13 December 2024
As a coach, how can you help strengthen team spirit? When Covid hit, researchers, epidemiologists and practitioners were caught up in a frenzy of collaboration. It was a perfect example of what we call collective intelligence. Thanks to this production of shared knowledge; they were able to eradicate the pandemic.
In the world of business, this form of collaboration is far from having revealed its full potential. At a time when employee commitment is waning due to remote working, enabling teams to work on a common project is a good way of strengthening team spirit. It is by being united around the same objective that a team can continue to be cohesive and motivated. There are many ways of doing this: creating communities of people on digital platforms or pilot groups on a given subject to encourage employees to share their ideas with their peers.
Although this is not a new idea, it proves to be extremely effective when teams meet less often because of the widespread use of teleworking. Team-building activities, preferably face-to-face, are essential in a hybrid organization. Managers should organize team-building sessions at least twice a year. They could also organize learning expeditions or hackathons. The latter is an event during which specialists come together for several days to work on a collaborative project. Originally, the concept was aimed at IT specialists. Today, it has been extended to all other sectors. All these initiatives enable teams to create new links and strengthen team spirit.
The more remote the work organization, the more frequent these collective moments need to be to strengthen team spirit. If the context does not allow them to be organized face-to-face, offering online team games is a less effective but nonetheless interesting option. Managers need to pay even more attention to their posture. Face-to-face, ideas are expressed naturally within a team. This is less true when teams are working remotely. Managers should continue to schedule individual feedback and development reviews on a regular basis.
On our side, as coaches, we can help our enterprise customers to strengthen the team spirit internally by proposing team coaching sessions.
If you’d like to offer your customers a new team coaching experience,
you can find in our shop a kit proposing new practical ideas and tools:
train and lead – 7 tools for team coaching
(cc) Outilsducoach 2024, articles may be freely copied and distributed subject to mention and link to the original source.
As a subscriber, you will receive a regular newsletter specially written by our team of international coaches to help you develop as a coach.