5 strategies to build a resilient team

In every work environment in the contemporary workspace, teamwork remains critical in pursuing organizational goals. A team is only as strong as its weakest individual member, and that's why building a solid team is vital now more than ever.

The advent of COVID 19 made it necessary for organizations to be innovative in carrying out their aspirations without necessarily working within the exact physical locations. Virtual meetings and conferences have replaced in-personal panels. And thanks to virtual meeting plugins such as Equal Time from Equalicert that encourage active participation, teams now have better and more inclusive meetings.

Building a resilient team won't happen overnight. Achieving this goal in today's challenging times can be more difficult. But it's possible. In order to build a resilient team, there has to be a level of self-awareness and empathy that may not come naturally to all team members. Leaders must assess and review the state of their teams, identify weak spots, and then deliver strategies that will help team members break down barriers and build foundations of trust, transparency and self-awareness.

It's important that a team can be honest and open with each other and speak out without fearing any consequences so that any problems and challenges can be faced head on and resolved. Good communication is key and resilience can be built in the work environment.

Here are the top strategies that will enhance your team's resilience:

• Encourage Adaptability

Unexpected changes within the job environment can be the beginning of disenfranchisement for the average employee. Using the pandemic as an example, many employees found themselves unfamiliar when the physical office momentarily became untenable.

Employees now in 2022, in a post COVID world, are still dependent on technology to undertake their duties. Even though the way we work has evolved and now consists of a more hybrid affair with a mix of still working online to attending the office a few days a week or month. Those whose knowledge of new technological advancements such as virtual conferences and meetings applications have benefited from monitoring software such as the popular Equal Time to help have more meaningful and inclusive and manageable virtual meetings.

During the pandemic, the demand for working from home and technological shifts, presented a new way to work for employees, with the workforce having been forced to adapt to the changes. This new and encouraged way of remote working for the masses, offered a lifeline for employees careers because remote work became a reality. Contracting Human Resource Professionals to help with such sudden career changes is ideal for ensuring employee adaptability.

• Build Support Systems

Teams and their success rely heavily on the ability of the individual members to complement and support one another. Teams can achieve their goals by harnessing individual members' goals.

The ability to care about each other's challenges and take steps to correct problems is what compassion is. It goes a long way in building robust support systems that guarantee resilience. Through understanding, a team exists as a unitary whole rather than an aggregate of different units. Career coaching and open discussion sessions create the desired support system for group resilience.

• Effective Communication

Effective communication is an integral component of creating resilient teams in an organization. Communication is the vehicle through which the message of resilience is conveyed to team members and should therefore be as efficient as possible. Business and project failures are likely to kill morale within a team.

If the team leader uses a participative leadership approach and communicates a message of hope and not despair, resilience, and not resignation, the team would likely take up the challenge and survive the storm. This process comprises four critical steps:

• Setting up a team meeting.

• Encouraging candid and open communication.

• Focusing on the future.

• Devising a strategy to achieve the desired dreams.

These four steps bring out another critical component of participative leadership: listening. A good leader and communicator must keenly listen to his employees and talk less but listen more. During an online meeting this can be effectively managed by using plugin software to monitor everyone's contribution.

• Promote Psychological Safety

Psychological safety can be broadly defined as a shared belief that teams, as homogenous entities, are safe from the interpersonal risks of their members. When groups, individuals, and organizations possess high levels of psychological safety, their ability to achieve group goals and innovate inherently grows. Their adaptability prowess is enhanced too as compared to the competition.

When members feel vulnerable, they prioritize their safety instead of group safety. Taking up unfamiliar responsibilities will appear very risky for these individuals because of the possibility of backlash in case of failure. Team members with leadership abilities will shy off from such opportunities even as proactivity in asking questions becomes avoided for the sake of concealing apparent vulnerabilities.

Promoting psychological safety is a simple strategy of encouraging open, non-judgmental, and non-discriminatory workspaces. Workers will feel encouraged to ask poignant questions more freely once, in turn, get helpful answers to their questions.

• Protect Your People

Changes are a constant feature of every work environment that employees and companies encounter. Organizations, however, need to strike a balance on what changes are inevitable and necessary. However, changes come with their fair share of disruptions to the job environment. These disruptions impact employee morale and productivity, and organizations need to craft ways of protecting their staff from overly frequent changes.

In general, employees and teams also need to be protected from a lack of information. Companies should create a corporate culture of free-flowing information where employees do not feel unnecessarily blindsided.

Conclusion

The fast-changing corporate environment calls for an equally scalable and versatile workforce that can adapt to the changes. Organization goals and their pursuit need to consider the individual objectives and health of the employee.

Striking a work-life balance is vital in ensuring that the employee does not suffer burnout due to fixed and strict work schedules. This burnout arises from a monotonous and, at times, tiresome work schedule that leaves the staff very little space to reload their energies from other aspects of their lives, such as work breaks or leaves. In the absence of these breaks, workers suffer from fatigue, and their capacity to contribute to the organization's growth declines positively.