Proven steps to build well functioning teams

Actagan
3 min readMay 10, 2020

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Build well functioning teams

When it comes to today’s business world, the culture that’s instilled within an office or workplace environment serves as a key indicator to the success of the business. Why? Well, because a positive work environment allows employees to thrive. And yet, instilling that positive workplace culture isn’t as easy as you’d might think. It all comes down to one thing — team building.

In this blog we’re going to discuss the need to build happy, purposeful, well-functioning teams and embrace equity, and show you a method you can leverage to achieve this transformation. When each individual team member recognize that they have equal opportunity to contribute, make an impact, and drive towards results, it brings the team’s operational level to a whole new level.

A large number of studies show the value equity and team building.

Business leader already understand the co-relation between employee engagement and empowerment. A Salesforce report found that employees who report positive experiences in sharing their thoughts within a team environment are 4.6 times more likely to produce exceptional work. Gallup studies suggests that teams with greater engagement actually help to increase profitability by more than 20%.

At the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie — employees who recognize they have equal opportunity to contribute are more compelled to perform exceptional work. And when teams are engaged, they can help you improve your bottom line.

And yet, building teams is still an elusive and perennial challenge.

Bellow we’ll go though a series of steps you can adopt to help your team building efforts towards creating an equitable and impactful work environment.

  • Create a transparent and visible process that aligns employee growth objectives with team deliverables.
  • Treat employee growth plans with the same rigor as core projects.
  • Maintain a consistent pulse on your team’s growth.

Create a transparent and visible process that aligns employee growth objectives with team deliverables.

We can’t speak enough about the importance of surfacing the alignment between employee development and team deliverables. It is the single and most impactful way to communicate what matters to your employees and your team.

You want everybody in your team to aim towards the same objectives and key results. Work with your team to define their growth objectives against team commitments and communicate these plans. Your goal is to build entanglements where we work with and for each other to realize employee growth opportunities and team’s commitments.

Treat employee growth objectives with the same planning rigor as core projects.

Maintaining a consistent and repeatable workflow to execute on employee growth objectives is key to keeping employees engaged and aligned towards your teams’ vision of success. This is, after all, a vision where a team’s success is a combination of delivering on team’s external commitments and realizing the employee growth opportunities.

Let your employees know that their growth objectives are important to you. Work with them to create a development plan with specific milestones and associated success metrics. Iterate over this plan with the aim to be more specific in how objectives and key results are defined.

Maintain a consistent pulse on employee growth.

You already use project management tools like Jira, Trello, or Asana to track project execution. Apply the same methodology to employee growth.

By adopting existing project management practices you leverage well-understood frameworks with their own playbooks and rituals. You can apply Retrospectives, Customer Interviews, Elevator Pitch, Experience Canvas….etc, to execute on an employee growth plan and achieve meaningful results.

What is Actagan?

Here at Actagan, our core drive is increasing the level of engagement and productivity of engineering teams. This means that we provide highly specific solutions that today’s engineering managers can use to further develop their teams.

With Actagan you create a customized development plans for each individual employee. Our platform makes it easy for you to have a repeatable and consistent process around managing employee growth objectives and consistently check employee and organizational alignment towards said objectives.

Actagan helps you instantly boost the level of engagement at your workplace. Once you start utilizing our platform you will discover that your team brings a higher level of energy to work. We are looking forward to working with you. Thank you.

Originally published at https://www.actagan.com on May 10, 2020.

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Actagan
Actagan

Written by Actagan

Helping teams grow and deliver. At Actagan, we help you focus on building relationships and do the tactical work for you. https://www.actagan.com/