Employees are required to share great workplace rapport with their colleagues, as this contributes to levelling-up the performance delivered and increases their motivation to work cohesively in a team.
While everyone might just give an affirmative nod with a statement that says, workplace relationships are as important as personal ones. However, the HR manager has a crucial role to play here. The manager is required to ensure that the culture in an organisation supports harmonious workings.
When employees nurture great relationship with their colleagues, managers and co-workers, they work together in tandem as one integrated family, hand-in-hand directing themselves to achieve the organisational goals in unison and build a solid team.
See also: Top 8 Motivational Phrases HR Managers Must Know to Build a Confident Workforce
Healthy competition should be encouraged by managers, however caution needs to be observed that these competitive spirits do not result in conflicting situations at work, thus disrupting harmonious workings of other members in the team. Healthy competition empowers, motivates and encourages employees to perform and inflict on their drawbacks to measure and understand the scope for improvements.
Here are some affordably simple ways to strengthen employee relationships at work:
Employers can encourage sharing work and responsibilities at times between colleagues of the same department, when there are deadlines to meet. This would help strengthen employee relationships, offer opportunities to imbibe new learnings and build more solid teamwork in place.
However, some specific job roles and duties cannot be shared, owing to the specifics assigned. Herein, managers can ensure that the members of the team help each other to reduce stress and tension in the workings, while meeting client delivery expectations and deadlines on time.
While exercising rules for employees to primarily focus on their job roles and duties is important, there is thin line of difference between influencing a selfish-eccentric workplace culture and the one that believes in sharing and caring for all.
As the work week begins, overcoming the Monday blues is not easy on most employees. Hence, they need to feel motivated and recharged with a purposeful goal to achieve for the week. This is where the morning briefing session is important to boost employee confidence to get started for the day and continue in high spirits for the week ahead.
To build stronger relationship with employees, the morning briefing session could begin on a casual note and lighter tone to set the stage for some cheer, wherein employees are allowed to share quick bytes on personal fronts, happenings over the weekend, or issues that impede progress in their jobs, challenges to execution of tasks and so on.
These morning briefings set the pace for the day, thus allowing colleagues to understand each other better, offer support, constructive feedback, brainstorm and suggest new ideas to elevate the spirits of each other.
To add an interesting aspect to these morning sessions, employers should focus on challenges to accomplishing deadlines for the week, make an account of employee’s progress and provide constructive feedback for improvement.
One of the ways to build strong employee relationships at work is by encouraging a culture of care, wherein sensitivity of other employee’s emotions is observed and respect is maintained.
Encouraging participation of every employee to decorate the office during events, preparing for the birthday cake-cutting celebration or preparing for other surprise events would in turn elevate the happiness levels at work.
Every workplace has its own set of rules, and following them is a must to create consistent, competitive and healthy workplace culture. To ensure that all employees abide by the rules stated in the employee handbook, employers should assert on its need and importance to maintain the workplace decorum and code of conduct.
A supervisory authority could be assigned to make sure that all employees maintain discipline and common courtesy for all in a workplace environment.
Lunch hour is one of those few break moments, when employees snap out of their work zones and engage in a casual light-hearted conversation with colleagues. Employers should encourage team/group luncheons to strengthen employee relationships and allow time for emotional bonding to support cordial working engagement, motivation and enhanced productivity.
An effective 45-minutes of time away from desks for group lunches should help boost employee engagement, morale and productivity.
The need for HR intervention is sought at times, when employees are low on morale and they need an emotional support system to rely on, open up their concerns at work and perk up their moods to be able to perform for the rest of the days.
Next read: How to Reprimand Employees without Conflicts?
