Sure, the phrase “Team work makes the dream work” has a nice ring to it, but let’s stop and consider what we’re dreaming about.
For most companies, the dream is to grow. That could mean growing the number of customers. It could be growing the number of locations in which it sells products and services. For some it might be about growing topline revenue.
However you define growth, it’s people within the company who turn that dream into a reality. Yet there are all kinds of ways teams work together, and not all of them lead companies on a path to growth.
Within some teams, there are people who communicate the bare minimum because they assume others won’t perform a task quickly or properly. Keeping information in silos can lead to disconnects that directly impact the customer experience (CX), and not for the better.
There are also coworkers who don’t take the time to develop a deep relationship with one another. Without a stronger connection, they might not realize they could be reaching out to a team member with expertise to solve a problem. Worse, they may duplicate efforts or make mistakes because they aren’t working in a cohesive manner.
You can’t force everyone within a company to like each other, but when you make it easy to keep in touch and collaborate, you increase the odds of achieving your most ambitious goals. A simpler way to put it is that when employees have a great experience with each other, the end results of their work improve.
Salesforce’s The Experience Advantage: Transforming Customer and Employee Experience for the Future of Work report speaks directly to the power of a great employee experience (EX). The research found that by focusing on employee experience (EX), companies can boost revenue growth by 50 per cent or more.
Many businesses are still learning about the direct connection between strong EX and strong CX. Sometimes they do little to address the relationships between colleagues until they begin to lose talent, which is of course too late.
Fortunately, fostering a more engaged and collaborative culture among your team is often possible by leveraging tools that support overall business objectives. A platform like Customer 360 is invaluable because of the way it helps brands understand what buyers want, for example, but it also unifies data across teams, so that everyone is looking at a single view of the customer truth.
That’s just the start. Make sure you also consider the following.
1. Reducing mandatory meetings with dynamic huddles and chats
Making everyone gather at the same time every week or every day isn’t always conducive to healthy discussions and employee bonding. Sometimes it just means people are waiting for the meeting to end.
Levering technology can provide you with other alternatives to discussing important company developments and brainstorming. Take Slack, which offers flexibility to set up channels among specific teams or even on specific topics. You can also host huddles within channels instead of scheduling another meeting. These are quick, nimble ways to exchange ideas in real-time.
2. Swap the in-person offsite for a virtual deep-dive
Not everyone wants to trek to the office (or an even farther location) to run through a series of exercises intended to boost morale. Show employees you want to make the most of their time with you by taking advantage of cloud-based communication technologies instead.
Video conferencing calls may be a staple of many business cultures today, but they are often for brief, specific discussions. Set up a series of virtual offsites that could be done over the course of a day with breaks, or as a series that runs every week for a month. Changing it up like this gives people the time they may need to reflect on what they share with colleagues, and absorb more of what they heard.
3. Turn offering feedback into an opportunity, rather than a chore
Sick of nagging staff to complete the quarterly “employee pulse” survey? They’re probably tired of it, too. It’s not hard to understand why: when feedback mechanisms feel routine, we’re less inspired to offer it.
Take a page from many companies’ CX strategies, where surveys are only conducted at a significant moment in the journey, like completing a purchase or getting customer service. Look for similar moments during the employee journey (like after completing a new training program, for instance) and use nimble tools like Slack to pose questions that make giving feedback feel more like a conversation.
4. Provide options to revisit conversations and key information
It’s not that colleagues aren’t listening to each other. They just can’t always remember everything that was shared in every single discussion. When all meetings happen out loud, it’s easy to forget critical details. When conversations happen via email, people are left digging through their inboxes.
Simplify this for your team by teaching them to pin the messages they need within a Slack conversation. Suggest using voice or video chats to reduce the amount coworkers have to read through. Periodically step back and access what kind of long-term content might be best housed on a company intranet.
5. Celebrate random acts of collegiality
The more you put effort into offering better EX, the more you’ll notice select employees becoming a role model for their peers. They’re the people who are first to use Slack scheduling features to respect the fact some colleagues are working different hours, or within different time zones. They take the time to set up channels that ease the process of keeping up with tasks or managing projects.
When there’s time to have an all-hands – whether virtual or in person – salute these employees and show how much you appreciate the example they’re setting. It won’t be long before their colleagues begin to follow their lead.
