What’s your first response when you find yourself in a challenging situation?
When people go into distress, they go into fight-or-flight mode and individual survival is paramount. They tend to focus primarily on individual priorities. Teamwork gets pushed out of focus.
As a matter of fact, team spirit supports your team to deal with stress and changes. It’s in every organisation’s best interest to keep a sense of team spirit alive during challenging times.
Here are some tips to foster team spirit in the workplace:
- Keep the energy flowing
- Common goal
- WOW-factor
- Continue socialising
- Long-term Team Commitment
It can seem like a good idea to give priority to ‘crisis’ meetings and therefore cancel other team meetings, however, you risk your team going into ‘freeze’ mode. Keep the momentum going and keep your usual daily meetings going. In fact, introduce more team meetings to check on your team members, strengthen your relationship with them, learn about them and understand why they react in certain ways.
Research has shown that successful companies are those whose employees live by their values every day. These values also differentiate you from your competitors. Make sure that your team is familiar with your mission, vision and values, and that they work towards common goals.
Delightful moments and wow experiences create a happy workplace where all team members feel valued. Install a personal daily goal to tell your team when they are doing a good job and motivate them to achieve much more. Make time for rewarding events, such as team building activities.
Even in a remote setting, socialising boosts team spirit. Set up a buddy system and swap buddies around every month. Make plans to get together out of office hours and in a relaxed setting. Team building is a great investment as it changes the scenery and staff learns to have fun with people they don’t see every day.
Wow moments and shared goals are great for team spirit, but they can easily be forgotten in the long run. Gather your team to make a daily commitment to work towards their values in the organisation. This way, enhanced team spirit becomes habitual, but there’s no magic formula, it just takes commitment.
Here’s to enhanced team spirit!