How to improve your team culture

To achieve a high performing team, everyone has to be comfortable within the current team culture. If it turns out that this is not the case, problems may arise. Employees may not feel understood and may perform less. By mapping the current culture and making it measurable, practical insights become actionable and work can be done to achieve the desired culture.

“What is team culture? By team culture, we often mean the norms and values within teams. It’s about dynamics and the way we work together and communicate.”

The benefits of mapping your team culture

To be agile and resilient in a rapidly changing market, it is vital that employees feel good and that they are motivated to do their job. This can be done in several ways. But first, you need to analyse the current team and company culture to see where change needs to take place. This starts with identifying the qualities of your team. By mapping the natural behaviours and talents of the people in your team, how they react to complex situations and measuring how they view the current level of psychological safety, you can already make many steps in changing the culture within the organisation.

• Readhow to improve your organisational culture in 10 steps.

How to measure and improve your team culture?

Human Insight has developed several tools, practical assessments and survey questions that we use to measure team culture.

Measure your current culture with our AEM-Cube

By using the AEM-Cube, three dimensions are used to look at how employees naturally deal with change and growth and where they contribute to strategy execution. By deploying the AEM-Cube, you can measure the current team culture and gain immediate insight into the strengths and weaknesses within a team, as well as whether your team has what it takes to achieve objectives. By exposing team dynamics, immediate action can be taken to ensure sustainable growth.

An inclusive team culture: How can you build it?

Recurring themes these days are diversity and inclusion and cognitive diversity. Low levels of diversity within teams can hinder success. A diverse and inclusive team is generally more creative, feels more comfortable and has higher problem-solving abilities. An inclusive corporate culture can be achieved by measuring psychological safety in a team and actively working to create a culture where everyone feels safe.

Why culturally diverse teams benefit a positive culture

There are multiple advantages of culturally diverse teams, especially when we are thinking about the benefits it has towards a positive team culture. According to different studies, diverse teams, are more motivated and creative and are better problem solvers. They tend to have a broader perspective and thus important in a cultural diverse environment.

Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse

Read our research in collaboration with Alison Reynolds and David Lewis here. Within this research, we examined the role cognitive diversity plays within teams and why it leads to faster resolution of complex problems. Read research Research

Successfully creating a positive team culture

Changing the culture of an organisation, team or company is often difficult. This is because it is a longer process in which it is important that all employees are heard and the willingness to change is high. To successfully change, map and measure a company’s culture, it is important to adapt your leadership style accordingly. You must learn to manage change and motivate your team to actively contribute. The following points can form the basis if you want to measure or change team culture:

• Map the current situation Give your team survey questions like “Where does an employee think they contribute?” and “Where do they contribute?” or “What is the mutual communication between individuals and teams?”. But don’t forget to think about current norms and values of the team.
• Provide clear communication that can be understood by everyone. Keep up the conversation to discover what the team cares about. Create a common language. Listening carefully to your team will help you understand norms and values and quickly reveal where improvement is needed.
• Create clear goals Changing the whole team culture is a process that takes time. Make it clear to everyone what the long-term goals are and how they are to be achieved. During the process, keep a close eye on challenges and celebrate successes.