Team Culture

Team Culture is an essential part of any organization and it emphasizes on achieving a common goal by sharing values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours among team members.

What Is Team Culture?

Team Culture is not dependant on or created by an individual member's personality, but rather built on how the team collectively functions. It is about sharing values, beliefs with each other and integrating them in the work. Attitude and behaviour of team members also play a key role in defining a good team culture.

The definition of team culture is fairly simple as it implies each member of a team should work towards achieving a common goal with collective efforts, discussions and feedback.

Why You Might Want Team Culture?

An individual person working on the project is far less productive than a team working on the same project. It is very easy to understand that why a team will be more productive than an individual. An individual person has to do all the work during all stages of development.

Team Culture is the change in traditional workplace culture. It is about achieving a goal through collective effort of all the team members rather than leaving all the burden on an individual person. Team work is very essential part of team culture in every aspect.

"Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results." -Andrew Carnegie

Source: Team culture example

Problems Team Culture Helps to Solve

• Performance
• Efficiency
• Finger-pointing & blaming
• Demotivated Team
• Project Deadline
• Meaningless work
• Lack of core values
• Lack of communication
• Toxic Team Culture

How to Implement Team Culture?

Implementing team culture at first might be not easy but as you communicate with your co-workers and form a team, you get better at it. Organizing team meetings and discussion helps a lot in further developing team culture at your workplace.

Create Team Leaders

Leader is a very important person in any team who plays a very crucial role in promoting team culture among members. The leader needs to lead the team by establishing trust among members. The leader must also know how to create enthusiasm in the team so that every member is motivated towards achieving the team's goal.

Establishing Team Values

Establishing team values must be the first priority in any organization. Team values are not established in a day or week, they are developed over the years. Team values can be developed by sharing personal values by members, finding the values that overlap and integrate them into the work. One of the best practice to develop core values is by writing a good manifesto.

Meaningful Meetings

Conducting meaningful meetings with all the team members will definitely help in building good team culture. These meetings will help in understanding the team dynamics. It will encourage members to trust each other and build healthy relationships.

Constructive Feedback

Constructive feedback is one of the best ways to help your team to improve. Avoid overdoing it, keep it simple so that a team member is not burdened by your words. Be specific with each team member, every team member is different and providing a specific feedback will help in improving team's productivity and thus improve team culture. Sandwich method (good-bad-good) is a good way to give feedback. Start a feedback on a positive note and end it in the same way, providing critical thoughts in between. This method helps in not making other person feel distracted from the positive aspects into just thinking about the negative ones and also provides important feedback.

Common Pitfalls of Implementing Team Culture

• Team does not have proper communication
• Team doesn't use meaningful meetings
• My idea is perfect mindset
• Not enough member participation
• The lack of coordination

Resources for Team Culture

• 6 Ways to Build Great Team Culture
• Here's how we can create a high-performance team culture
• Damn Good Team Culture: Pitfalls & Effective Strategies
• Secrets to Building a Winning Team Culture
• What Is Team Culture In The Workplace?