Ways to Manage and Bond a Disjointed Team. When your team starts to feel a little disjointed and you feel that people are not working together as they should, it leads to poor output and can seriously damage the business as a whole. That’s why it’s important to take action as a manager or business owner and make a change.
For a small business to gain a foothold and experience genuine success, it needs to have a united team of talented people behind it. When office politics take over and people are no longer focused on the tasks at hand, problems naturally arise. We’re going to talk today about some of the things you can do to manage and bond a disjointed team, shaping it into a team that’s capable of propelling the business forward.
Show Trust
If you want to show your team that you have faith in them and that you know they’re capable of helping the business succeed, you need to trust them with important tasks and responsibilities. One of many potential reasons why businesses struggle to create a cohesive team is because the upper management simply doesn’t trust them. As a result, they’re nowhere near as invested in the business and its long-term aims as you might like them to be. When people feel trusted, they’re far more likely to give their all to the team and work more cohesively.
Create Space for Team Bonding
There should be space for bonding inside your workplace if you want the people working for your business to bond; it’s not something that just happens by itself. You have to create the room and possibility for teamwork and bonding. You could create specific bonding sessions for your employees to take part in, or you could simply make sure that there are open spaces with large open tables where people can share ideas together and collaborate in a sustainable and non-stressful way. That might mean making some changes to your office space as it currently exists.
Get the Bottom of Conflicts
If you feel that conflicts are at the root of a lot of the problems that your team has been experiencing recently, it might be a good idea to get to the root cause. Conflicts and office politics are relatively commonplace, unfortunately. But you can’t allow them to distract you from the important work you should be doing. After all, your team needs to work together as a unit in order to achieve those goals, and it’s hard to do that when staff members are in conflict with one another.
Ensure the Infrastructure is Setup for Success
If you want the best from your employees in terms of teamwork and performance, you need to make sure they have the tools and infrastructure at their disposal to make that possible. You can’t demand the best from your team if you’re not giving them what they need to make that happen. To create a setup that’s geared towards success and that ultimately makes success more likely. That’ll mean different things depending on the business and the kind of work you do, of course, so that’s something you’ll need to think about.
Promote Healthy Accountability
Accountability is important in any team dynamic. When your team members are more accountable to one another, it tends to yield better results for everyone. It nudges people to take responsibility for their actions and the decisions they make. And when people know they’re accountable to those around them and vice versa, it creates a better bond and team dynamic. It also encourages people to do their best work when they know other people are relying on them. That’s why it’s important to promote a healthy sense of accountability and standards inside your workplace.
Tailor Your Approach Depending on the Type of Employee
The way in which you manage your employees should be tailored and specific. Treating everyone the same way in terms of communication and motivation is probably not going to work. There are lots of different employee types and each should be treated a little differently if you want to get the most out of them. So be sure to pay closer attention to people, get a feel of them as individuals, and work out what kinds of communication and motivation work best for them. The more time you put into this, the better the outcomes will be.
Define Clear Goals
Having clear goals for the team in place will be valuable for quite a few reasons. When you have clear goals laid down for everyone to follow, it becomes easier for people to see what they’re working towards as a team. And by pairing team goals with individual goals, it’ll be clear to everyone on your team what they need to do in terms of doing their work to the best of their ability while also contributing to the wider goals of the organization. Both of those things are obviously very important.
Listen to Feedback from Your Team
When your team provides you with feedback, you should do your best to make the most of it. That feedback can be valuable because it can sometimes be hard to spot problems within the team when you’re the manager or business owner because your role is a little more detached from theirs. So by encouraging your team to tell you about what needs to be improved and what’s working and what’s not, you can work hand in hand with your team to create a dynamic formula that’s going to result in the best outcomes for the business.
Set Standards and Expectations
High standards are obviously important if you want your organization to achieve all the things it’s capable of achieving. But if you don’t lay down the law and set standards and expectations both for the quality of work that’s completed in your workplace and for individual conduct, your employees will feel as if they can get away with more and that’s obviously not what you want. So hold a meeting and put some expectations and guidelines in place. They don’t need to be punishing rules but they should make clear what’s acceptable and what isn’t.
Promote Work-Life Balance
It’s in the best interests of your business to make sure that your staff members have a good work-life balance. If your team members don’t have that balance in their life, it can be highly damaging for them. You won’t have a happy and dynamic team that works well together if they’re working too much and not resting enough. Pushing your employees too far might seem justified when things are busy, but the dynamic and overall health of the team and the individuals in it will suffer if you push things too far. That’s not what you or they want.
Celebrate Milestones and Successes as a Team
Finally, you should make sure that you and your team celebrate the good times together. When you work hard for a long time on a project, you need the opportunity to bond over the success and enjoy some sort of reward when you pull it off and it all comes together. So don’t forget to celebrate as a team.
As you can see, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to managing and bonding a team of people who might not be working together particularly well. So be sure to make the most of the various tips and ideas we’ve discussed above if you want to ensure you get the most from a united team of people.
