Clearly, a proper working environment is crucial to the success of every company because employees need comfortable and engaging conditions. These conditions are often more effective in stimulating team performance than financial rewards by creating a joyous workplace where everyone contributes to mutual success. 

However, building such conditions requires a lot of effort from team managers who often need to perform a number of various tasks to get this right. In creating an effective team environment, they play a vitally important role because they manage and control the strategy of introducing and reinforcing specific conditions that stimulate employee performance. Moreover, managers often have to carry out a lot of psychologically-related work, which makes the overall task even more difficult.

Show appreciation

There are lots of employees in companies around the world who feel the management does not appropriately appreciate their effort. Here, the supervisors simply perceive the performance of the teams as their job and deprive them of the joy of receiving an appraisal. However, this strategy is one to avoid because showing the team members the appreciation for their work is very important to their performance in the future. You can start with simple ‘thank you’ or ‘you made a difference’ and proceed to a meaningful stuff that shows your real acknowledgment, including high-fives.

Establish a dialog

It is a known fact that some team leaders and managers do not engage in dialog with each member because of lack of time or different geographical position. This may sound familiar and even normal for many companies but in fact, such strategy will not bring anything good in a long-term! Depriving the team members from the direct communication with the manager is like taking away the feeling of caring. Therefore, take your time and get to know your employees in person when you can or have a video call scheduled for those who are far away. It’ll go a long way.

Listen to everyone’s ideas

you will need to show that you are open to new thoughts and value the effort of innovation.

Each team member has a lot of unique ideas that they can give to you and thus contribute to the mutual success. Analysis of every idea that the team generates is an important part of the job, so discovering them is just as equally relevant to the progress. To ensure that everyone contributes his or her ideas during any stage of the project, you will need to show that you are open to new thoughts and value the effort of innovation. It can be done through establishing a policy of new ideas that requires you to give the opportunity to provide new thoughts to everyone in the team.

Trust the team

Trust is an important building block of every relationship, including yours with the team members. However, this does not mean that you should give all responsibilities to them and watch them work without you. Building trust is a process that includes specific steps and requires particular actions from the manager. For example, you should provide the team members with the opportunity to make decisions on their respective parts of a project for a start. Then, you should continue with delegating some of your responsibilities to them and control the execution on a constant basis. Finally, you could involve the team into the office decision-making and establish some policies together.

Building an effective team environment can be difficult, but there are a lot of opportunities to enjoy the process.

Don’t forget to have fun

Remember, every member of the team wants to have a little bit of fun during work. However ‘fun’ does not mean behaving like children but rather being able to be themselves on the job because it gives the feeling of enjoyment and significantly increases job satisfaction. Also, ‘fun’ here could mean some off-work activities, like Friday Basketball Game after successful completion of the project or even parties where the team members could enjoy the opportunity to talk about something else beside work. By having fun with your team members, you will also enhance the functionality of group dynamics and effectiveness of collaborative working in the workplace.

Building an effective team environment can be difficult, but there are a lot of opportunities to enjoy the process. Clearly, the success of this mission requires good communication skills, interpersonal skills, and leadership abilities from managers, because they will be needed to implement these relatively simple but enormously effective tasks. The important thing to remember that anyone in the team can make a huge difference so should be provided with appropriate opportunity to express the ideas. When the potential of everyone is combined, the team can go a long way and deliver even more than you expect, but first, you need to unlock this potential and make them feel appreciated and cared. Moreover, these simple methods will also help you to enhance your own team leadership skills, so use them to reach new heights with your team!