When people from various backgrounds and professional experience come together to achieve common goals such as those in the workplace, teamwork doesn’t necessarily occur naturally. With the right amount of direction and incentive however, as a manager, you have the capacity to inspire the individuals in your team to achieve far greater things as a team than they ever could on their own. By owning the responsibility of moulding your team into a high performing asset to your company, you’ll also be contributing personal value and inspiring your team to achieve their own professional goals.

Cause for Celebration

When someone in your team achieves an important accomplishment, make sure you celebrate their success with your team. This includes personal milestones such as birthdays and weddings as well as work related accomplishments. By sharing their success together, you’ll naturally stimulate the development and strengthening of relationships within the team. Colleagues will start to lean on each other for support in times of need, as well as in times that are cause for celebration. Share outstanding feedback from clients with team members and consider implementing a celebration system whereby a small material gift is shared with those who achieve success within the team.

Promote from Within

When colleagues are promoted, you soon realize that you recognize hard work and their efforts won’t go unnoticed. By providing career growth to existing employees there is less chance of high turnover in the long term. It will inspire them and also assist them to perform and encourage them to develop a stronger sense of teamwork as they acknowledge that there is opportunity to work with your team and the company for the long term. Identify top performing talent within your team and assist them to up-skill in areas that will benefit the company and their own career, by contributing to their eligibility for promotion in the future.

Mix it up

Mixing up the usual way of doing things can reduce the potentially mundane aspects of the work environment. Mix it up by hosting your regular team meetings in different places, outdoors for example, or at a local coffee shop. Mix colleagues that don’t tend to have opportunities to work together often, by creating projects that will encourage their collaboration. Encourage your staff to contribute ideas about new ways of doing things, and make sure you do adopt some of them as well as encouraging others with the team to get on board.

By increasing variety in the workplace, both in regard to the actual environment as well as the nature of the work itself, staff will feel more valued and increasingly inspired to want to achieve the common goals of their team. Creating an atmosphere where your staff feel their work is more than just a job, will keep them motivated and actually excited to come to work each day with their team.

Bio: Joe Flanagan is the Senior Consultant at Velvet Jobs outplacement services section (https://www.velvetjobs.com/outplacement), in addition to their job search facility. Joe also provides advice across the web to HR professionals and job seekers across a variety of industries.