Include everyone in the company’s shared project
One of the most important attitudes for strengthening cohesion is to include everyone in the company’s project: the intern, the finance director, the accountant. Each person has to feel carried by the project and included in the group your team forms. Avoid separating roles in a way that excludes: “that is not up to you”, “that does not concern you”, “that is not your remit” are phrases to remove from your vocabulary.
Everyone can contribute to the shared structure, and everyone can also help with each other’s work without neglecting their own role. A contact, a recommendation, a corrected email, some help with a design, an idea or an opinion are always worth having. Above all, they serve the sense of group, of tribe, and strengthen the cohesion of the team. Each person is useful to every other, and your colleagues should feel it.
Give your project meaning
Nobody starts a company for the money alone. You start a company because you find meaning in what you do. Are you committed to your company’s project? Let it show, say so, and share with your colleagues the articles, photographs and sources that make you believe in the idea. It will motivate them further and help them find meaning in what each of them does. Cohesion also runs through motivation.
Do not fix people in place
Following on from that first point, it matters not to exclude people from each other’s tasks and roles. That extends to the layout of your premises. Do not isolate desks from one another, and do not partition working spaces. Open-plan offices are not there to let you watch your team; they are there to create cohesion in the space and therefore in people’s minds.
Encourage communication and mutual support
Make your colleagues feel that your shared project runs through teamwork. Their roles may all differ, but that does not stop them benefiting from their colleagues’ help. If one of them is overloaded, ask who will volunteer to help; one of them always will, and it strengthens team cohesion.
Mutual support is necessary to how a company works. Nobody is perfect, and nobody always meets their objectives alone. Being aware of that, and showing it to your colleagues, creates the solidarity that holds a team together. Show them that asking colleagues for help and advice matters.
Mistakes to avoid if you want to keep team cohesion
Watching over moments between colleagues
Do not forbid your employees from talking to each other, laughing often and occasionally getting carried away. Moments of relaxation are necessary to good productivity, and shared moments of relaxation are necessary to cordiality and good relations between colleagues.
Taking success for granted
As noted above, success is not automatic, and failures contribute to it overall. It matters to congratulate people on the work done, in private and in public.
How does that strengthen cohesion? Knowing that they will be congratulated in turn for their own successes, colleagues come to enjoy each other’s. A large contract signed? Buy croissants in the morning, or a beer in the evening, for the whole team — to congratulate the person responsible, but also the others, who are necessary to every win. A win is never one colleague’s alone; it is indirectly, or even directly, the work of the whole team.
Condemning mistakes
Nobody is perfect. Only those who do nothing make no mistakes. Put them right together. Above all, do not establish a climate of fear and suspicion by condemning people, which will dismantle whatever cohesion had been built. “All for one and one for all” does not apply only to employees; it applies to the CEO, who is an integral part of the team and not a member apart.
Practical ways to build team cohesion
Take your colleagues’ personalities into account
Every company has its characters, its various and different personalities, which make a team heterogeneous and let each person bring their own knowledge to help the others. Do not assume there is one attitude everybody must adopt at work. Communicate with each person according to who they are. That leaves nobody aside and helps every colleague feel included. Personality is also a source of amusement, and contributes to a healthy atmosphere on your premises.
Allow unplanned moments of relaxation
As noted above, relaxation and distraction benefit productivity and creativity, so do not resent a moment of downtime between colleagues.
A coffee break together, an impromptu game of table football, or a video shared across the office. These small moments hold a team together and take nothing from your colleagues’ productivity.
Organise group activities
Group activities are an effective complement for building cohesion in the moment, and afterwards too, since the memories created during them belong to you as a team.
Activities that build team cohesion
Laser tag and paintball
By producing adrenaline and creating the sense of a team fighting for its (virtual) survival, laser tag and paintball are a genuine opportunity to build cohesion. People have to stick together to win, and are forced to communicate in subtle ways. They also have to put tactics in place if they are not to be beaten.
The escape game
Locked in a room, your colleagues have an hour to get out. Sometimes tied up, sometimes absorbed by a puzzle that resists solving, they have to help one another to come out ahead of this very current format, which suits team building particularly well.
Seminars in the open
As our article on company seminars explains, some seminars are directly tied to the question of team cohesion. They are known as team-building seminars.
Bring your colleagues together by taking them into the open, away from the everyday, so that each personality and each individual mind comes through and they finally meet in a setting entirely separate from work. Helping them get to know each other is itself a strengthening factor, because affinities form and friendships emerge.
A tip: choose somewhere with no mobile signal, so nobody has the option of drifting onto their phone rather than mixing with the others.
Consider digital tools for team building
A weekend in the open may be good for relations within a team, but that is no reason to do without the tools available to us. Digital tools such as WeChain are a case in point: a small social network, built for a specific event and configured to the organisers’ wishes.
How it works: each attendee uploads the photographs they took during the event, and those are then shared on the network. A public display can also be scheduled, which attendees are invited to. They are the only people who can reach the material on the WeChain network.
Consider Slack too, for organising your trip. A rich messaging tool built for companies, Slack is among the most complete and the simplest means of communication to put in place.