The key to successful businesses is successful teams.
In the perfect world, every organization would be full of teams who communicate effectively and are aligned on a common goal that drives organizational success— without fail. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
If you’re wondering how to drive performance in a team, then this article is for you!
If your team can’t work together, isn’t motivated or can’t meet their goals causing productivity to diminish and conflict to arise, it’s time to take a step back and invest in new strategies. Fortunately, you’re already on the right track by reading this article.
Keep reading to learn the key ways your company can break through ineffective team dynamics and create high performing teams to achieve overall success for the company and your team members.
What is a High Performance Team?
High performance teams are teams that are goal-focused with high-level skills in a specific area of work. These high performance teams always strive for excellence and continuously collaborate, innovate and have high productivity.
Basically, high performance teams are the gold standard. Let’s dive into how you can build high performance teams that will achieve superior results for your business.
How to Transform Your Team Into a High Performance Team
The following strategies will help improve your team’s performance and drive success.
1. Create Team Collaboration Meetings
Regardless of the work you do, collaboration is everything. Collaboration plays a significant role in success and is crucial to effective problem-solving. So, how can your team collaborate?
Collaboration can be found in a variety of tasks in the workplace. One of the most common collaboration strategies is having brainstorming meetings with your team. Brainstorming requires a team effort to make effective decisions that positively affect your work. Here are some essential tips in having an effective collaboration meeting:
- Set a clear goal or agenda for the meeting
- Have the group prepare ideas prior to the meeting
- Don’t criticize any idea that your team brings to the table
- Encourage your team to be open and creative with their ideas
- Stay focused on the main objective of the meeting
Employee engagement through brainstorming meetings can help your whole team become confident and trust in one another when discussing complex problems. Research shows that 86% of employees blame the lack of collaboration as the top reason for workplace failure. Working together helps increase team morale and investment in the common team goal.
2. Set Clear Goals for Your Team Members
Creating goals will provide your team with focus and direction. Having clear objectives and expectations for your teams helps them grow and drives motivation throughout the department.
It’s no secret that setting goals is crucial to employee success, but learning how to identify and achieve goals is what drives performance. At times, you may realize that your current plans aren’t achievable or even limit the potential of your teams. Taking the time to continuously assess and rebuild your goals is essential to help your teams succeed.
Here are some key strategies to help you when you restructure your goals and create a clear picture for your team:
- Evaluate the company’s goals, and then evaluate what your team needs to achieve in order to reach these goals.
- Find a good mix of small goals that are easy to check off so your team can build momentum and larger goals that your team can strive for in the long-term.
- Make sure these goals are attainable or you will have trouble motivating your teams.
- Once you have your goals set in mind, develop a strategy to implement them.
- Provide reasoning for your goals, so your team fully understands the objective.
- Motivate and encourage your team to achieve these goals.
- Follow up with your teams on their progress on a consistent basis.
- Encourage and support your team to meet these goals or targets.
- Ensure your team knows that you are there to support them with their goals.
- Consider how you can remove roadblocks to help your team on their path towards success.
- Once they have completed or reached their goals, provide them with relevant feedback on their work.
- This may be completed in a quarterly review or a planned meeting.
- Help employees understand where they have excelled and where there is room for improvement.
- As your teams start succeeding, provide them with larger goals that will help drive performance and help them achieve further team success.
Setting and achieving goals does not happen overnight. This process may take weeks, months or even years, so it’s important to identify and celebrate milestones along the way.
3. Celebrate Team Success
Ensure that when your team accomplishes important milestones or projects, you celebrate them. Team recognition can help your team understand the complementary skills they bring to the table and feel valued under your direction.
You may choose to show recognition to your team members by providing them with positive reinforcement as they achieve goals or complete tasks. There are many ways that you can develop a “team success” strategy. Here are two ideas that may help you celebrate team success:
- Create a medal system
- Establish a system to provide co-workers with a medal or certificate based on how well they performed that quarter. You may identify a few different award categories that align with your key organizational or team goals and values and select the top performers for each category.
- Performance reviews
- Develop a plan that analyzes your team members’ performance. This may include anonymous evaluation from the department on how well they felt each person performed in areas like decision making, focus, organization, communication and their overall roles and responsibilities. It’s also important to give team members the opportunity to assess themselves and how well they think they performed so you can evaluate the alignment or divergence between the two assessments.
Celebrating success can boost confidence and motivate your team, making for a more efficient and effective working environment. This will inevitably improve team success while performance increases amongst the group. These processes aim to provide effective feedback to help your teams perform better and become a high performing team.
4. Create a Solid Communication Strategy
Communication is everything when it comes to creating and retaining strong relationships in the workplace. Having an open communication policy where your team can come to you with any concerns or questions that they may have will ensure that everyone is always on the same page.
For example, one strategy that may help drive performance is a regular discussion with each team member. Take time out of your week to meet with individuals or departments to discuss their challenges, address questions, and listen to them. These meetings may be as short as 10 minutes long, but help bring that connection between you and your team.
According to Access Perks, 90% of workers claimed they are likely to stay at a company that provides feedback and takes feedback with an open door policy. This suggests that teams work best when given feedback on precisely what they need to improve on.
5. Provide a Comfortable Working Environment
Providing a physically and mentally comfortable working environment is essential for a team member to succeed and show continuous improvement within their role.
When you provide a space for your team to work in, ensure that it at least has windows, comfortable seating, and good lighting. This will help your team stay focused and drive overall performance.
According to Harvard Business Review, 47% of employees feel tired from the absence of natural light in their office, and 43% feel gloomy if there is no natural light. Meaning, if you can provide your employees with a comfortable and bright space, they are more likely to be motivated and perform well.
With the physical office space kept in mind, it is also of equal importance to provide a positive and welcoming atmosphere. This type of office space will help build trust, mutual respect, drive motivation, keep spirits high and allow your team to feel valued.
6. Motivate your Teams
It’s not a surprise that motivation drives high performing teams and helps your team members achieve success. You must help spark inspiration within your team and develop strategies to ensure employees feel motivated throughout their employment.
When you hire your employees, ensure they have the potential to stay motivated throughout their entire careers. You can’t force motivation on those who aren’t intrinsic motivators, but you can inspire and stir up inspiration for those who need that extra push from time to time.
Motivation can be bolstered in many different ways. For example, you can motivate your teams by:
- Providing a pleasant working environment.
- Having strong leaders and managers that provide employees with clear expectations.
- Setting up regular evaluation meetings for your employees.
- Creating effective communication strategies.
- Investing in team-building activities.
- Offering additional perks or benefits, and more!
7. Foster an Environment of Continuous Learning
Providing an environment that values continuous learning will help your teams evolve concurrently. Continuous learning within the workplace will ensure your employees are up-to-date with the latest and greatest strategies to perform at their full potential. It can help your team members develop new skills and increase their knowledge to continue to grow and develop unique strengths within their roles.
There are a variety of ways to foster an environment of continuous learning in the workplace. This may consist of allowing your employees to attend conferences during work hours and providing your employees with an allowance to complete additional certificates or classes.
According to Lorman, 87% of workers believe learning and developing are essential for growth within the workplace. Continuous learning will provide employees with the necessary information and skills to grow and succeed in their roles.
8. Introduce Team Coaching
Team coaching is a very effective practice in creating high performing teams. Team coaching helps strengthen, improve and organize your team members. It focuses heavily on the team’s dynamic and enhances the performance of the collective.
Here are a few of the benefits of team coaching:
- Fosters a culture of continuous learning and development to increase the collective knowledge base of the team.
- Helps you fast track team synergy.
- Provides specific tips, tricks and new techniques tailored to each individual team.
- Strengthens relationships between team members, leading to more efficient and collaborative projects.
When investing in team coaching, it’s essential to select a coaching program with proven success helping teams realize their full potential. At Bright Wire, our high-performance team coaching programs have been designed and honed over the past two decades. We have a long history of helping Canadian organizations and leaders increase team performance and drive tangible results.
Improve Team Performance With Bright Wire
Bright Wire has specialized expertise to help your team members shine while improving morale, motivation, and cohesion in your workplace. Our Team Coaching programs will provide you with various strategies to collaborate effectively, create team goals, celebrate success, create solid communication and more.
Regardless of the size of your team or how long the team has been working together, we can work with you to make everything click again. Don’t hesitate to reach out; let us help you drive performance and achieve team success. Contact us today!
