Simple Ways to Improve Your Company Spirit

Enhancing your company spirit can help you increase employee satisfaction, improve morale, reduce employee turnover, and boost productivity. While developing company spirit may be tough at first, once you make the first step, you’ll start enjoying the benefits. Here are 9 surefire ways to enhance your company spirit.

Bring Team Players On Board

To create a work environment that promotes company spirit, you should begin with the hiring process. When hiring new people, be conscious, and ask questions that’ll help you separate candidates that value team spirit from those that don’t value it. The objective here is to bring team players who will add the right energy and morale to the team on board.

Nurture Strong Coworker Relationships

Strong coworker relationships don’t just happen. It takes time, work, and thoughtful team-building activities. As a business leader, you should create spaces that promote collaboration. For instance, you should have a dedicated kitchen where all employees can eat lunch together. This space will provide a chance for coworkers that don’t usually interact to get to know each other. This will help cultivate strong relationships. Make this space modern and relaxing by outsourcing your kitchen remodeling to a reputable kitchen & home renovation company. For example, you can opt for outsourcing to GVD, or other trusted providers local to where you personally are. This approach will promote togetherness which will encourage team spirit in the workplace. Breaking the work pattern during lunch breaks will encourage your team to socialise. Therefore solving whatever conflicts they may have amicably.

 Involve Your Employees in Strategic Planning

Allow your employees to participate in strategic planning. Your employees are more likely to have a heightened sense of investment in any project at hand if they have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. On top of involving them in strategic planning, you should give them autonomy. If employees feel that the management respects and trusts them, they’ll be motivated and will work towards seeing the company succeed.

Encourage Open Communication

Open communication is a crucial part of cultivating a company spirit. Make yourself and/or your colleagues at the management level approachable by implementing an open door policy. When workers feel comfortable talking to you or the management, you’ll see a significant drop in employee turnover. Take time to listen to your employees’ problems and provide useful solutions. Work on your communication skills and communicate regularly. Also, use effective communication channels and tools.

Let Employees Maximise their Personal Strengths

Give team members roles that they understand and can perform well. That way, every employee will feel their efforts are crucial to the overall success of the company. It also gets rids of outliers who may become disengaged and disruptive in the long-run. And in case there are a few disruptive elements that are spreading negative energy and frustrating team spirit within your company, identify and encourage them to start working as team members.

Additionally, focus on your employee’s strengthens other than their shortcomings. A study by Gallup found that employees who make use of their strengths are bound to be more engaged in their work because their spirits are elevated. You should also realise that people have varied passions and weaknesses. Thus, you should be a leader that offers encouragement and not dwell so much on what people cannot do. So long as people do their work diligently, their downsides can be tolerated.

Acknowledging and celebrating your team’s achievements can have a positive effect on your company spirit. It gives team members a positive feeling when their achievements have been acknowledged or rewarded and encourages them to continue doing better. Also, it makes them feel valued and supported by their peers. Additionally, it also helps team members to cultivate a deep, supportive connection with each other.

Resolve Conflicts Quickly and Efficiently

Keep divisions within the team at bay by resolving conflicts promptly and efficiently. You can leave team members to find ways to overcome slight disagreements among themselves without the involvement of the management. But be sure to intervene on time to keep the issue from causing communication breakdown or affecting internal relations.

Serve as an Example

What kind of office culture do you want to build? What characters should your team members possess? You must set an example to your employees by carrying yourself in a way that’s in line with the office culture that you’re looking to build. That way, they’ll understand how you want them to behave.

Be Inclusive

Ensuring every employee at work feels included is a great way to boost company spirit. Simple efforts like using inclusive language and hosting group activities that meet the unique needs of every team member can be instrumental in promoting inclusivity in the workplace.

Share feedback

Feedback should be the cornerstone of the company’s daily activities. You can either use messaging tools or internal email to publicly positive feedback to your team. To improve your company’s spirit, you should encourage your employees to normalize sharing feedback with colleagues. Enhancing such a culture will strengthen your employee relationships, foster understanding among teams as well as encourage communication.

Utilize workshops

Workshops are the best way to encourage teamwork among employees and support a collaborative culture in a diverse workplace. You can organize energetic workshops to improve your company’s spirit. For instance, you could have:

• New employee workshops to induct them into the job so that they feel welcomed into your organization.
• Work-life balance workshops to help your employees cope with their work and other personal responsibilities that they may have.
• Workshops to help with their personal financial management obligations such as insurance schemes and pension funds.
• Development seminars to help employees polish their skills and have them identify some of the things that are essential for their professional development.

These seminars should be held depending on your staff needs. In other words, investing in such workshops will definitely help you improve your company spirit.

Have interactive office spaces

Having people confined in their cubicles or small offices will reduce your company’s spirit. Instead, you should adopt an open concept plan for your offices and add glass walls where necessary so that everyone can see their colleagues. You can also have project rooms where employees can go and brainstorm about possible solutions to the challenges that they are having on the projects that they are working on. You should also have conference rooms with state-of-the-art conferencing technology that can help you communicate with other stakeholders, customers, and most importantly remote employees, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Having such facilities will enhance a positive working spirit in your organization.

Incorporate sporting activities

Sporting activities are also an effective way to boost company spirit. You could have your employees congregate one weekend quarterly to take part in sporting activities. They can participate in games such as cricket, soccer, volleyball, marathons as well as corporate walks and triathlons will encourage them to keep fit. Sports will keep them both physically and mentally fit which will also improve their productivity and promote collaboration.

Enhancing company spirit can have incredible long-term effects, such as higher employee satisfaction, better employee retention, improved productivity, and greater profits. But you must commit time and attention to improve your company spirit. Examine the aforementioned 9 tips, select those that’ll work for you, and then implement them. Once you do that, you’ll start seeing positive results within your company in no time.

Owen Manningham is a management consultant with over 6 years of experience in the field. He advises on training and coaching in the strategic and operational aspects of management, change, and client relationship management.