So you’ve made a solid start with your team to achieve your vision of a positive workplace culture. Keep in mind that your efforts need to be nurtured in order to endure. And there’s always more that you can do to help your working environment evolve. Here are five more ideas to spur your people on to more collaboration.
1. Assess and Adjust as Needed
Monitoring your company’s progress towards creating an accepting and inclusive working space is critical. The importance of spending part of your day interacting informally with your employees can’t be underemphasized. Conversations in an office cubicle or on the shop floor can yield valuable information about how your attempts to build a collaborative workplace are going.
But it’s equally necessary to structure opportunities for more formal feedback from your staff. For example, you could establish an employee engagement committee or request that workers anonymously answer some targeted questions about their experience in the workplace. Both intelligence gathering methods will show your team that you’re serious about striving for a solid company culture. The subsequent actions you take to modify and improve your enterprise’s approach will be noticed.
2. Identify and Reward Progress
By maintaining a regular presence among your employees, you’ll quickly learn where progress is being made. Take note of indications that people are embracing the business’s cultural vision and point out examples to others. Reward individual actions and helpful behavior shown by work teams. Often a special mention at a morning meeting may be enough praise for people and will encourage them to continue making contributions.
Having said that, individuals do sometimes value more tangible rewards. Consider whether a perk or bonus of some sort might be a good thing to implement. A little bit of healthy competition to attain a particular honor or award can help a team really pull together and support one another to try to outdo another group, for instance.
3. Provide Collaborative Opportunities
Your employees will be at different stages when it comes to experience collaborating with others. Explicitly creating opportunities for them to work closely together is a good strategy. This gives more of your staff a chance to practice their communication skills and build their expertise. The amount they learn about what it means to work with their colleagues towards a common goal will benefit them—and you—going forward.
The chance to work as part of a team towards a common purpose will teach your staff how to resolve conflict, negotiate responsibility for tasks, and agree on project milestones. These are critical ingredients for a collaborative and positive workplace culture. In addition, go a step further and let your people know that you’re open to suggestions they have for collaborative proposals.
4. Create Collaborative Spaces
Office layouts these days may offer individual offices, cubicles, shared desks, open workspaces, or any combination of these. It can be difficult to get the balance right. Remember that employees need to feel that their time and productivity is respected. Workspaces should include areas that support individuals who need to fulfill individual time-sensitive responsibilities.
However, having working areas that allow people to come together in a comfortable environment that supports sharing ideas and working on collaborative projects is necessary. Being siloed in offices should be avoided, but it is how many of us are used to working. Your staff may need a little nudging to use all spaces to their best advantage. Every working area should be appealing and comfortable to spark creativity.
5. Embrace Diversity
Creating a collaborative culture depends, in part, on recognizing the diversity of your employees. Hopefully you’ve done your due diligence recruiting and hiring a cadre of people with different backgrounds, cultures, education and life experiences. This will set your staff up for some rich and innovative encounters as they learn to work together across these divides.
Foster curiosity about the lived experience of your team members and embrace differences. Recognize and encourage divergent opinions to assist your people to learn from one another and develop and reify bonds that will further the goal of achieving a positive workplace culture. Above all, be patient as individuals develop the ability to embrace the diversity of the working environment and leverage the advantages.
Collaboration Adds Value
Building trust by acting with transparency and sharing knowledge will go a long way to improving and ensuring the longevity of your workplace culture. Such collaboration will reap many rewards.
Bill Malloy 