Building Team Culture

As we know from our work creating a positive culture, just because people work in a team, it doesn’t mean that it’s a cohesive team. Learning how to trust each other takes hard work, and learning how to have robust discussions, and create an environment where everyone is on the same page, working towards the same results, takes time.

Often, the important work done at the senior leadership level doesn’t cascade down to teams effectively. This may be because the senior leaders have not engaged the team leaders in the discussion; or they have communicated the culture strategy, but not followed that with any change in behaviour themselves; or they may have asked for feedback from the teams, but then done nothing to incorporate the feedback; or, employees may not feel safe to speak up for fear of reprisals.

In an organisation with a poor culture, employee feedback sounds like, “we’re never heard”, “they never listen”, or “if we’re asked to do a survey or give feedback, nothing ever happens”.

There are steps we can take as team leaders, to engage our people in a way that is psychologically safe for them to speak up, and we will explore those here.

How we build team culture

We first need to ensure we’ve put the work in to achieve committed leadership and culture; have participation at the leadership level; have developed a strategy around desired culture; and equipped leaders so that they’re lead the change.

Next, we need to engage the whole business, engaging each team — as a team, in conversations around it so they have the opportunity to discuss and reflect on how well they demonstrate the behaviours, how they interact in team meetings, give and receive feedback, and engage in important conversations.

People need time, discussion and input to examine the intent of a new culture that supports psychological safety, test it out and check that it works for them.

This process helps us to connect and define what success means for us, and align us with the strategy around culture developed by senior leaders.

This is an important step in building team culture, as it engages thinking, helping people feel included and increases buy-in.

Having a culture where employees ‘have a voice’ is the means by which our people communicate their views to leadership and influence matters that affect them at work.

It helps to build open and trusting relationships between organisations and our people, which will improve workplace mental health and wellness.

Giving people the confidence to embrace and lean into that new culture will have the biggest impact on any culture transformation.

We do this by having team leaders take the message down to the next level and engage them in a session where they can unpack it.

This act of cascading the message through the broader group allows us to build on the ‘speak up culture’ around physical safety, and to bring discussions about mental health and wellness into the conversation at ground level.

There are some critical factors to ensure success while you’re building team culture:

• We should begin this process of inclusion in the transformation of culture - gradually building an expectation that we welcome and encourage ideas and want the people on the ground to speak up.
  This gives people time to prepare and start to feel psychologically safe to voice their opinions.

• Then, once we’ve got people speaking up, we need to take action so they don’t stop! We should think about ways to delegate tasks to add interest, provide development opportunities, and help people feel valued.
  This is particularly helpful when introducing any culture change as it allows people at ground level to ‘own’ some of the work.

• A key component is having the wellness champions in place because when you engage teams in the journey to create the desired culture they are there to hit the ground running, back up and support the activities.