Whether you have a team working in-office or remotely, every team member having a sense that they are valued and respected in the organization is critical for success. They need to feel like they are part of a community, where they feel comfortable sharing their opinions, ideas, and can trust one another to do their part. Having a sense of community can remind members that each of them carries their own importance and has a job to get done. An organization can have one large community, and within that, they may have a smaller community, say for different teams within the organization.
This article will provide strategies that organizations can implement to transform their teams into a community where their employees can truly develop and thrive.
1) Celebrate organizational wins
Many organizations forget the importance of celebrating success in the workplace. Whether they believe that celebrations should be saved for personal lives, celebrating the wins that take place at work can boost team morale and encourage that the hard work to continue. Take the time to celebrate and show your appreciation to your employees. If not, employees can find themselves getting frustrated and even begin to feel unmotivated. In fact, 79% of US employees who leave their job do so because of feeling under-appreciated at work.
2) Facilitate team activities outside the workplace
Coming out of the pandemic, organizations have the opportunity to re-introduce team activities outside the office to encourage a strong team bond. This is a simple strategy that organizations can take to start taking the steps to build a community where employees feel comfortable with one another which can encourage collaboration. You don’t want your employees to feel like they have no connections at work. A Gallup article reported that feelings of employee isolation can reduce productivity up to 21%. If you want your employees to feel included in a workplace community then organizing things like team sports or lunches should be prioritized. Socializing for employees is critical, in fact, socializing between team members improved communication patterns by more than 50%.
3) Encourage 360-feedback
A big part of establishing trust ,which is big in building a community, is being able to share feedback with one another. Not just feedback that is using the sandwich approach to spare employees feeling, but real effective feedback that is shared to truly develop employees. The feedback that will be most useful for employee development will be constructive, objective, and should be continuous. By implementing continuous feedback, employees can become more comfortable with one another and with the idea of sharing and receiving feedback. Communication is important when trying to build a community, and implementing feedback is a great way to get employees to communicate with one another. Not all organizations choose to implement a continuous feedback solution, but it does allow documentation of the feedback being shared.
4) Community-designed spaces
Collaboration is used in all kinds of industries, from marketing and advertising agencies to construction, therefore some sort of community-designed collaboration space is important. Employees need these designated spaces to come together to work but also to come together socially. These spaces provide them the opportunity to catch up about their lives or to work on projects to ensure they are getting completed by the deadline. If you have offer these spaces and are encouraging team members to work together, that can reflect on the type of company culture you are trying to encourage.
5) Mentorship programs
Nine in ten workers who have a career mentor say they are happy in their work. A big part of communities, especially in the workplace, is having the reassurance of being able to go to a colleague for workplace advice. Mentorship programs are a great and simple initiative to make sure all employees feel like they have a second opinion or someone to bounce ideas off of. With mentorship programs, the norm is that someone with high hierarchical status will mentor someone who may just be starting out in their career, but if you are simply trying to create a community within your team, you don’t necessarily need to match employees up based on age or status. Simply matching two employees that you think may work well together, or even matching two employees up that you think will challenge each other’s thought process can bring them closer.
Conclusion
Workplace relationships are important. These relationships can really make or break a company in terms of engagement, productivity, and overall performance. By creating a community within the workplace, you have a unique opportunity to create these critical relationships throughout the entire organization.