PEOPLE Make Work Happen: How to build Teams

“I did not come to this office to make friends”

“Every man for himself in this office o”

“is it only me in this office, I cannot come and die”

These are common lingual in our work environment in this part of the World. Statistics show that we spend about 1/3 of our lives at work this goes to show that your work can make a huge impact on the quality of your life.

People make a business so it’s safe to rephrase this by saying the people you work with make a huge impact on the quality of your life. Wow!

This is intriguing, I know a friend who always fell ill because his team members played a lot of politics and the office environment wasn’t conducive for him and he had to resign for health reasons.

A healthy work environment improves productivity and reduces costs related to absenteeism, turnover, workers' compensation, and medical claims.

In an office environment we have mini groups, work groups, teams, departments etc. Work groups exists mainly for sharing information. You may wonder how a team is different from an ordinary work group. Work groups are mainly for members to share information and make decisions so that each member can achieve his or her individual work goals. Teams are usually made up of two or more people who work together to achieve a common goal. And they have gone through the Tuckman’s stages of being a team.

Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing

How do you make your team experience successful?

· Communication – Communication, Communication, Communication, this is the bane of many relationships. It is so important in working together. From consistently updating every person and never assuming that everyone has the same information. Also, let’s know that communication transcends writing and talking, your nonverbal (tone of voice, body posture, facial expression) matter even more than what you say or write.

· Common Goal – Every team member should be clear on what the overall goal of the organisation is and play their part in achieving it.

· Team Roles – Asides from ensuring that everyone knows what they are doing. This helps to engage staff. In a research it was discovered that only 13% of the World employee are actually engaged at their work 87% are not. With team roles and deliverable established this will avoid any person feeling under-utilised or over used

· Delegation – We each have our strengths and weakness, good teams play to this, putting the right pegs in the right holes

· Reliability and Time management – knowing that if one person fails in the team, the team has failed. We should all be able to rely on completion of tasks on time from individuals

· Bonding – A team that bonds together gets the work done faster and better.

· Listening Skills - According to the 7 Habits of Highly Effective people; seek first to understand, then to be understood

· Have fun – Be intentional about having the fun of your life at work. You spend more time at work than at home anyways…

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