Businesses are the most successful when they have diverse teams of professionals who are able to develop their skills, work together productively and generate new ideas.
By definition, team development is about providing resources and training that your employees need in order to continuously improve their work quality, workflows and their relationships with each other. Stronger skills and competences can result in a more resilient and motivated team. Besides, figuring out how your team works, identifying their skills and potential fields of advancement are an effective way to show both your dedication for further innovation and appreciation of your employees.
Organization can maximize the output of their teams, see their alignment with the business strategy and track the performance of their employees by implementing a great performance management plan. So in this article, we will look into top business practices for the improvement of your teams and its members.
In this article, we'll cover:
Characteristics of High Performing Teams
Before jumping into practice of improving teams’ performance, it is always a good approach to define the goals of your team. What do you want to improve? Which ways do you want to grow in? Among the defining characteristics of high performing teams are the following:
- 😊 Sense of purpose, common goals;
- 💬 Successful communication;
- 🤝 Trust and respect;
- 🦎 Flexibility and adaptability;
- 📚 Continuous learning.
By examining your team based on these traits, you can determine the focal points of your further model of implementation.
Best Practices for Team Performance
When researching the ways of improving your team for the first time, you might get lost in where to start among the many books, tutorials and recommendations. Overall, the literature tends to differentiate between four phases of team performance management model.
- Planning phase: developing strategies for effective teams;
- Monitoring phase: implementation of strategies and tracking of the performance;
- Reviewing phase: evaluation of the team overall improvement;
- Rewarding phase: rewarding team performance for employee encouragement and motivation.
All four of them are highly integrated and depend on the successful completion of each other. Developing your team based on this cycle can further guide you to a more structured and refined approach to the whole process.
Professionals skills development
Professional training is important to develop in own field and expertise, but that’s not all. To truly integrate employees into a team, there’s also a need for cross-department skills sharing. Cross-training and job shadowing is a great investment into the workforce. They aim to build more diverse skills for employees and, in some cases, can even result in job rotation. By getting to know how different parts of the company function and practice in the tasks of their coworkers, employees develop an understanding of others’ competences, and it becomes increasingly easier to work together. Therefore, professional training expands individual employee’s knowledge base and contributes to efficiency, but also leads to better collaboration, creativity and agility of the team.
A few other ideas for professional development can also be watching webinars together, participating in professional conferences, forums and events or mentorship and coaching within the company. These tactics in SupportYourApp help us deliver our services more professionally and continue developing our workforce together with the innovations of the market.
Personal skills development and conflict management
Although soft skills are not rocket science, they should not be neglected in the process of team training either. According to Indeed, commonly, people try to become better in one of these: communication, problem-solving, self-confidence, agility and adaptability, leadership. Personal traits and qualities are highly useful for individuals – except from self-fulfillment, they can also lead to career advancements. Real-time training or webinars are great tools for personal skills training, while social and psychological games that can be run within teams can improve communication between their members.
Personal skill development is very important for our consultants teams at SupportYourApp, as it helps them to learn from each other and deliver the highest quality service. We focus specifically on emotional intelligence, empathy and problem-solving.
📗 Book club as a common ground for high performing teams
Individuals often come from very diverse backgrounds and getting everybody to produce one coherent product can be quite challenging. To resolve this matter, a corporate book club has been an interesting practice to keep everyone in tune. At SupportYourApp, the management team participates in a book club. Every month, we pick a book to read and by the end of it discuss it all together. Besides participating in a great team-building activity, they acquire a set of knowledge about new managerial techniques, learn psychology to better motivate their teams or find out new methods of mentorship. Not only this builds the common ground for communication, information from books can be utilized for both personal and professional growth.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about team development is that this is not a one-time decision. In order to be truly effective, improvements must be embedded into your company’s culture and done continuously, and their effectiveness must be reviewed regularly. In SupportYourApp we constantly keep our teams up to date with the latest information in their respective fields. We also invest in personal development of every team member in order to provide the highest quality service to all of our clients.
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