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Team Building And Business Growth

Written by: Susan Regier

Article Overview: Every business has it’s own distinctive culture – “the way things are done around here”.

Team Building And Business Growth

Every business has it’s own distinctive culture – “the way things are done around here”.

A good workplace culture reinforces the sorts of values and behaviour you want, and weakens attitudes and actions you don't want. But a weak culture gives little guidance or direction to your team, allowing all sorts of inappropriate actions and behaviour.

Does your company inspire loyalty, dedication, creativity and motivation? Does your business culture challenge staff to learn, improve and grow? As a business owner, you must ask yourself these questions. And you need to find positive answers.

Businesses generally concentrate on quantifiable outputs such as profit, market share or growth, while neglecting three key factors that vitally affect not just success, but long term survival.

Fun

Teams that play together work together. Having fun at work is important, not just in creating a positive team environment, but also in raising morale, boosting confidence and reducing staff turnover. Having fun helps maintain a positive attitude to work, and generates commitment and job satisfaction.

You can see this in the enormous popularity of the Fish! video, which has been rented and watched by countless company managers and executives. (But it’s often another story when you ask about their success with getting that approach to work in their own company!)

Introducing occasional novel or unusual workshop sessions into your workplace does not have to take all day, does not have to cost a lot of money, and can more than repay the “lost” time in increased productivity, less sick days, and better loyalty, bonding, cooperation and efficiency between sections.

Attitude

There is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself. And this applies to staff as well as to business owners and managers.

But can be hard to maintain a positive attitude where a business is arranged in “silos”. The back office staff might never have met some of the production people or sales people; and the storeroom or warehouse staff might never have interacted with the office or shop floor staff.

Look for opportunities to get your staff together, and encourage people to choose a positive attitude to their job, their colleagues and their customers or clients. In doing so, people commit themselves to do the best job they can.

Relationships

Because success is often about who you know, not what you know, it depends in large part on the quality of our working relationships with others.

In any business, management and staff work better together when they have plentiful opportunities to interact.

Enjoyable team building activities can let participants see the people they work with in a different light. That can in turn lead to improved working relationships and enhanced productivity into the future.

Make sure you do what you can to build a strong, healthy, productive workplace culture.

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Need help in Team Building Activity.. - Hi! I am tasked to organize a Team Building Activity in the office. I would like to seek help from you guys on ideas on how to make it worth the time and effort. I want the team to ask for more team building activities after this one. Thanks! jane
Re: Need help in Team Building Activity.. - Team Building Activities are my favorite part. Last time our team was out for an expedition. We got a map and had to find the cave were we also slept and on our way there were other activities. It was an extreme team building and it was organized by a specialized company.
Type of business with building - If you owned a building and Wal-Mart was opening its doors across the street in a previously unoccupied area (along with 12-14 small shops), what type of business would you start? Here are the considerations: 1. Money is a non-factor 2. Building is fairly large (10,000) square feet 3. Building is on the corner of a busy intersection (about to get much busier)
Re: Anyone Uses Elance.com? Guru.com? Rentacoder.com? - I've had quite a bit of success on oDesk.com. I've never used Elance so I can't compare. I like oDesk.com 'cos I get to sort thru people (e.g. within a certain bid range) with a single click. I find their help response very quick and I like the oDesk Team software that "providers" must install. This gives me the Buyer more insight as to what I am paying for. The Team software takes screenshots of the Providers screen on 10 min increments so I can see that the person is infact doing work for me.
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.


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