Team spirit, how to keep it alive?

A team is the most important thing in both business and sports. It is the lowest level of organizational structure that needs a special attention to make your business a success. It is the place where your company culture will be defined and practiced. That is why we need to focus on the team.

Instead of pushing values and processes from top of the organization to the lowest levels, we should focus on building a culture, practices and spirit in a team level, from the lowest level of your organization to the top.

But how to build up and maintain the team spirit?

Surprisingly the most important part of the team spirit is humor. It encapsulates the essence of the team spirit. If there is no common understanding about what is humorous and how to express it inside the team then there are challenges in building the team spirit.

In our Scrum team in Nokia Oulu site we try to keep good humor alive. One example of this is our way to reward and show appreciation; in our daily stand-up we give a circulating "Well Done! Thank You!" badge together with applause to any team member(s) that have completed their task (or have fixed some problem), the more complicated task the bigger applause ;) 

Yes, it does not cost anything, gets smile on everybody's face and is a nice way to appreciate the good work.