How to Build a Team-Oriented Business Culture

Every company that seeks to develop productive teams first needs to focus on building a business culture that is open, positive, and supports collaboration and creativity. When your staff works together to achieve the organization’s goals, everyone benefits—the employees, the customers, and the company. In addition, this kind of culture can help you attract top talent and reduce employee turnover.

However, creating a team-oriented business culture is different from team building. Here are six tips that will help you build a great team culture.

1. Set Clear Goals

Start by creating a detailed plan that contains goals for building individual and team expectations regarding tasks and performance. Be sure that each member of the team understands the company’s vision and objectives, as well as their role in achieving the goals.

Setting clear objectives will help individual employees and teams to collaborate to achieve the organization’s goals, creating common ground and increasing productivity.

2. Measure Your Team’s Productivity

Measuring your team’s productivity is the only way to make sure your objectives are understood and achieved. Be sure to monitor and measure your progress and collect regular feedback from your team members on how the plan is proceeding.

Measuring individual employee productivity, team productivity, and performance on a company level allows you to gauge the influence of a team-oriented business culture on employee progress as well as the organization’s bottom line. Some relevant metrics to take into consideration include increased production, increased sales, cost reduction, new customers added, and so on.

3. Celebrate Your Team

Recognizing individual and team performance is important. You need to make sure that every employee who contributes to the team’s success reaps a reward for their contribution to the company’s increased success. However, you should also celebrate them as a team and not just as individuals. Consider the fact that rarely is anything achieved only by the efforts of one person. By celebrating the entire team, you show them that they’re part of a larger collective. This is a great way to reinforce camaraderie and a team-oriented business culture.

Be sure to celebrate important dates, as well as your team’s milestones, with thoughtful gifts. You can choose, for example, buying lunch for everybody or presenting physical gifts to commemorate the moment. For instance, for the next holiday, consider giving your employees holiday gift boxes. Implementing benefits and rewards can help bring all the individuals and teams within your company closer together and help to cultivate a more positive business culture.

4. Invest in Training Toward a Team-Oriented Business Culture

Consider investing in cross-training, as well as training your HR team. The HR team plays an important role in implementing the processes and systems that shape and grow business culture. By hiring and training employees that fit your company culture, your HR and talent management team will help maintain the direction of team-oriented culture.

Another thing to consider is cross-training. Give all your employees a chance to learn other people’s jobs. When all employees have an idea about how different departments of the organization function, they will be better prepared to make decisions that benefit the entire company, not only their own team.

Don’t forget your top executives as well. Have members of your management spend some time working on the front lines with your products or customers. This way, they will understand what your regular workers go through on the job and have more appreciation.

5. Provide the Right Resources for a Team-Oriented Business Culture

Regardless of how qualified your individual employees may be, teams can’t achieve success without the right resources. Start by making sure your teams have a designated space where they can hold meetings on a regular basis. Each employee also needs to be given time to devote to these meetings. If possible, try to supply your teams with an adequate budget to spend as they see best for the organization.

In addition, make sure all your teams are provided with tools and best practices to collaboratively solve work issues, hold productive meetings, and improve communication. All of this will help to ensure a more productive business culture.

6. Don’t Leave Your Remote Employees Out of the Business Culture

As remote work becomes more common, bringing your employees together is more important than ever. But it is also more challenging. Team-building activities, team building icebreaker questions, virtual parties, and games can be very helpful in reinforcing the behaviors that create a team-oriented business culture.

Take Consistent Action Toward a Team-Oriented Business Culture

Growing and evolving a team-oriented business culture is possible. It all begins with identifying where you are now and defining where you want to be in the foreseeable future. The best way to make substantial change is to act as a united team.