6 Tips to Engage a Community Teams' Strengths

Your workforce is more than just a collection of job titles, it’s a community. You might have the most talented and promising employees in the world, but if you want to create the spark of real success you’ll need to move beyond seeing them as just staff. That means bringing your team together and helping them get the most out of their existing strengths to form a cohesive unit.

Here are a few tips on how to turn your team into a close-knit web of talent.

Identify Individual Strengths

Identifying individual strengths is one way to strengthen your whole team.

Any work community is made up of individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. Employers that fail to respect the differences in their teams will struggle to build a strong team and get the most out of their workforce. With every employee, make sure you define what their strengths are, before finding out how these ideals work within a group.

One of the most popular ways of doing this is by carrying out a personality test. You can do this during the interview process for new employees, or with small assessments for current employees. In any case, make a note of the results for future use. Over time, you will begin to see how certain employee’s strengths complement others’ strengths. Everyone has an important role to play.

Build These Strengths with Training

Intuitive employers and community managers will be able to see the potential in every one of their workers, especially if they have unrivaled talents. If these talents are left un-nurtured, any chance of progression and building a successful community goes out the window. Luckily, this is easily tackled by holding regular training sessions. This doesn’t mean your traditional training. With millennials expected to make up 75% of the national workforce by 2025, modern twists on training are the best way of building on your team’s strengths.

Millennial or not, mobile training is excellent for keeping your community up to date with technology. Younger employees may take comfort training on a device they are comfortable with. Smaller businesses could find that personalized training programs allow them to reap more benefits.

Improve Communication Skills

Good communication is one of the things that makes the difference between a disparate workforce and a community. The problem is that there are various issues that can get in the way of communicating in a work environment, like anxiety, low confidence, and disorganization. Improving these will also improve how your employees communicate.

Those suffering from low confidence can benefit from practicing confidence-building habits, and almost everyone finds it easier to communicate in a friendly workplace. There is also the practical element of keeping communication open across various platforms. Personal exchanges, emailing, and even instant messaging are all ways employees can use to interact. These tools are particularly useful if you have a large remote working team you need to draw strengths from.

Make Teamwork a Priority

Teamwork makes the dream work, as the saying goes.

Having a supremely talented team is a great start, but these strengths mean nothing if your community is fractured and disorganized. Working towards a united team should be a priority in your community. Once you have mastered effective communication, this becomes much easier. Yet, there are a few more steps you must take.

Firstly, planning work outings is a fun way of bringing your team together. When they get along, there is a wholesome motivation behind them combining their personal strengths at work. Classic ideas like team building exercises are also important. These help your employees make the mental shift from being simply a team of workers to being a community or tribe.

Praise Their Successes

Chasing high targets and big sales is a key part of running a successful company. However, this can sometimes come at the expense of employee satisfaction. If your team feels as though their strengths are not being encouraged, they may not see the incentive to put them to good use. Even if your oversights are not deliberate, they can still have lasting effects, and you could see your workforce begin to disengage.

The solution to this is simple. If your employee does a great job, tell them. If they have smashed targets, reward them. If they are a joy to work with, let them know. When they see that their hard work is being appreciated, enthusiasm and determination will follow.

Show Them You Care

Any small thing you can do to demonstrate that you care will go a long way.

In a world increasingly defined by the mental health epidemic, it is no surprise that numerous workplace communities are beginning to suffer. Unfortunately, many workers don’t feel as though their employer cares about their wellbeing. If you take an alternative approach, they are far more likely to engage with their strengths.

Listening to your employees’ concerns can be difficult when you are working with a large team, but it is not impossible. Taking just a few minutes out of each day to engage with your team is more than enough time. Here’s the best thing about workplace wellbeing: even the smallest changes can help. For example, giving them a safe workplace can prevent injuries, whereas hiring an internal counselor enables you to keep their stress levels low.