By Kara Masterson
A unified team can overcome any obstacle and support each other’s personal and professional growth and work towards a specific mission statement and objective. If a small business’ employees operate as a unified team, brand awareness and company growth are accelerated at a relatively faster pace. Team unity is absolutely essential to business growth. Here are six tips to help you get started.
Make It Known to Your Workforce. Subtly inserting your wishes of team-building and unification during weekly meetings won’t have a long-term impact to your company’s progress. You want to be sure to make it known to your employees that team-building is a goal that must be proactively worked on. Discuss educational materials and spark healthy debates about creating alignment and working together in the business. It is definitely a good idea to work with your team to decide how to most effectively build team unity and really be able to work together well.
Expose Them to Adversity. Adversity forces groups to collaborate otherwise the margin for failure becomes greater. This doesn’t mean that you should make daily work harder for them than it already is. A good example of adversity is to enroll your entire team in a retreat that puts them against carefully designed courses and challenges, such as making fire with nothing more than a few pieces of dry wood or climbing a towering stack of logs. Removing technological devices to aid them during these training courses will instinctively help them to work together.
Embrace Criticism. As long as feedback is constructive and relevant, embrace it. In fact, encourage your employees to share their thoughts and concerns about the business. Allowing them to speak their mind removes the cloud of skepticism and stress that can restrict them from cooperating when it matters most. An open communication policy, however, must also impose limitations as this can backfire and cause further tension between employees.
Be Quick About Firing People. While it sounds counterintuitive to the goal of building team unity, it’s a necessary call every smart business owner must make throughout his/her lifetime. Cut the toe before it spreads the gangrene throughout the entire foot. You want to make sure that you have great workers who can really work well with others on your team to help strengthen the foundation of your business.
Host Events. Hosting company parties and events through venues, such as Noah’s Event Venues, gives your employees a chance to socialize with one another. With different event venues you can gain access to the professional environment along with the laborers and technologies to successfully host your events.
Make It Fun. Nobody wants extra work to build team unity. Instead, mask it in the form of fun activities, such as playing paintball or LAN game parties. Your employees can hone their team skills unconsciously through these activities while also venting out stress in the process.
Overall, small businesses and startups can successfully compete with larger brands and corporations, who outnumber them 3 to 1 or even greater, with a unified and solid team working behind the day-to-day operations.
Kara Masterson is a freelance writer from West Jordan, Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah and enjoys writing and spending time with her dog, Max.
