How to build a healthy team culture—know what’s unhealthy!

Paradoxically, the first step toward building a healthy team culture may be recognizing toxic team culture. Unfortunately, that’s not hard to do. The American workplace is sick and it shows. Morale is low, stress is high. Millennials, Gen-Xers, and Baby Boomers clash.

Demands for diversity and gender equality are rife. And then there’s the runaway train of technological development—all of these issues have transformed many offices into seething cauldrons of conflict and strife. 

And when the lid blows, many workers bailout.  It is estimated that as many as 100,000 workers quit their jobs every day and it costs 20 percent of their salary for the boss to find a replacement. Recruitment, training, and orientation can add up to more than 1 billion dollars a year for small businesses. 

For all of corporate America that figure balloons to as much as 550 billion bucks—every year!! The domino effect: employee turnovers delay order fulfillment, decrease productivity, drain morale, and corporations hemorrhage profits and potential.

How to build a healthy team culture—out with the silo! 

Management underpins all employee engagement—for good or ill. Often a toxic corporate culture stems from poor management. For example, many companies have developed what’s called a “silo culture.”

 In agriculture, silos store grain, coal, woodchips, sawdust, food products, even cement. In some offices, managers silo information—tools, strategies—storing it up for their use.

To them, information is power and they don’t want to share it. So they leave workers in the dark about certain goals, processes, tools, and the like—making it available to their allies on a need-to-know-basis only.

Those at the bottom of the food chain feel left out, alienated, vulnerable, and hopeless. This kind of management undermines the mental health of employees and the overall stability of the workforce.

How to build a healthy team culture—DiSC it!

Silos are for farms, not offices. Healthy team culture is open, inclusive, and accepting. Managing a healthy corporate environment means being more people-driven than process-driven because, at the end of the day, it’s the people that make the process work, right?

In a healthy team culture, diversity is recognized as an asset instead of being dreaded or resented as a liability. That’s because sharp managers know that variety really is the spice of life! It’s our different backgrounds and points of view that help our workplaces become more well rounded and vibrant.

But that “variety”  works best if you know how to work it, and fortunately, there’s an “app” for that. It’s called DiSC, which represents the 4 personality profiles we all exhibit. Some of us are Dominant; others Influential; Steady; Conscientious. Understanding these personality types is invaluable in understanding yourself and your employees.

Relationship building is the foundation of team building and you can only build a relationship with another person if you understand them—who they are; how they think. After all, it’s easier to humanize your workplace and create a humane corporate culture when you know how your “humans” think—what gets them motivated.

DiSC creates a safe way for you to examine another person without making them feel threatened or intimidated. And it can be a humbling process for you as well if you’re a boss, because you may learn a lot about yourself throughout the whole process. 

How to build a healthy team culture—listen up! 

You get to ask questions and learn how to “listen” to the answers and translate what you hear into an action plan that will make it easier to communicate and collaborate with that person.

Associations built around projects are temporary, hierarchical, and therefore fragile. DiSC personality profile training helps build relationships built around your common humanity. And these relationships, along with your work assignment, can be fruitful, enlightening, and lasting.

The psychological and emotional bonds of a relationship are the glue that binds groups of employees into teams and fosters loyalty to the company. DiSC is an invaluable tool in developing those psychological and emotional bonds.