Brilliant Team = Better Results

Increasing sales and return on investment is hard. And so often employers don’t help themselves, by focusing too much on the problem rather than the solution – the team.

According to the Financial Times “A happy and engaged workforce brings a positive return on investment for organisations and individuals.”

So, having a strong working team, where your employees are happy, fulfilled and comfortable in their position, will increase your firm’s chances of success.

If you want to improve and strengthen your team to produce the best work, as well as avoid a high employee turnover, you need to ask yourself three key questions:

1) Is your entire team aware of, and working towards, the same business goals?

When you set goals for your firm, who hears about them? Often they are decided for the firm, but only those in senior roles hear or know about them. It’s important that any and all goals are clearly defined and communicated across the business, ensuring that everyone is aligned and working accordingly to achieve them.

If one of your firm’s goals is to start branching into a new area of the industry, but you don’t fully share and explain that aim with the greater team, how will they help the firm achieve it? Communicating objectives, and your teams’ roles in achieving them, means that they can proactively tailor their work to best support your business.

2) Do your employees have both personal and team objectives that help them achieve job satisfaction?

Job satisfaction, as defined by the Cambridge dictionary, is ‘the feeling of pleasure and achievement that you experience in your job when you know that your work is worth doing.’

With so many waking hours spent in the office each week, it’s important employers take the time to ensure the working environment is both enjoyable and satisfactory for each and every employee. When your employees are content in the working environment, it’s shown to ‘increase productivity by an average of 12%’ (SMF).

It’s also important to work with each employee individually, giving them defined roles with clear objectives and goals. Give every member of your team a challenge, as people get a sense of satisfaction from their job when they’re challenged. And, with satisfied employees, you’ll start to see harder workers and better results. According to Deloitte, passionate workers, on average, work five hours more per week, which per person can add up to a lot of extra hours.

3) What are the relationships like between team members?

How well does your team communicate? Are you encouraging openness and discussion? To add value to the work your team produces, and enrich the team itself, endorse conversation and open dialogue.

If a member of the team is working on something they’re struggling with, or running out of ideas, being able to chat openly to others can help get their creative juices flowing again – sometimes it just takes someone else’s point of view to stimulate ideation. To summarize a report conducted by HBR, the more conversations there are between co-workers, the higher the overall performance of the team.

Communication really is key!

Address these three questions in your quest for a stronger team and you’ll begin to see a big improvement – and better results in your firm’s overall return on investment (ROI).

If you think that your team is struggling in any of these areas, have a look at our ‘How to Build All-Star Teams‘ page and get in touch. We offer training that can help your team perform optimally and deliver excellent results!

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