The 12 dimensions of a healthy and productive team.

Key Tips for Building a Productive and Engaged?Team.

In today's fast-paced and ever-changing workplace, trust, conflict resolution, enjoyment, and a sense of belonging are crucial for building a successful team.

These aspects of teamwork not only contribute to the happiness and well-being of team members but also affect the overall productivity and performance of the team. In this post, we will discuss the essential elements of a successful team, including commitment, accountability, productivity, stress management, learning, growth, and guidance, and how focusing on results can help teams achieve their goals. We will also explore the role of managers in creating a supportive and inclusive work environment that fosters teamwork and collaboration. Let's dive in and explore how these elements can help your team thrive.

There are 12 dimensions that we measure to evaluate whether a team is engaged, healthy, and productive:?

In this post, I will briefly go over some of these dimensions and how leaders and managers can ensure that their team stays engaged, healthy, and productive.

Trust and Conflict.

Trust starts from the top. Leaders who don’t show humility, admit their mistakes, or acknowledge their lack of knowledge generally don’t create spaces where teams can trust each other. That’s often the first sign of a lack of trust. Any manager needs to start by being a role model, being vulnerable, trustworthy, humble, and acknowledging the unknown. Without a space where teams can trust each other, conflicts can become unhealthy.

Tips for managers to enable trust and constructive and healthy conflict:

1. Repeat on multiple occasions how important it is to have conflict to ensure the team can produce the best possible outcome.
2. Promote debates and ensure people who start healthy and productive debates are rewarded, as well as those who are not afraid to say “no” or propose opposite ideas.
3. Encourage team members to engage and not retreat from debates.

Fostering Enjoyment at work.

Managers should prioritize measuring and fostering enjoyment and fun among their team members. This can be done by evaluating enjoyment at work, relationships with colleagues, and work-life balance. To create a?plan for the team, managers can consider physical, social, intellectual, cultural, and creative activities, as well as the work environment.

Additionally, when evaluating work-life balance, managers should be open to discussing?factors outside of work, such as family life, spiritual activities, and personal goals.

Metrics for enjoyment can be measured as?unsatisfactory, underdeveloped, or satisfactory.?It’s important to note that?enjoyment levels can fluctuate?based on factors such as?workload and personal priorities.?Therefore, enjoyment should be evaluated holistically, taking into account how the employee feels overall at work and whether they are happy in their role. This may involve finding the right working rhythm for a team member, effective communication, or providing challenging work to ensure employee happiness. It’s crucial to recognize that enjoyment should not be limited to typical team building or social activities at work.

Sense of belonging.

Belonging at Work: Why It Matters and How Managers Can Create It.

Social belonging is a fundamental human need hardwired into our DNA. And yet,?40% of people say that they feel isolated at work, resulting in lower organizational commitment and engagement. In a nutshell, companies are missing the mark, spending nearly 8 billion dollars each year on diversity and inclusion (D&I) trainings? that neglect our need to feel included. Humans are so fundamentally social that we can even bond with strangers over the very experience of not having anyone with whom to bond. Belonging is not only a human need, but it’s also good for business.

If workers feel like they belong, companies can reap substantial bottom-line benefits. High belonging was linked to a?whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days.? These strategies can help workers navigate tricky workplace dynamics and drive their own version of change, especially when the system isn’t working for everyone. Leaders and organizations should invite employee feedback and take it seriously; this behavior is a cornerstone of inclusive companies. Workers need to feel like they belong to something they value and have the power to bring about change when needed. Here are a few tips for managers to create a sense of belonging:

1. Invite everyone to speak during meetings and show?admiration, curiosity, and respect.
2. Strive for a workplace culture in which individuality is noticed and valued. Demonstrate care for all employees and provide routine opportunities for check-ins. Workplace support, understanding, and trust reduce the likelihood of an individual feeling like an outsider.?Source .
3. Encourage employees to?value what each person can bring to the table?by caring for one another,?advocating for everyone’s voice to be heard,?and?investing in their colleagues’ growth and development.
4. Ensure everyone understands each other’s roles, responsibilities, and the value they provide to the team.
5. Spend 5–8 minutes of a meeting learning about each other and finding commonalities among the team members.
6. Define your team’s culture and identity:?create ceremonies, team routines and rituals that bring them together.?Culture ?comprises a few specific elements: artifacts, stories, rituals, heroes, symbols, beliefs, attitudes and values.

Here is an example of how I recommend team start the discussion about culture. Start by asking the team to define their superpowers.

Continue the session and discuss things like: Values,Beliefs, Norms, Stories, and what are the common things this culture needs to be happy(sun).

Commitment.

To ensure teams commit, leaders and team managers need to be able to communicate the goals of the business and help team members understand how their job aligns with the business’s ability to achieve those goals. Here are a few tools and principles that managers can follow and measure:

1. At the end of meetings, invite team members to review key decisions and actions and ensure they agree on what needs to be done and a due date for each task.
2. Clearly define the direction and the priorities.
3. Align around common objectives.
4. Define clear deadlines and respect those dates with discipline. Ensure you always provide a due date every time you commit to do something for someone and ask team members to provide one as well when they are committing to a task.
5. The leader or manager should always push and encourage the team to close issues and get to a resolution.
6. Review mistakes and discuss how you can learn from them.
7. Ensure team members feel confident enough to move and take certain action without hesitation and are comfortable changing direction.

Accountability.

A healthy and productive team shows up for their colleagues and managers by holding themselves accountable for their work and holding one another accountable. This demonstrates respect among team members and the high expectations they have for each other’s performance. By pushing each other to grow and cooperate, they ensure everyone’s success.

To create an environment of accountability, leaders and managers need to lead by example and follow these tips:

1. Publicly clarify what each team member?needs to achieve,?who needs to deliver,?and?what is expected from everyone to succeed.
2. Ensure all team members can communicate whenever necessary and regularly with transparency. This does not mean adding more meetings to the calendar or having daily check-ins to ensure people are meeting expectations, but rather having the ability to monitor progress and asking openly about how they feel about their objectives.
3. Reward team achievements and not (only) just individual performance.

Leaders and managers can use the following phrase to?foster accountability?and encourage team members to do their best:?“I expect this from you because I admire you, and I believe that with your help, we can achieve great things.”

You can also keep a list with all the objectives (include instructions and expectations) and define who is accountable for each tasks or outcome and when each outcome should be deliver. Multiple tasks and outcomes should be delivered on weekly basis.

Maintaining Productivity & Performance.

When it comes to productivity, managers need to have defined metrics to evaluate how long it takes to deliver results and how many results are delivered on a weekly or monthly basis. The first step to evaluate how productive a team is involves asking the team questions?like,?“How productive do you feel you’ve been this past week?”?or?“Are you productive or just busy?”?This self-reporting of productivity is important to?compare with the actual results and to identify any misalignments between the team’s perspective and the actual work.?Ultimately, the goal is to evaluate whether team members are delivering value.

It is essential for managers to?provide rules and tips to help employees manage their time efficiently?and learn?how to be productive.?It is important that team members can define how they want to?organize their time?and save time for urgent and important tasks based on their work preferences. Secondly, it is key that team members can say “no” to urgent requests coming from other team members.

Another example is?how people organize their time.?For example, people often do what they like to do first and the things they don’t like after. We tend to do what we know how to do quickly first and then leave all the difficult tasks for later. Here are a few?rules?that can help the team:

1. Create a list of things you want to get done today.
2. Organize your tasks and do the most important things first and the urgent tasks later. Use your energy to focus on tasks that require more attention and thought process whenever your energy level is higher. Leave tasks that take your energy and don’t require as much focus for when your energy is low, like responding to emails or joining an informative call where you are not involved.
3. Identify tasks that will only take a few minutes so that you know which tasks you should be tackling whenever you have a few minutes.
4. Block some of your time to ensure you have enough focus time for important tasks.
5. Ask for and provide deadlines always. Be always clear on when people can expect things from you and make sure you know when people need things from you so that there is no misinterpretation.
6. All recurring or routine meetings should be done at the end of the day.
7. Sometimes it is a good idea to stand during short meetings to keep them short because if you feel comfortable, you may stay longer.
8. Maintain control of your day; don’t let others put too many activities on your calendar (whenever possible).
9. Say “no” to meetings or information overload.

Give everyone a sense of purpose & value.

Employees seek personal value and purpose at work, but often they don’t understand their own strengths and weaknesses. It is important that?managers coach and support team members to help them define and identify their purpose?and the?value they bring to the workplace.?There are a few ways in which the team manager can support the team:

• Explain and provide?clarity on the role and the expected results of the role’s efforts.
• Provide support to ensure team members?feel in control and have everything they need to achieve their objectives and deliver results.
• Connect the team with the results.?This means that all team members get to explore and see the results of their work.
• Create and lead from a place of trust. That means the leader trusts the team when their?actions and words are congruent.?It also means the manager will be fair and create a?fair environment?for everyone.
• Leaders should have?admiration and interest in the work?and achievements of others.
• It is important that leaders and team members are aware of their competencies and strengths and the knowledge and skills required for each activity.

Identify stress factors and help your team manage their stress.

Identifying stress factors and helping the team manage stress can significantly improve their performance and overall well-being. Managers should be able to identify stress factors and provide solutions to improve the team’s ability to manage their time effectively.

There are four key factors of stress: Time factors, encounter factors, situational factors, and anticipatory factors.

Time factors:

• High work overload
• Lack of control

Encounter factors:

• Role conflicts
• Conflicts about events or specific issues
• Conflicts of interaction

Situational factors:?Situational factors include bureaucratic and slow processes, lack of recognition, and poor communication.

• Work conditions
• Rapid change

Anticipatory factors:

• Undesirable expectations
• Lack of fairness.

Time factors include high work overload and lack of control. Encounter factors refer to role conflicts, conflicts about events or specific issues, and conflicts of interaction. Anticipatory factors involve undesirable expectations and lack of fairness.

Managers can?help their teams manage stress by implementing several strategies.?Firstly, they can create guidelines to help team members manage their time more efficiently. This includes creating delegation plans and delegating extra work to other team members. Secondly, collaboration and team training can improve the team’s overall productivity and reduce stress levels. Thirdly, emotional intelligence training can help team members better manage their emotions and improve communication.

Redesigning work processes can also help reduce stress levels. This includes establishing clear goals and defining and celebrating small wins.

Here is a quick overview:

• Create guidelines to help team members manage their time more efficiently.
• Collaboration and team training.
• Emotional intelligence training.
• Redesigning work, roles, and processes.
• Establishing clear goals
• Defining and celebrating small wins.

Additionally, managers can?help team members prioritize tasks effectively.?For example, team members should?prioritize important tasks rather than urgent?ones and?focus on results rather than methods.

In conclusion, managers can help reduce stress levels in their teams by identifying stress factors and implementing effective strategies. By doing so, team members can manage their time effectively and prioritize important tasks, resulting in improved productivity and overall well-being.

Managers and leaders can access our toolkit and find team retros, questions for your 1:1s and team surveys to measure stress levels.

Principles of Communication for Guidance, Growth, and Support.

The best leaders base their leadership style on?congruent communication.?This means that?verbal and nonverbal communication is aligned — and needs to adjust to what each individual team member is feeling or thinking.?It also implies being honest, providing feedback and communicating effectively.

Here are a few principles to?guide the team and communicate effectively. These tips can help managers provide better feedback:

• Communication should be?descriptive?and not evaluative. Instead of saying, “You are not doing a good job,” say,?“This month, you have only completed half of your objectives, and I am worried about our current velocity and productivity. This has also affected the client as they have expressed dissatisfaction. I would like to help you identify the obstacles.”?Start by describing objectively the activity or behavior that needs to change, explain what happened, describe the consequences, or how it has affected others, and provide an alternative.
• Communication should?focus on the problem?and not the person.?People-focused communication?centers on the characteristics of the person, while?problem-focused communication?should be linked to standards that have been accepted by the team, rules, or expectations and less on personal opinions or preferences.
• Communication should help?validate?team members instead of?invalidating them.?Communication that invalidates team members affects their self-esteem and often gives a perception of superiority or insensitivity. Avoid making complex problems simple and generalizing them. Instead — create space for growth and admiration.
• Communication should be?specific?and not generic. Generic communication is useless. You have to be specific. The more specific your message is, the more effective it will be.
• Communication requires?active listening and is bidirectional.

Help your team define their goals and guide them and support them during that growth.

Lastly, provide guidance and helps your team understand your expectations. This can be easily done by asking the team to archive a milestone and provide and example or a template and even providing instructions.?

This is easily done in Nova.?For example, if your team often builds a marketing plan?, or needs to define a new epic or initiate for a product or needs to onboard a new client, you can easily share a template with your tips and instructions.?

Learning and “intellectual” challenges.

You may be working in environments and organizations where tasks are being accomplished, but you aren’t growing or utilizing most of your skills. It is crucial for a company to provide an environment where teams can balance completing work, exploring new ways to perform tasks or opportunities to innovate and create, as well as a space where they can learn from peers or managers. If all these things are happening, team members can grow, learn from peers or managers, and have time to explore new ways of doing things, innovate, and be creative, making the organization or manager an excellent learning space where team members often feel fulfilled.

In addition to these, some managers may also offer credits for learning outside of work or support employees going back to school. While this is a benefit for the team, it is essential for the manager to focus on internal learning and how team members feel about their intellectual growth on a monthly basis. It’s crucial to ensure that team members’ skills and knowledge are being challenged regularly.

Focus on ‘results’.

Are there any instances where your team is not taking action towards achieving results? How often do team members wait for someone’s approval or come up with reasons for why tasks are not completed, such as “I don’t have enough information” or “I am waiting to hear from Jack”? Leaders and managers need to cultivate a mindset that prioritizes results in order to ensure team members focus on achieving them. If team members sense that their leaders value things other than results, they may begin to prioritize those things instead. To stay focused on?results, team members and managers must?publicly commit to achieving them and work with passion and dedication.?This often involves figuring out the details of a task and adopting a proactive mindset.?It is crucial that leaders lead by example and?reward those who make contributions toward goals and those results.

Moreover, leaders and managers need to measure, compare, and reevaluate results and goals.?Managers can provide each team member with a weekly or biweekly list of specific goals that need to be achieved and define the?results that are expected from each team member.?In a team environment, all team members should have clear objectives of what they need to achieve every week, along with the?expected deliverables and results.

Create a disposition for positive change.

To lead?positive change, managers need to?enable human potential.?With positive change, individuals and teams?experience appreciation, collaboration, engagement, and the significance and value of their work.?It focuses on?creating abundance, well-being, and positive change to help others recognize change from the heart and mind, but ultimately shown by actions.

To be able to implement positive change, leaders need the following capabilities:

• Ability to establish a?positive environment for the team:?A positive atmosphere is where there is space for compassion, mistakes, and gratitude. It’s also important to recognize and support those who are implementing change by example and bring a positive energy to work.
• Create the conditions to create change.
• Communicate a vision of abundance:?To be able to do that, the leader will have to establish role models, define events as indicators of this new vision, and create a language that is inspiring, passionate and reinforces that change.
• Get people committed to that vision.

While managers implement changes and improvements, it is important for them to?identify when a team does not have the environment or resources they need to succeed.?There are signs that help managers identify if the team will stay healthy, be productive, and successfully grow by evaluating if they are:

• Working in silos, making people duplicate work and creating a lot of resentment and frustration.
• Making all decisions from the top-down, and if during discussions, the highest-paid person speaks first and the loudest, or if there is open communication and healthy conflict.
• Exhibiting artificial harmony, where everything is always good, and everyone is doing great. This can show that people are not being genuine, or that there is no trust.
• Feeling disengaged, and having poor commitment to goals and results. Often, team members value things done instead of results.

To ensure the team has the?necessary resources and environment to succeed, managers can take steps to encourage collaboration, communication, and healthy conflict. By identifying these signs, managers can intervene early and help teams become?more productive and successful.

Use one of our team health surveys and evaluate how well are you supporting your team by using our "self-evaluation checklist for managers".

You can find this and other surveys and tools at Nova.

Learn more about tools and templates for managers at Nova —?www.novatools.org

Created by Ro Fernandez, CEO and Co-Founder at Nova and Director of Product at PlayMPE and Destiny Media.