How to Create a Strong Team Culture

A company's team culture is an essential component. A healthy team culture lays the groundwork for a company's long-term success by forming a cohesive team of individuals with shared values working toward a common goal.

What Is a Team Culture?

Team culture is defined as co-workers' shared values and goals. Because a great team can adapt to cultural shifts in the workplace and weather the worst storms, team culture feeds into overall company culture.

A winning team culture includes top-down engagement and psychological safety for employees. Building a strong team takes time and effort, but it yields positive results.

What Is the Importance of Having a Team Culture?

A strong team culture provides several benefits to both co-workers and great leaders, including:

Better problem-solving: A good team culture defines its values, which can foster co-worker collaboration. Because everyone knows where the team's north star is, there is less friction in the workplace and a better environment for problem-solving.

Fewer interpersonal disagreements: Team culture fosters a more positive attitude and respect in the workplace, which can make it easier to resolve disagreements.

High-performing groups: Workers who can advance their careers while also enjoying a positive work environment are more likely to stay. Employee engagement reduces turnover in any organization, resulting in improved workflow and overall productivity.

Improved company reputation: Potential employees may learn about a company's poor team culture. A poor reputation can make it difficult to recruit new high-performing employees. People will want to work for companies that have a positive work environment.

Pathways to success: With a new culture in place that explicitly defines goals and roles, employees will know what paths to success they can take, whether that's a leadership or management role.

4 Types of Team Culture

There are various types of team culture, such as:

1. A customer service culture: These businesses go above and beyond to provide a positive customer experience. They equip employees with the resources they require to assist customers.

2. A hierarchical culture: This culture is built on employees, upper-level management, and supervisors, all of whom have specific responsibilities. There is a well-organized structure with clearly defined roles.

3. An innovative culture: A company of this caliber emphasizes a culture of creativity in which employees strive to develop new solutions and ideas.

4. A purpose-driven culture: Companies with a purpose-driven culture work toward a common goal, which typically focuses on a mission that benefits the community. For example, a company may decide to donate money from each sale to various charities, encouraging employees to care about the company's mission.

How to Create a Strong Team Culture

Understanding your company's core values is essential for developing team culture. Here are a few ideas for developing a positive team culture:

1. Develop new strategies for dealing with ongoing issues. Put a brand new system in place to improve the overall health of your team culture. Make a plan to address systemic issues such as employee behavior and workplace inefficiencies. Create pathways to bridge cultural differences and identify ways to make the workplace more tolerant. Create physical spaces, time-off policies, and employee benefit packages that contribute to a better employee experience.

2. Determine what qualities make good leaders or senior managers. Great culture begins at the top. By setting a good example, good leaders can create effective teams. Consider what shared values and skills senior executives should possess. This could include handling conflict resolution or communicating effectively with team members.

3. Discuss your strategy for fostering a positive team culture. Discuss your ideas for fostering a positive team culture with your team, as well as why you want to make these changes. Use the feedback from your team members and senior management to fine-tune your new culture.

4. Accept remote work. Effective teams can work across the country or even internationally. Some employees prefer to work from home, and allowing remote work will foster a more positive team culture by encouraging a healthy work-life balance.

5. Assess your current company's culture and think about how to improve it. Consider this: What is the current culture of your company? What are your issues? What values do employees and leaders have in common? Before attempting to change your team culture, identify its strengths and weaknesses.

6. Put the new plan into action to build a strong culture. Build a new team culture in collaboration with high-performing teams, managers, and company leaders. Build a strong team from the ground up in collaboration with human resources. Employee engagement is influenced by the examples set by leaders, so try to convey the plan through your actions. Extra time off, flexible schedules, or team-building exercises can provide an additional incentive for employees to become invested in the new company culture.

7. Provide new tools to help your team culture's overall success. Set the new team culture up for success by providing all of the resources that team members require. Team members may require new computers and software for remote work or updated equipment to perform their jobs more effectively. They may require team culture training or access to webinars and classes. To achieve a more efficient workflow, you may need to develop new processes.