Is ‘happy team’ a myth?

Building a team is rather easy. You identify your requirements, you open the req in your job portal, you work with your sourcing team or work internally to fill up those requirements and bingo, you have a team in hand. But what is not that easy is to keep the team always highly motivated. Because motivation is a resultant of multiple other factors. And needless to say, those factors are at times little tricky to achieve.

Its tough, I agree, but its not impossible. With little effort and discipline, a leader can make his team a happy one.

Here is my six points theory on how we can build a happy and motivated team.

Understand and value their career goals

Your team is a combination of senior and junior members. Each has their own career goals. As a manager, its your responsibility to understand their goals. Build a confidence in their mind that more than their manager you are their coach. And you value their career goals.

Align their tasks based on their goals

This point goes hand on hand with the previous point. Once you are clear about the goals, you know how to align their work accordingly. When the employee sees their work is inline to what they want to do the magic starts happening. And the most important thing, keep raising the bar by giving them challenging task

Share continuous feedback

Having a goal and giving them task is one part of the job. The other part is to follow up and ensure that your team members can stick to those tasks and executing them properly. Having a continuous feedback mechanism helps here. Set up a biweekly or monthly conversation with your team members. Go thru their progress, share constructive feedbacks that can help them to scale up. Support continuous learning

Build a culture of peer recognitions.

Apparently one third of your lifetime you spend with your office colleagues. And more time one spends with other, the bond increases. This bond between the team members help increasing their motivation. Something, that makes them look forward towards another day at work. And then when one member recognizes the other member, the bonding just increases. It acts like a catalyst that maximizes the happiness among team members. So, encourage peer recognitions.

Insist on maintaining a Work-Life Balance

The labor law says one should not work more than eight hours a day. Taking the breaks and other time offs into place, it sometimes gets extended to ten hours a day. But anything more than that is having potential to disrupt the work life balance of the team member. Paying detail attention to this is very important to ensure a healthy team. Unavoidable incidents like production down, or customer escalations or urgent demo can push the team members to work extra hours but that should not become a daily affair. Start your meeting by asking about the team’s well being. Ask them whether they had lunch or not. When the team feels that their manager is ensuring their well being, it automatically makes them happy and satisfied.

Work hard, party harder

This one is my favorite. While working together is important, having fun together is incredibly important. Even in the days of WFH, you must arrange some virtual games etc on monthly or quarterly basis to keep the team busy on a fun filled event day. A team that party together, wins together.

So, these are my six ways of boosting the morale of team and keep them highly motivated. Would love to hear from the forum about their opinion.