A good team culture is more than just a bunch of employees working together. A thriving team culture is defined by the way you interact with your employees and how they interact with each other. It’s also about creating an environment where people feel comfortable to speak up when they have ideas, concerns, or feedback. By listening to employees on their terms and providing psychological safety, organizations can benefit in areas of improving workplace culture, retaining staff, and increasing their productivity.
Give your employees a voice
When employees feel heard, they feel appreciated that what they have to say is valued and matters, increasing their sense of belonging and happiness. And when employees are happy, they are highly motivated, high performing, more innovative — and most importantly, more than likely not searching for another job!
Providing opportunities for open dialogue in the workplace can help create an environment where motivation thrives. For example: regular meetings with direct reports where managers listen attentively; providing feedback on performance reviews so that employees know how they’re doing at work; holding regular town hall meetings so that everyone knows what’s going on with the company. These simple actions will go a long way toward creating trust between managers and their teams by demonstrating openness as well as providing opportunities for growth within an organization’s culture.”
Create a psychologically safe environment
To ensure your team culture thrives, you should create a psychologically safe environment. There are four pillars of psychological safety:
- Share ideas
- Share mistakes
- Share concerns
- Share success stories
Provide real-time and relevant feedback
Providing real-time and relevant feedback is an important part of your culture building strategy. Feedback should be specific, actionable, and given in a timely manner. Real-time feedback goes both ways. Employees should not have to wait until next big survey to share thoughts. This also presents the opportunity for improvements to be made in the moment when it is most relevant.
When providing feedback, it’s also important to ensure that the environment is safe for all parties involved. If either party feels pressured or uncomfortable during the conversation (or after), then there was probably something wrong with the way that you approached it. The most important thing to do when you get feedback of any kind, is to share the results with your organization being sure to report both positive and negative results from those surveys as well as taking some time out of each month (or quarter) to talk about what’s working well within your organization along with what needs improvement based on these surveys too!
Feedback drives change
Feedback is the key to improvement. Team members need feedback in order to grow, just as much as they need it for their personal lives. If a team member is not getting feedback from the manager, then they will not know how their performance is being perceived and what areas need improvement.
Feedback should be given in a timely manner (not 2 years from now) and be specific and relevant to an employee’s role on the team. Feedback should also be constructive and not destructive; if you don’t want someone to improve then don’t give them any useful information!
Finally, feedback needs to be real – if you can fake the funk then you can fake a smile too so this means being honest when providing criticism while still remaining positive in tone!
In the end, a thriving team culture is a combination of effective leadership, employee engagement and trust. It begins with open communication, which can be fostered by leaders who will listen to their people, provide opportunities for them to be heard and create an environment where feedback drives change.