5 Tips for Building (Or Rebuilding) Team Culture

Something’s off. People aren’t talking. They’re working in silos. Engagement is falling fast, and miscommunications are on the rise. It’s one of the most challenging situations a manager can encounter: a bad team culture.

Here’s the bad news: it’s not going to fix itself. As the manager, you’re responsible for creating, managing, and recreating the team culture as needed.

The good news? There are so many simple, effective things you can do to get your team’s culture back on track. 

HERE ARE MY TOP 5 TIPS FOR BUILDING A STRONG TEAM CULTURE:

Call it out

This might be the last thing you want to do –– after all, having a less-than-great team culture doesn’t really create an atmosphere for sharing and trust. But I promise you that letting things fester is worse. Call a meeting and lay it all out on the table. Talk about how the team culture hasn’t been what anybody wants it to be. And then ask the team to brainstorm ideas about how to fix it. I’m always a fan of doing this together on flip charts if you possibly can, but doing it remotely via a doc works too.

Create consistency

Teams thrive when they know what to expect. Schedule in consistent activities for team culture-building, and make sure they always happen. Think: things like a weekly team meeting, quarterly happy hour, yearly off-site. It’s easy to let these things slide when you get busy, but don’t give into that temptation. These things are just as important as any of the other work you do, because they ensure that you can do that work well.

Give people space to form organic connections

Many people hate traditional icebreakers, so if you try to force your team through those week after week, you may end up doing more harm than good. Instead, use tried and true team builders, and be sure to create lots of space for forming organic connections too. Things like coffee tastings or bagel bars often work well for this. Anything you can do that puts people in a room with each other and gives them the opportunity to chat is a good thing!

You may also want to see how you can encourage mentor-mentee relationships among your team members. You can go for the traditional manager-team member set up, but I’d encourage you to think outside the box and let people form these relationships organically among themselves as well. You never know whose skill sets and needs are going to align!

Revamp your team meetings

Team meetings are usually the worst part of everybody’s week (managers included!), but they can be such a valuable opportunity for culture-building, if you know how to do them right. Instead of going with the traditional meeting structure, make meetings collaborative. Give everybody a job to do in the meeting, or a part of the meeting. You can even do a rotation, or a lottery for who gets what job each week to keep things interesting.

One really effective culture-builder for meetings is the weekly shout-out. It sounds cheesy, but if you end every meeting with a time where people can give shout-outs to their teammates, calling out good behavior and celebrating wins together, it goes such a long way in building culture. Plus it makes meetings way more enjoyable, since everybody leaves on a high note! (Want more training for running great meetings? Check this out.)

When in doubt, bring food.

Bagels, doughnuts, salad bar, coffee or tea flights, cocktails, whatever’s a fit for your team, bring it. Food always brings people together, and the act of eating with each other is an easy way to foster a sense of community. 

Creating a strong team culture is so important, and it really can start with something as simple as a box of bagels and lox. So make sure you’re taking the time to focus on this critical element for engagement and retention! And as always, if you’d like some support while you’re working on it, I’m here to help! Find out how I help managers build great team culture here.