Building Success: 5 Traits of a Winning Team

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

How to Get the Most from Your Employees and Make Clients Happy

Having a happy team and happy customers is a major goal for most businesses. Without satisfaction within and outside your company, remaining a healthy, profitable entity is next to impossible. In fact, the reason most employees leave a job is not money—but rather dissatisfaction within the company culture. And further, clients who interact with positive, satisfied employees are more likely to become satisfied themselves.

So how can you do it? Follow the seemingly simple steps below that MyOffice has been following for years— with the measured results of a 96% overall satisfaction rating by customers and employees.

With check lists, org charts and performance reviews aside, MyOffice has found some basic tenets of human interaction to be the most powerful tools in building their winning team and to solidifying customer relationships:

Reinforce Winning Behaviors

MyOffice focuses on five core behaviors to maintain a healthy work environment. And good behaviors are reinforced with spot bonuses, handwritten notes with small gift cards, and old-fashioned pats on the back from executive staff.

Encourage and Reward Winning Behaviors

1. Request Changes Instead of Complaining.
   It's so easy to complain about inefficiencies or lack of follow through from a co-worker. Coach your team to take a critical eye toward a situation and request changes to improve it. When finding themselves in this position, instead of criticizing or complaining, MyOffice encourages employees to use that energy toward improvement.
2. Speak to Each Other with Respect.
   Talking to colleagues with a tone of respect instead of annoyance or condescension encourages collaboration, and limits negative feelings like resentment that can poison a team’s spirit.
3. Listen Actively.
   Listening intently requires active participation. MyOffice asks employees to make sure they listen to each other and always “check for understanding”—meaning, reiterating what your colleague said and making sure the intent, action plan, and desired result are clear between both parties. The MyOffice team uses the language: “If you say Blue, I want to know if it is Baby Blue or Navy Blue - and will check for that understanding”
4. Empower Each Other.
   Empowerment doesn’t have to come only from management. Empowerment also emerges out of encouragement from peers. MyOffice rewards team members who encourage their colleagues to do their best and help to work through challenging situations. Empowering behavior is so important at MyOffice that employees who demonstrate the team focused behavior earn a “Blue Angel coin”—an award that is revered within MyOffice culture.
5. Maintain an Attitude of Gratitude.
   Everyone on the team plays a unique role in the team’s success. Like MyOffice, you can coach your team to appreciate their coworkers for what they each bring to the table—and to use individual strengths to make the team as powerful as possible.

Call Out Defeating Behaviors

1. Seeking to “Be Right” or “Win”.
   Is winning the argument that important? What damage might it do to morale? Train your team players to pick their battles, and not to make “winning” the ultimate goal, but rather mutual understanding and getting the job done right.
2. Trying to Control Behavior of Others.
   MyOffice trains its staff to be vigilant and to help each other—but not to control what others do. Since we only have ultimate control over our own behavior, MyOffice has found that using an employee rating system where the employees anonymously rate each other on a monthly basis helps to contribute to team accountability.
3. Over Communicating.
   Who needs to know… and who doesn’t? precise and concise communication of the right information to the right people ensures success. MyOffice has found that over-cc’ing people on emails makes work inefficient. In addition, over-communication refers to sharing feelings/thoughts with the wrong people—instead of going straight to the source. This can lead to gossip and mixed messages—a perfect recipe for an unhappy team.
4. Retaliation for Wrongs.
   Feeling like a coworker slighted you, or caused your work product to be less than it could have been? There’s nothing to gain by retaliating or not performing well for that coworker in the future. Keep your eye on the prize—which is to do a great job for the client.
5. Withdrawal from the Game.
   Or otherwise called, “I’m taking my ball and going home”—this behavior makes work grind to a halt, doing no one any good. MyOffice trains team members to work collectively, proactively and encouragingly—and to never withdraw from a situation because it’s not working, but rather request a change and communicate problems.

At MyOffice, winning behaviors are openly rewarded while the entire team is encouraged to eliminate defeating behaviors. Employees have reported not only a more positive, efficient work environment, but an improvement in personal relationships as a result of taking these expectations seriously.