Team spirit is the key to success and it plays an important role both in personal and professional life. When peoples get together for achieving a common goal and common attitude shows during work that is called team spirit. There is a quote that says: “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success- Henry ford.
To effectively build teams, it is important to remember that: Everyone in the organization needs someone else assistance from time to time, either as part of the regular work flow or during emergencies.
Whether it’s the CEO or the cleaning lady, every person in an organization has to consider himself or herself as part of a team in order for a business to function smoothly. The moment a “That’s not my job!” attitude appears, you have the makings of a dysfunctional organization.
Team spirit is willingness to cooperate as part of a team
Team spirit makes the members want the group to succeed.
Team spirit helps to get results in a reasonable time frame than individual spirit.
Teams are not born, they’re built. Building an effective team where everyone considers it his or her job to pitch in and contribute to the overall team effort does not come easy. To effectively build teams, it is important to remember that:
Teamwork is based on a company’s culture. Companies that encourage open, honest communication and foster employee interaction are in a better position to have good teamwork among employees.
Team spirit comes from the top. Building effective teams with the right attitude emanates from the highest levels of an organization. Only by flattening the traditional organizational pyramid can one expect to instill the right team culture.
People must fit the culture. Some people are team players and some aren’t. It’s partly a question of personality and partly a matter of training. One person in the team with the wrong attitude can undermine the effort of the entire team. Hiring only people with the right traits for teamwork is crucial in building effective teams.
These are 12 ways of building team spirit and inspire your people to pull together.
1. Start at the beginning
This can be tough to do – after all, nearly everybody puts “team player” on their C.V. these days. Hire people who fit into the company’s team culture. Use interviews and pre-employment assessments well to determine a person’s personality and traits. Look for cooperation and a willingness to listen in order to determine whether an applicant can work well in a team environment.
2. Include Team Spirit in Your Handbook or Employer Mission Statement
If you want your employees to understand how important team spirit is to your company, then put it somewhere they’ll see it! You could add it to your employee handbook, include it in your mission statement, or even print it onto a poster and stick it to your walls.
3. Create a comfortable Co-working Space
The work environment must be designed to foster interaction, collaboration, communication and flexibility, hence the design of the working space must be taken into consideration. According to Franklin Becker and Fritz Steele in Workplace by Design, "We can influence a pattern of experiences over time, therefore increasing the possibility that new ideas or connection will occur." Increasing the likelihood of chance meetings through space planning is a popular new strategy.
4. Let everyone know where you’re going
This means making employees part of the strategic planning process and making sure they understand the goals. It’s important that every team member buys into the plan.
5. Reward Teamwork
Establish clear team and individual expectations. Once you’ve defined exactly what teamwork means, develop a way of rewarding people who demonstrate your ideal behaviors.
If you reward somebody for great teamwork, make sure you are clear about exactly what it was they did to get this reward – this will reinforce and encourage similar behaviors across your workforce.
6. Keep communication lines open
Encourage frank and open communication among team members and management. Solicit ideas and suggestions from team members on ways to better achieve the team’s goals.
7. Identify Your Competitors
A big obstacle to team spirit and teamwork is internal contention. Bickering, one-upmanship, over-competitiveness are just a few of the symptoms and it can be really counter-productive to your company’s goals.
To help your people feel closer to each other, show them who they should really be working to beat – your competitors! Find out performance metrics that your competitors are achieving, and compare them to your own. Your team will soon develop a natural ‘togetherness’ and a desire to vanquish this common foe!
8. Engage Your Rivals
If you want to take point 7 even further, you could go as far as challenging another workforce to a (mostly) friendly sporting competition. Instead of investing their surplus energy into bickering and point-scoring, your staff are more likely to invest it into devising strategies, boosting each other’s egos, and preparing for the exciting foe-bashing you’ve arranged for them.
Togetherness and team spirit is so much stronger when you have a common enemy to engage.
9. Arrange Team Building Activities
There’s a bit of negative stigma around team building activities, and with good reason. But if you select your activities wisely, they can really help to bring your team together!
Try to avoid activities that might cause further splits or divides within the team and opt where possible for activities where the whole team can work together. You might even consider bringing a specialist on-board.
10. Let Employees Find Their Personal Strengths
Excessive individualism most often arises from people within companies where uniform behaviour is effectively being forced onto them. Don’t you realise that not everybody works the same as everybody else, and that everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses?
Even where two people have the same job role, realize that one of those people might be good at X, while the other is good at Y – let them focus on these strengths.
11. Resolve team conflicts immediately
Work to correct performance, attitude or ethics problems of individual team members when it is possible. Sometimes, disruption within a group can be attributed to one or two individuals. This doesn’t always mean that they are bad employees, it just means that something is going wrong, and needs addressing.
Work with these people to find out what they need to work more harmoniously with the rest of the group, and if they have a problem with the group itself, consider moving them in order to protect the integrity of the team
12. Celebrate Success
Whenever you achieve a major milestone or a key goal, take time to celebrate your success and make sure you highlight all the ways teamwork helped you to get there.
Making employees realize that they are part of one team is the best antidote to an insular, narrow-minded work attitude. This will engender a willingness on the part of everyone to pull in one direction, regardless of the job or task at hand.
Designing a true team space is more than simply erecting four walls and throwing in a flipchart. Take a holistic approach by considering space availability, diversity, connectivity and flexibility to create an ideal environment which support the two-heads-are-better-than-one theory. With well-thought out space planning, corporations are experiencing increased productivity, faster product cycles and heightened employee morale.
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