Having positive workplace relationships doesn’t just improve the overall morale of your office and make it a more pleasant place to be. Putting in the effort to strengthen your employees’ relationships also benefits your organization by improving engagement, productivity, retention, and talent acquisition. Learn more about how to improve workplace relationships among your team:
Set Clear Expectations
Tension among coworkers often arises when there are no definitive guidelines regarding responsibilities for particular tasks or outcomes. Set clear expectations for everyone’s specific roles and duties for both individual and group endeavors to help them all work together in a more harmonious manner without uncertainty on who should be doing what.
Cultivate a Culture of Appreciation
Lead by example when it comes to improving workplace relationships among your team. Cultivate a culture of appreciation by making it a point to model behavior in which you recognize effort, compliment results, and give credit where it is due in a public setting. This will make it clear that this is the behavior you value in yourself, as well as the employees you manage.
Build-in Time for Socializing
In a quest for productivity, managers may discourage small talk at the beginning of meetings or be disapproving of water-cooler chats. However, this stance can inadvertently damage opportunities for employees to form positive relationships, which often organically develop in these casual settings. Instead, build in time for socializing as part of your overall management strategy and only intervene when it becomes excessive or otherwise halts output.
Reward Team Players
A common root cause of negative team relationships is the feeling that coworkers are competitive, and in order to get ahead professionally, one must be cutthroat. To change this mindset and ease concerns about their job security and long-term professional potential to be promoted, make it a priority to acknowledge and reward employees who demonstrate they are team players to make it clear this is what is valued by you as their boss.
Build a Team of Top Talent
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