As an organization, challenges will always beset when you work with others. Members all come from different backgrounds, culture, upbringing, education, values and perceptions.There will always be people who see things completely different from us. What’s more you may have 4 different generations working in your organization.
can we all work well under one roof ?
Yes, we can build strong organizations. From my 17 years of experience as a consultant, I discovered that there are ways to improve teamwork and team bonding in every organization. It is not rocket science. And it takes effort to make it happen.
TIPS TO BUILD A STRONG TEAM IN YOUR ORGANIZATION
(SHARING BY JACKSON NG)
TIP#1: IDENTIFY AND SPREAD YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
What is organizational culture? Every organization has its own culture. When I was meeting a senior management from Mydin, I noticed MR Ahimat Mydin always came 15 mins earlier. I enquired why he came so much earlier than others. He told me that it was a culture built by his father. When his father ran Mydin in his days, he made sure everyone was always punctual for all appointments. Punctuality is an example of the best practice of organizational culture. It is important people need to build an organizational culture. Good cultures to build are examples such as innovation, creativity, courtesy.
TIP#2: INSPIRE SHARED VALUES
As leaders in your organization, you are the role models. You need to share the company values to your team so that they know what responsible work values are and cultivate them everyday. In sharing values, you are creating a powerful corporate image about your organization.
When you share these good values, your staff will be united and perform as one organization. I remember training Hilton staff. One of their values is H- Hospitable (the word HILTON). Everyone at Hilton was reminded and shown hospitality at the workplace. This value helped to produce fruits – many of the staff work more than 10 years and some even for 25 years. What made them stay? They were treated with respect regardless of position bringing about a sense of belonging in the organization and commitment to one another.
TIP#3: BUILD RAPPORT WITH EACH OTHER EACH DAY
Building rapport requires more than just saying hi and bye to each other at work. We need to make effort to have coffee and know the person well enough. If you put in effort to know your colleagues one at a time, you will be able to know many colleagues in a year. Building rapport is to show the person you are important and significant coming in the work place.
Show care by talking to people at work to know them a little better. This will create a sense of belonging.
TIP#4: IDENTIFY CONFLICTS AND SOLVE THEM QUICKLY
As we all know, conflicts happen when two people disagree at one idea. This is common and it happens everywhere. The question is, can we solve conflicts? Can we solve conflicts for the good of all? We must learn to put aside personal ego, pride and interest and uphold or prioritise the organization first. The organization comes first and personal stands come second. When we are in conflict, be the first person to approach the other person and acknowledge there is conflict. Let’s talk about ways to solve the issue always focusing on the big picture.
TIP#5: RUN A TEAM BUILDING TRAINING AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR
I have been doing team building training since 2003. It has been 14 years. What I discover is, in team building training we always desire to achieve a few key objectives-
- Make people feel important working in the organization
- Create a sense of belonging
- Get people to mingle and know everyone well
- Put teams to face a challenge and see how they perform as a team
Do people gain from these outcomes? Yes. At least we hear from the management the wonderful feelings they all feel about each other and how they want to do more for the organization.
TIP#6: DO LEADER’S DAY
What is a leader’s day? A leader’s day is when we celebrate all the leaders in each department. It is important to encourage your leaders and recognize their contributions and efforts. Leaders get burn-out. They are just human. They too need encouragement and support from their team members.
TIP #7: INVITE EXPERTS TO SPEAK ON MULTI-GENERATIONAL TALKS
There were few organizations who invited us to give talks on Understanding and Communicating with Multi-Generations. However we did it for Bursa Malaysia. They were enlightened by how much they soon knew about different generations. In the talk, we shared about why all generations had a certain thinking pattern, what motivated them, what inspired them to stay, how to recognize and celebrate their success, how to retain them and most important, how to communicate well with each generation.
TIP#8: INVITE THE BAD APPLES TO LEAVE
As an organization, we welcome everyone who buys the organizational culture and values. If there people who don’t care for these values, there is no point holding on to them. They can be a bad influence to others indirectly giving others permission to practice bad values. Examples of negative values are coming to work late often, missing in action during work hours, playing with social media which has nothing to do with work and not cooperating with his boss.
TIP#9: HIRE THE BEST PEOPLE IN YOUR TEAM
Sometimes we have to pay more to get the right person to join your team. It is better to pay higher if you need to than to hire cheap and inefficient people to join your team. There are people who can be busy but working on the wrong priorities.This person may not be excited to achieve your organization KPI but always looks busy working. The question is, do you prefer to pay more for quality people or spend all your energy training chickens to be eagles?
For more information or training request on team building, kindly write to us at [email protected] or call +6016-3366030. Thanks for reading.
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