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Five leadership actions to boost team culture

Mike Essex, Senior Partner and European Leader of Talent & Change – Wipro (NYSE: WIT).

The hybrid world is here to stay and this has several effects on team behaviours and culture are more pronounced and noticeable. Everything is becoming more transactional, there is vastly reduced face to face contact for many people, deeper relationships take miles longer to build and there is a sense for many employees that they could be working for any company; more of a contractor relationship than a permanent employee relationship.

Additionally, leaders of teams are busier than ever with the advances in technology creating blurred work/life boundaries and margin pressures heaping more work on already busy people.

Against that backdrop, it is difficult, but not impossible for leaders of teams to influence their team engagement for the better.

 Top 5 activities busy leaders should prioritise 

  1. Recruit wisely – bringing new people into the team can re-energise and provide a boost to creativity. For our team, we have a robust 3 step interview process that we can complete within 2 weeks. Get it right and everything goes well. Rush the interview process by taking shortcuts and hiring ‘borderline’ candidates will end up costing enormous amounts in wasted time and energy to manage. And they will be a negative influence across the team you have been carefully building.
  1. Communicate regularly – Have some regular sessions where you bring the whole team together on a call to discuss updates against plan and bring in opportunities to learn about new areas. We have an hour’s Teams call every 2 weeks for the Europe practice, have an interesting agenda with a mixture of internal and external speakers.
  1. Empower the team – a good team has high levels of trust and a good leader empowers individuals to take decisions. This will sometimes mean the wrong decisions are made but in an environment where failure is seen as a ‘bump in the road’ and a learning opportunity, then teams flourish. Leaders then don’t become a bottleneck for decisions and frees them up to focus on more strategic areas.
  1. Provide learning opportunities – Budgets are usually tight for formal training, however, there are other ways to learn. We use our fortnightly team call to have 30 min learning slots with speakers, ask our SMEs to create and deliver internal ‘masterclasses’ on topics such as Agile change and encourage leaders on projects to provide opportunities for team members to learn on the job.
  1. Celebrate success – all too easy to have a ‘team win’ and then move onto the next activity. Take the time to talk about the success, why it occurred and recognise through saying thank you or a more formal recognition method. In our team we have a formal recognition system called Vantage where it is easy to allocated points for use with an online catalogue. Easy to do yet many leaders underuse this capability.

What happens if you get it right and create a strong team culture?

  • Higher employee engagement:
    Organisations with strong cultures have 65% engaged employees, compared to just 19% in organizations with weak cultures.
  • Better financial performance:
    Companies with strong cultures outperform their competitors by 20% in terms of revenue growth and are 4.5 times more likely to have high employee engagement levels
  • Improved talent attraction and retention:
    87% of employees say that a strong workplace culture is important to them.
  • Enhanced brand reputation:
    A strong culture can help to enhance an organization’s reputation and brand image, which can attract customers and other stakeholders.

References

  1. Higher employee engagement: “State of the Global Workplace” report, Gallup, 2017.

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