Team Building tips

Building a team is important to create a healthy working environment. The sad reality is that only a few people understand how to work as a team and what it means to work as a team. Teaching your employees that they belong to a team can be frustrating and often challenging for many managers. Belonging to a team means giving up selfishness and finding a way to work together to help the company progress in a positive manner.

When employees take a step back to realize they are part of a team and not just individuals, they are able to understand the mission of the company and the objectives of the organization. Everyone becomes united to accomplish their goals and they actually learn how to communicate with their co-workers.

To help your employees learn how to work as a team, here are some easy team building tips to follow:

• Set individual and team expectations. One of the first things you must do is set expectations for your employees so they know what path to follow. They need to know what their end goal should be so they can try and find a way to meet that goal.


• What is the vision for the organization? As you go about setting expectations, you need to clearly define the vision of the company and allow your employees to take it in.


• Support. As you have set your team in place, you must teach your employees to support one another and gain strength from each other. Support is essential as it will give your employees the strength to completely commit to the team. As your employees struggle to support the team, you also need to look for ways to give them plenty of recognition. This is the best way to help them stay enthusiastic about the team and to have a strong desire to continue working hard and advancing their skills.


• Communication. Part of working as a team means you need to learn how to communicate with one another. Keep the lines of communication open so that your employees can all be on the same page with one another. This helps to reduce confusion and it keeps the team working like a well-oiled machine. Email is a great way to send small updates to another about the project, but don't always rely on it to do all the communicating for you. It is important for you to call them and to spend time stopping by their office where you can have face-to-face interaction so you can learn from one another. Communication can also help you figure out if your employees have had too much and they are feeling completely overwhelmed with their roles and responsibilities.


• Clear roles. Although you want to pull your employees together to work as a team, you also need to make sure they each have clear roles and responsibilities. This is the best way to keep each of them performing well as individuals and it will help them find a way to mesh as a team.


• Freedom with empowerment. When you have a number of personalities trying to blend together, you need to make sure they have enough freedom to let their ideas run wild but you also need to be careful about giving them too much freedom. Limitations are necessary in order for your employees to know what their boundaries are.


• Creativity. As you work on building a team you need to make sure your employees are each being creative on their own. Do not let their individual creativity become burned out because they start working with other people that may be more vocal than they are.