Leading a team can be inspiring, rewarding and exhausting. Busy working environments can leave little time for team leaders to check-in with team members and ensure they’re feeling happy, creative and on track.
With good communication channels and plenty of opportunities to give feedback, you can provide your team with a strong support system. With this, team leaders can develop accountability, trust, and a less hierarchical approach. If you want to get more team management tips browse to https://hrresourceguide.com/team-management/.
Here are our six tips for achieving a happier and more productive team via some supportive workflows:
1. Be transparent
Transparent working environments have been found to make teams more accountable, happy and creative.
It sounds like a big claim but transparent environments help to develop a feeling of mutual respect between team members and team leaders. Via open and consistent communication, transparent and authentic workplaces help employees to feel secure in their positions. In turn, team members feel freer to contribute ideas and suggestions, enhancing creativity.
2. Keep communicating
You must have heard this one before: the basis of a cooperative and productive team is good communication.
The aim is to create an environment in which team leaders feel able to provide honest and constructive feedback, and team members feel confident to voice concerns and communicate with one another.
3. Provide valuable feedback
Providing feedback to team members is one of the best ways you can support them to develop professionally and personally.
Even if you have no negative feedback to give, make sure to hold regular opportunities to check-in. This way, you can provide advice on how you feel your team members are progressing and could grow further. If there are any areas of work that you feel could be improved, these discussions also provide a good opportunity to share your constructive feedback.
4. Encourage collaboration
Inevitably, your team members will be happier if they can get along well with one another. As an added bonus, they’ll perform better too.
To achieve this, encourage your team members to collaborate. On your team, there will likely be a whole bunch of diverse skills. Make sure these different skillsets are utilized by ensuring everyone is aware of ongoing projects. That way, team members can jump in to collaborate wherever they feel they can bring value.
5. Trust your team to do their job
Companies hire competent staff for a reason and effective team management shouldn’t mean micro-management. If you’ve hired staff for a specialist area like programming, you need to know when to just leave them to do their job.
6. Prevent team burn-out
As a team leader, you’re in a great position to set positive boundaries of work, play, and relaxation. Of course, this can be difficult. Particularly in teams where members work flexibly and might prefer to start early or work late, to save time elsewhere. However, encouraging team members to set themselves some working limits, to sleep well and avoid burn-out, is important.