employees with the insights they need to get to know themselves better and to find out how their personality impacts their on-the-job behavior. These Reports increase self-awareness with personalized self-coaching tips that encourage development by empowering employees to reflect on their strengths and limitations.
5. Monitor Burnout and Work-Life Balance
Burnout and the desire for work-life balance are becoming increasingly common. In fact, since 2019, burnout in the United States has been at an all-time high. When employees grapple with burnout or feel a lack of work-life balance, the overall health of your organization’s culture can be negatively affected.
Improving feelings of burnout and encouraging work-life balance can be achieved through:
- Clearly defining employees’ roles and setting clear expectations for all team members.
- Conducting regular employee check-ins.
- Conducting surveys and assessments to gauge employee satisfaction levels, monitor stress levels, uncover workload perceptions and identify signs of burnout.
- Organizing events and team-building activities to foster a positive work atmosphere and strengthen team bonds.
- Investing in leadership training that equips you with the ability to recognize and address the signs of burnout in your team members.
Recognizing that signs of burnout vary from person to person, assessing an employee’s resilience can help in gauging their compatibility with the job’s demands. TalentClick has mapped traits strongly indicative of employee resilience with the dimensions in the Attitude-Values-Personality Assessment, to help identify resilience in employees.
Build a Team Culture that Drives Organizational Success
Building a positive and known culture amongst teams in an organization is imperative to the success and longevity of both the employees and the organization itself. TalentClick can help you hire and develop employees that believe in the organization’s values, behaviors, and attitudes and work harmoniously towards a common goal.
Conducting TalentClick’s Work Values and Attitude Assessment and Employee Engagement Surveys are powerful first steps toward developing and retaining happy employees. Start a 7 day free trial to learn more.
