8 Authentic Ways To Create A Team Oriented Workplace

Covid has undoubtably created a significant number of challenges in the workplace. One of the most significant challenges facing leaders and peers is the ability to foster a team oriented culture.

I remember the pre-covid days when I could frequently check-in with my coworkers, have more “water-cooler” talks, and be within earshot of the team. Being physically near the team made it so much easier to keep a team-oriented dynamic.

Unfortunately, with the remote and hybrid work models being the new normal, team connections, bonds, and dynamics have declined.

Thankfully, there is hope! The key to fostering a team-oriented culture is to practice a set of habits and behaviors that are carried over from in-person interactions.

In this post, I’ll dive into the behaviors you should practice that encourage team oriented behavior.

I’ll admit that the behaviors below will take intentional practice to adopt and normalize, some may even be uncomfortable depending on the relationship with your peers. However, these behaviors will make a significant positive impact on your team’s dynamics. Let’s first define what being “team-oriented” means.

What Does Team Oriented Mean?

I define being “team-oriented” as having a mindset and behavior that prioritize the goals, success, and well-being of a team over individual interests and achievements.

When you have a group of individuals who are consistently practicing team-oriented behaviors, you are setting up the foundation to be a high-performing team. Being a part of a high-performing team is an incredible professional experience. There is high energy, passion, innovation, and the accomplishment of exceptional results! It’s truly rewarding.

Let’s jump into the behaviors that are critical to being a team-oriented peer and leader.

1. Foster Psychological Safety

Psychological safety has been a trending word the last few years in the professional industry and is a critical component of creating a team-oriented workplace.

Let’s start with the definition of psychological safety. According to Harvard Business Review, it is defined as, “A shared belief held by members of a team that it’s OK to take risks, to express their ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions, and to admit mistakes — all without fear of negative consequences.

It’s a trending term in the modern workplace and millennials are placing it at the top of the lists for team cultures they are looking for.”

Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor and author of The Fearless Organization also describes it as “felt permission for candor”.

Can you think of a time in your career where there was a lack of psychological safety? How did it make you feel when you wanted to share your ideas with your team? How comfortable were your team members with speaking up?

Psychological safety has so much of an impact on teams, that organization who focus on this concept experience the following benefits, according to Accenture:

So what’s the takeaway? Psychological safety has a significant impact on personal well-being.

Furthermore, psychological safety is a foundational anchor that needs to be established on teams before any of the subsequent behaviors are practiced. Start here!

If you are feeling like the team is experiencing a lack of psychological safety, talk it over with a couple of peers first. It’s helpful to hear their thoughts and have a conversation whether they share the same feelings.

From personal experience, my peers have been very receptive to this topic of conversation and were in fact, thankful for broaching the subject with them. If you think it’s an important issue to escalate, have a conversation with your leader on how to create a safer environment to share ideas.

While this is a complex issue that has many different variables, and probably needs it’s own blog post, here are some tips to get started with creating a psychological safe culture:  

• Let people know that you want to encourage more collaboration amongst the team
• Establish a core value that the team is a safe space to communicate thoughts, ideas, and issues
• Ensure everyone feels valued and appreciated
• Slowly embed the tactics below as more evidence of psychological safety is observed.

2. Focus on the Process, Not the People

Issues and conflicts are inevitable in the workplace. In my 12 years of professional experience, I have found that 90% of those issues exist because of good people working in bad processes. Therefore, it’s important to tackle issues with a focus on improving the process, not criticizing, or assuming people are causing the problems.

This is also a core lean continuous philosophy that shows respect for people and assumes they want to do their best work.

Being process focused means you first examine the factors and root causes surrounding the environment that people work in. You default to investigating barriers, forms of waste, inefficiencies, and more before examining if people made an error.  

Here’s an example scenario:

Let’s imagine we have a customer service representative who handles complaints for a tech company. They have a genuine desire to provide exceptional support and resolve their customers issues promptly.

However, the process to resolve customer issues is cumbersome and requires multiple managers and departments to review the issue which causes long waiting periods for the customer.

If an issue or complaint was made about the customer service representatives’ ability to resolve the issue in a timely matter, at first glance we would think this is a people performance issue.

But, if we keep our focus more on the process and less on the person, we can learn, understand, and fix the barriers that are getting in the way of a highly competent customer service representative. In this case we would investigate why so many different managers and departments are required to resolve issues and work to reduce the number needed to thoroughly resolve a customer issue.

Being process focused is not easy and requires a lot more upfront work. However, as stated before, roughly 90% of issues in the workplace are process related. If the team culture is to place blame on people first, it can create a toxic environment that leads to high employee turnover.

There are times when in fact issues are people focused which means that it’s time to give them constructive feedback on their performance. For a detailed explanation on how to do this, see behavior #6.  

3. Be Curious Using Humble Inquiry

Practicing humble inquiry with your team members is a secret weapon for creating strong workplace relationships. The practice of humble inquiry means to approach situations with curiosity and ask open ended questions to learn more.

Think about a situation where you were working with a peer. Did you feel a stronger connection to them when they were telling you what to do or asking for your thoughts and opinions with enthusiasm? Probably the latter, right?

The practice of asking questions to learn naturally makes you a more team-oriented peer. It communicates that you want to learn about other’s ideas, thoughts, preferences, and more.

As a result, it makes you more approachable because it shows that you are also an active listener.

Here are some benefits I have come across and heard from leaders:

Some of the best leaders and peers I’ve encountered in my career practice humble inquiry routinely to the point where it naturally becomes a part of their communication style. Again, it’s a secret weapon for leaders and team-members to build authentic relationships and demonstrate empathy.

For an in-depth post on how to practice humble inquiry in the workplace, check out the article: Humble Inquiry: An Ingenious Way To Build Strong Relationships.

If you’re looking to practice humble inquiry quickly, start with the top 10 questions listed out in the video below:

4. Ask “How I Can Support You?”

Have you ever had a team member proactively ask if you needed any help or support on the work you were doing? How good did that feel to know that your peer or leader was there to provide you with assistance if you needed?

When I get asked this question, it makes me feel like my peers care about my success and well-being. It also encourages me to ask how I can support them in their time of need.

There’s a high chance professionals experience burnout at some point in their careers. In fact, according to a study by TeamStage,

“More than 60% of employees at some point feel work exhaustion but being part of a team eases the effects of it.”

Although this number is high, it strengthens the argument that we should be normalizing supporting our peers in their time of the need. If this is a normal part of team culture, you can rest assured that your peers will be there to support you in your time of need.

I want to acknowledge that to support your peers, you need to ensure that you have the capacity available first. It wouldn’t make sense to help others when you are already overcapacity, which could impact your burnout rate. Put your oxygen mask on first!

Assuming you have capacity and time to support your peers, I highly suggest you get a good sense of what they are working on. Ask them questions about their workload and if they are meeting deadlines or struggling. Then simply ask them, “How can I support you?”

It’s an open-ended question that will create the mental space for them to reflect on what they need. You may get asked to help with a small portion of the project or to provide them with some resources.

Some peers may say they don’t need any support or help at the time, but they will be incredibly grateful that you took the time to ask.

Being proactive and asking other team members what support they need is one of the strongest team-oriented behaviors you can demonstrate. By asking, them what support they need, you will be normalizing this act as a part of the team culture. Start asking this question and watch how you peers will latch onto and practice asking this question more frequently to each other, it’s infectious!

5. Participate in Meaningful Team Building Activities

No, I’m not talking about asking questions to each other like who’s your favorite superhero or doing awkward trust falls in an attempt to better connect. I’m talking about team building activities where you can more deeply learn more about your teammates personally and professionally.

Team building activities that are intended to learn more about each other help peers connect more in the long run which result in stronger team-orientation. Just check out the stats below from TeamStage  on how team building influences employee happiness and productivity.

Get your team started with engaging in authentic and meaningful team building activities by checking out a dedicated post on team building – My Top 5 Team Building Ice Breakers to Connect People, I go into detail on the team building activities that I observed having the most profound impact on being team-oriented. The top 5 are:

1. Create a User Manual For Work
2. Two Truths and a Lie
3. Myers-Briggs Personality Test
4. Marshmallow Challenge
5. Giving 5 to 1 feedback with team members

6. Give Positive and Constructive Feedback to Peers

The concept of giving feedback to peers, especially constructive feedback can seem especially awkward and uncomfortable. It’s a lot easier to give positive feedback because we get to tell people what a great job they are doing.

However, giving constructive feedback does not necessarily result in negative consequences or impact the positive relationships you have with your peers.

High performers typically need to hear constructive feedback to improve their work. They welcome the feedback and adjust their approaches for next time. OakEngage, collected the following data about employee feedback preferences:

I have observed a few things as a result giving honest constructive feedback regularly to team members. It fostered an open and honest communication dynamic. Also, it built trust and created stronger relationships because it showed that I cared about the success and growth of my peers. Lastly, the practice normalized a feedback loop to help both my peer and I to continually improve.

Again, it can be a bit awkward and uncomfortable to deliver constructive feedback, especially if you have never done it before. Here’s some tips I recommend if you are wanting to give feedback to your peers:

1. Let the person know that you have some feedback for them and ask when a good time would be to share it with them. Most professionals prefer to hear feedback 1 on 1, face to face, and in a confidential setting.
2. Let them know that you care about their performance and success.
3. Keep the feedback specific, objective, and professional.
4. Use the 5 to 1 feedback model: It’s approach where you deliver 5 pieces of positive feedback and 1 piece of constructive feedback.
5. Ask what you can do to support them after delivering the feedback.
6. Reinforce that you are welcome to hearing constructive feedback from them and that it is a normal part of a professional working relationship.

A book I recommend for learning how to give feedback is, Crucial Conversations Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High. It gives frameworks, example conversations, and helps you get into the right headspace to give and receive constructive feedback.

7. Challenge Each Other (Respectfully)

It seems counter intuitive that challenging your peers’ ideas is a team-oriented behavior. But, on high-performing teams, it is a norm. Challenging each other’s ideas enables a few key benefits such as: promoting critical thinking, encouraging diversity, and fostering intellectual growth. As a result, a healthy, robust, and intellectual discussion is often had.

It’s important to note though that challenging a peer’s ideas should be done respectfully and constructively. The goal should be to promote healthy dialogue, not to demean, or poke holes in other’s ideas. Additionally, there needs to be an established psychologically safe environment for these discussions to occur.

Appropriately and respectfully challenging each other’s ideas can look like: playing devil’s advocate, offering an alternative idea, or practicing humble inquiry to encourage deeper critical thinking. During my consulting career, when I was on numerous teams, we were expected to challenge each other’s ideas in team meetings.

It fostered collaboration, improved the overall decision-making process, and included diverse perspectives which helped us solve complex problems and achieve tough goals.  

If this is a new dynamic for the team, it can take a while for this practice to normalize. I highly recommend designating someone during team meetings to play the devil’s advocate role (and ensure to rotate the role at each meeting). Even someone offering a differing opinion can open a door that creates space for more diverse discussion.

8. Celebrate Wins and Reflect on Losses

Lastly, one of the most overlooked team-oriented behaviors is to acknowledge and celebrate team wins when they happen. As leaders and peers we get so caught up in the day to day busyness that we forget to stop and celebrate the great work being done.

I remember a leader continuously encouraging the team to recognize and celebrate the great work people were doing. It was a simple yet powerful practice because morale was instantly boosted, and it perpetuated a positive energy environment.

Take initiative in team settings to say, “I want to recognize so and so for the results on this project they have been working on” and “This team member got awesome feedback from a customer, I think everyone should hear it”! Take it a step further and ask if other team members would like to recognize and celebrate the work of others. It’s an infectious behavior that will encourage others to do the same.

Now, let’s talk about how collectively reflecting on losses is also a behavior that will make you more team-oriented. Losses and failures, on all types of teams are inevitable. It’s going to happen, it’s going to feel bad for the group, and morale might even take a hit.

When this happens it’s important to not just throw this experience to the wayside. Again, whether you are a leader or a team member, encouraging setting up a safe space in a team meeting where the team can air out their feelings. There is a lot of learning and growth that happens when teams reflect together.

I encourage you to lead your team or peers through a reflection exercise when a goal isn’t met or something needs improvement. It’s a discussion that may feel taxing at the beginning but from past experience, it can be one of the most energizing activities a team can do. It can create a spark that propagates a continuous improvement mindset.

Closing Thoughts

As you can see from the list above, being team-oriented is a constellation of behaviors that must be practiced consistently and deliberately. You of course won’t see changes in your team’s dynamics right away but overtime, you will start to see evidence of a high-performing team culture.

The team will begin achieving exceptional results, there will be a boost in personal growth, team members will be more engaged & motivated, and there will be stronger relationships and trust.

It’s an incredibly rewarding experience to be a part of a high-performing team. The energy, commitment, and passion you have for the work and towards your teammates are beyond words.  It’s something that I hope all of you reading this will get to experience in your professional careers.

So don’t wait for a leader or another peer to create this culture shift, you now have the tools to lead a lasting change for your team!