Genuine, healthy connections among team members are important for a company to overcome challenges and grow. Regardless of your role in the organization, you can connect with your co-workers and go beyond the formal interactions.
Such genuine personal connections result in a more dedicated team that contributes to business success. Here are some effective ways to make connections at work.
1. Create Opportunities During the Workday
Introduce some fun activities in the middle of meetings. Ask the team members to share something about themselves. It is a great way to build connection and trust. Once you know about the passion of different people in the company, you can plan some events where members spend quality time with each other.
Team lunches can be held and include structured activities to give such results. Create cross-functional teams that work on a project to strengthen bonds between members.
2. Make it Easy to Celebrate
Cultivating a culture of effortless recognition and celebration is an ideal way to make employees feel appreciated. Give each of them the chance to celebrate their own way. Let your employees reward each other. Asking them to reward other members builds a higher performance than when rewarded individually. Such an act of appreciating one another can build strong connections.
3. Create a Sense of Belonging
Let each team member feel safe and comfortable in the workplace. Achieve this by creating an open, warm and welcoming environment. Build a family-like culture.
Make a habit of sharing photos and stories on a regular basis to keep the personal tone at work. Hosting social events is another way to let people know each other and connect in light settings.
4. Give Everybody a Voice
Let each member of the team contribute and connect. Provide easy ways for dispersed members to participate in the conversation.
Create and use tools that allow staff members to provide their suggestions and opinions. This keeps the employees talking, makes new connections and keeps the culture vibrant.
5. Treat the Organization as a Community
People in a community are respected, supported and loved. It is where goals are shared and work unified. Thinking of your organization this way makes it easier to support connections.
Turn your organization into a community by finding ways to promote engagement and entertainment through charity events, social events and company events. Hosting an annual award event to recognize the contributions to the community is also a great way to make new connections.
6. Challenge Traditional Frameworks
Stepping out of the comfort zone is all that sometimes people need to build a strong connection. It is possible that some aspects of your organization are held back by the process due to resistance to change. One way is to change the meeting approach to something modern and advanced.
You can consider moving pre-meeting prep and chat to discussion forums, assigning meeting time to critical discussions to save valuable time. This can make you more efficient, targeted and productive in terms of projects, communication and initiatives.
These are some of the best ways to create genuine connections among team members. Do share your suggestions and experiences with us!
