One of the long-standing challenges of management and digital agencies worldwide is getting each member of your team to be invested in your project whilst maintaining team unity and cohesion within your virtual team. Managers used to rule over their employees with an iron fist demanding excellence through fear of firing and lost earnings. Nowadays, it is much more common to motivate employees on an individual level by using the carrot and stick method.
Needless to say, motivating individual employees is not enough to create a cohesive team, which is defined as:
“Team cohesion is the strength and extent of interpersonal connection existing among the members of a group.”
In this article, we will be breaking down some of the key ways to create a cohesive team in your virtual team.
Give And Ask For Feedback From Your Virtual Team
If you are a business owner and you have a virtual team working remotely, there will come a time where you will need to provide feedback to your team. This could be because your team has been working fantastically, and you want to heap praise on them, or perhaps someone is not working as effectively as they should be, and you need to give them a bit of a nudge in the right direction. There are many reasons why communicating effectively can increase team cohesion among team members.
Firstly, giving feedback allows your virtual team to understand where they need to improve and the things that they are doing well. If communicated effectively, this will lead to your team working more efficiently, which will then increase cohesion amongst yourself and your team. It is not only staff members who need feedback; as a leader, you should also ask for your team’s feedback. This allows you to understand how your business’s management can improve, and acting on realistic and reasonable input from your team can increase your employees’ motivation and lead to increased performance.
It may also be worth promoting an employee to employee feedback system in the workplace, whereby your team members feel safe and comfortable with providing feedback to one another. When such a system is implemented effectively, it can help prevent tension and conflicts between employees or ensure that they are defused more effectively.
It should also be noted that for organisations and individuals who practise succession planning, having an effective feedback system can help plan your successor. This is because communicating useful feedback will help people understand what procedures and behaviours are expected of them when they step into your role. This can prevent friction from occurring once the succession has taken place, which would potentially damage the team’s cohesion.
Practise Effective Communication In Your Virtual Team
A leader’s requirement to practice effective communication to build a cohesive and successful team is well-documented, with MIT also backing this up in a 2012 study. Although many people know that effective communication is required, it can still be challenging to instil effective communication into a person and the company. There are, however, several things that you can put into practice to ensure you are communicating effectively. Change comes from the top, and this advice can also apply to your subordinates.
Create an Open Culture
It is ideal for practising an open culture from the top, and a great way to start is by being available for your workers. This can be whether somebody on your team performs effectively and wants to heap praise or provide constructive criticism and a supportive environment to improve within. Providing this type of open culture can motivate employees and improve their job satisfaction, which goes a long way towards improving communication and limiting conflict.
Ensure You Are A Good Listener
There are several subsections to good listening as a part of effective communication in your virtual team, and you should encourage all of these traits within your team. Firstly, you should avoid being distracted by your environment and ensure that you are looking at the person; you should also listen without thinking of a retort to their point.
Next, use your body language to let the person know that you are listening. This encourages them to continue speaking and promotes respect. Once you have received the message from the person, try to confirm it back to them in your own words to ensure you have understood what they said. Once you have understood the message, convey your response honestly but with little negative influence. Don’t be condescending or needlessly harsh in your approach; if you do need to retort, do so respectfully.
Encourage Humour
Injecting a little humour into your communication is an excellent way of improving it and improving cohesion within your team. This is because humour helps to enhance the flow of information in communication and make what you have said more memorable. Despite this, there are two guidance rules on using humour within your organisation.
Firstly, you should make sure that the humour is relevant to the point you need to make. This ensures that people do not miss out on crucial information by figuring out the significance of what you have said. Remember to use what is referred to as the “sandwich method”, which requires you to make your point, then use your humour and then reiterate your original point. This keeps people on the track of your overall objective once the hopeful laughter has died.
Put Emphasis On The “We”
Everyone must have a propensity to predominantly use “we” instead of “I” within the team. It is essential to share credit with individuals at the top of the business when performing well and share the glory with each person that made it happen. Doing this can help make your employees feel like their results and work are truly interconnected, improving teamwork, cohesion, and outcomes.
Organise Social Activities
One of the worries about working in a new virtual team environment for many people can be the difficulty of meeting and connecting with a new group of people in a work environment. It can be more challenging to communicate with people at work than it would be over dinner, for example. Thus, you must try to organise social events within your company. Ensuring that your employees have ample opportunity to connect personally goes a long way to improving cohesion in the workplace, which will directly influence your company’s performance.
This improved cohesion can lead to several noticeable and measurable benefits for your business. The first improvement ties into the previous item on this article: those team members who have had an opportunity to interact with one another in a social setting have improved communication levels with one another, which increases productivity in your business. It also helps you keep your current employees as if they are happy. They will not want to go and work anywhere else. This helps maintain your workplace culture, as you will not need to bring in as many people, and high staff turnover can upset the equilibrium.
With the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is impossible to organise social events; however, you can still promote video chats and work-related team activities to pass the time. This can be a FIFA Tournament or a baking contest to see who can make the most impressive cake.
Set Clear And Actionable Goals
One of the better ways to ensure cohesion and understanding within your team is to set goals that are both clear and actionable. One of the best ways to ensure that the goals that you are setting for your employees are actionable and clear is to set SMART targets for your employees. SMART targets are made up of the following components.
S: Specific (make sure they are well-defined and clear).
M: Measurable (have specific metrics and criteria to measure against).
A: Achievable (ensure they are not impossible to attain).
R: Reasonable (ensure that they are relevant and realistic).
T: Timely (ensure that they have a clear start and end date).
The setting of SMART targets allows your employees to know what is expected of them and can provide them with a roadmap for success. Having clear goals also improves employee motivation, which leads to better overall results for the company and promotes cohesion, loyalty and effective communication within the workplace. As an employer, you will find that setting SMART targets will provide you with much better results than merely making obscure, generalist goals with little context on how they will be measured or achieved.
Delegate Appropriately
One of the skills required to be an effective leader and foster sufficient cohesion and communication within your virtual team is to delegate effectively and appropriately. Delegation itself is defined as “to assign responsibility to another person”. This could involve passing responsibility for your various tasks, such as meetings, calling customers, and much more in a business context.
Delegating is a fine balancing act. You need to understand several different things about the person you are delegating to; to ensure that the delegating promotes trust, loyalty, and cohesion rather than resentment and distrust.
Firstly, you should make sure that the person you are delegating to has the time to perform the extra work you ask of them. If the person you are attempting to entrust already has too much work to deal with, they will not appreciate being given more. Doing so can cause your employees to feel like you don’t respect their effort, fostering resentment and malcontent amongst your employees.
Secondly, you need to make sure that the individual has the knowledge and the capability to perform the task you ask them to complete. The best way to ensure that you can delegate to a person is to train them in that particular task before you need them to do it for you. If you try to make an employee do a job that they don’t feel like they can complete, this can lead to them feeling incredibly stressed and alone, which can lead to them airing their grievances to your other, causing friction in your employees. Furthermore, they may complete the task incorrectly, which depending on the job, could have some profound implications for your business.
Conclusion
Promoting cohesion and effective teamwork within a team is not easy. Judging from the material covered in this article, this culture of cohesion needs to be implemented from the top down to ensure proper adoption. Creating a cohesive team is a must for the modern business environment, with effective teamwork leading to better productivity and, therefore, better profit for your business.