Team building remains one of the most vital functions for long-term success in business. The reasons are many, but as more and more employees leave the workforce for more personally fulfilling options such as home-based businesses the decline in both morale and available talent is diminished.
This is both good and bad news. On the one hand there are new business start-ups that draw from the incredible potential of personal passion and dreams for a better future. On the other hand businesses that are looking for talented staff members may have an even more difficult time finding team-oriented staff members to fill vacancies.
One of the primary difficulties many employees experience in the workplace is inflexibility when it comes to the hours they spend on the job and whether they can break those hours up to juggle family and personal issues that may arise.
Many team-building businesses are discovering that if they can allow their staff members to attend after school sports events or ballet lessons with their children their staff members have a higher degree of satisfaction with the business they work for.
Some businesses also offer the ability to do some work at home with occasional visits to the office for staff meetings and internal issues.
A good team builder will work to understand what makes work the most satisfying for their individual employees and seek to accommodate those requests to the best of their ability. Often these requests are unspoken so it may take some creativity to find out what makes your employee tick.
If you can find ways to encourage them without patronizing them, reward them without turning over control to them, be flexible while holding to a strong work ethic you may be on the best track to achieving positive team building, improving job performance and increasing the overall level of job satisfaction among your team members.
For someone who has been involved in team building it is not impossible to visit a business and see where problem areas lie.
By simple observation you can spot the employee that is severe Type A and feels that they should be in charge, or the Type B personality that will not generally cause problems, but feels a bit forgotten because they don’t do anything elaborate to get noticed. There are often individuals that seem nice enough to their boss, but are more than willing to talk negatively about their leader when he or she is away.
What if all this energy was focused on completing a team oriented task?
What if the team leader made family a priority for his or her team?
What if encouragement was the norm instead of an afterthought?
And if you should need to rebuild a team, believe it or not, it may be a very good idea to admit your failings as a team leader first. When your team views you as a human who understands their own humanity they may grant you the initial seeds of trust needed to draft a new workplace strategy.
