FlashCast By PDB, With Phil Di Bella

 Hi,

you're listening to Phil DiBella and this is Flashcast by PDB. Today, we're going to talk about a couple of things. Building a strong team culture, which is essential for any organisation. As it creates positive work environment, it improves productivity. It improves employee engagement, it enhances overall performance, and more importantly, it helps us get the shit done in a business that we want done.

It helps us achieve those KPIs, targets, whatever fancy name you want to give them, strategic plans, all the rest of it, right? It's all about the culture of the team. If you've got a great team, you can achieve greatness. If you don't have a great team, you won't achieve greatness. It's pretty simple. I talk about teams being bait.

If you've got great bait, you catch great fish. If you don't have the bait, you don't catch the fish. You catch a certain fish based on the bait you've got. People are no different. If you don't have amazing people in your team with a great team culture, then you have got um, nowhere near where you need to be.

And in order to have a great team, you obviously have to have a positive work environment. And here's a little test before we get kickstarted. You want to really measure. How people feel about the culture of the company or the work, and you can do this yourself if you're an employee, is that moment of truth.

How do you feel on a Sunday before you go to work on a Monday? I'll plant that seed with you. How do you feel on Sunday night when you're getting ready to go to work on Monday? Can you not wait to get? To work and be part of an amazing team, see your friends, your work colleagues, uh, be part of the change you want to see in the world.

Uh, all these wonderful, beautiful things. If you feel like that, then you've got an amazing team culture. You, you know, you're working for an organization that has a positive work environment, a place that you love. It's obviously got you engaged and therefore you bring your best. So in this flashcast, I want to discuss the best ways to approach leadership and how to build a strong team culture within your company.

And obviously. You want to be able to measure that success and track progress in line with the, um, goals and objectives of the organization. And it all starts with the team. So let's talk about first about approaching leadership and building a strong team culture. Well, as a leader, it's important to focus on building the culture that aligns with the organization's values and goals.

And there's a key point is you want a team culture that aligns with your values and goals, the what's right. And what the culture is for one organization doesn't mean it's going to be good for all organizations. The key is that. The team culture has to align with your organizational values and goals. So keep that in mind.

It then also needs to make sure you're setting clear expectations. If you're not setting clear expectations or unattainable expectations, then you've failed before you even start. So you need to make sure that you have clear expectations. You then need to communicate effectively. I always say that poor communication is a common denominator of failure.

People don't put enough effort, enough time, enough skillset into being great communicators. And communicating is not just talking. It's also listening. It's also writing. It's also marketing, signage, all of it. Uh, but we've got to communicate effectively, uh, once we've got those clear expectations. Next part is we've got to have a supportive work environment.

If you don't have a supportive work environment that encourages collaboration, you've got nothing. You don't want people being an island within your workspace. People love communities. The, the human body has built to love community, to have a sense of belonging and a feeling. So you want to build great culture, make sure you've got a supportive work environment.

And that encourages collaboration, encourage people to get up and talk to each other. That's one of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of working from home constantly. Yes. If you have to something sick, someone's ill, there's a period of your life, but ongoing and studies are showing this, that it's not productive.

Uh, and there's many issues about this and specifically around this, how do you get the supportive work environment that encourages collaboration if you're working from home, um, something for you to ponder. And then next is all about personal development. What are you doing to personally develop yourself?

So if you expect and want a great working culture, you need to make sure that you're, you're working on yourself. Your personal development plan is there to make sure that you're in place. And of course, leaders should be emphasizing all of the above. They should be helping employees prioritize what I just spoke about.

It's important because, you know, leaders should be, be saying, right, I want my employees to engage and, and be important in, in this organization. I want them to feel. As part of something, I want them to feel like they're helping solve problems. I want them to feel part of the change that is occurring. And if you do this, they feel included.

The moment they feel included, you're building a very, very strong team culture. Next part is understanding the importance of people is your best asset. People are your best asset. As I said earlier, uh, people. I have a heart attack at times when I say that people are like bait, and I mean that in a very positive way.

People are your best asset. Simply put, you know, they're the most valuable asset of the organization and building a company from the outside in means that you've got to involve your people, prioritize your people, recruit the right people, retain the right people. 2022, all we ever heard about is recruitment, recruitment, recruitment.

And while people were talking about recruitment, I was saying, that's fantastic, but where's your Retention strategy. What are you doing to retain your staff? So when you've got a people policy, when you have a people strategy and hopefully everybody that's listening does or works for an organization that has a people strategy, there needs to be two parts.

It has to be broken down to attracting new people. How do you become an employer of choice? How do you attract new talent? How do you attract? And, and, and recruit amazing talent, the right people on the right seats of the bus. But the second part of the people strategy is what am I doing to retain my team?

I want people good enough to own their own business, but I've got to give them a reason not to. And if they feel part of your business and they're so amazing and talented because they could go out and get their own, but there's a reason not to, then you have, you've reached the epitome of engagement, you've reached the epitome of team culture, and that will see you kick so many goals.

You got to remember that by investing in the people and creating a positive work environment, you can generate the right customer base, right? Without the right people and positive work environment, you won't get a good customer base. You'll probably get customers just based on price and that's not what we want because when people offer a better price tomorrow, they'll leave you.

Whereas if people are feeling engaged, if your customers are so engaged because you have such a positive work environment. Then what's going to happen is people are going to choose you and they'll stay with you. So I always say that an eight out of 10 product will, will always be accepted. If the attitude is 12 out of 10, yet a 12 product delivered with an eight out of 10 attitude doesn't work.

And think about that. That gives you some metrics. So I always talk about our team having a 12 out of 10 attitude, make sure that our people have a 12 attitude because customers will put up with an eight out of 10 product. It doesn't mean you strive for an eight out of 10 product, but it means that they will accept it, but I assure you.

When you flip it, it won't be the reverse part three. Let's talk about measuring success and tracking progress. Well, to measure success and track the progress in line with the organization goals and objective, you first need to establish clear KPIs. And the amount of people that I know that don't have clear KPIs is flabbergasting.

Right. They don't have to be fancy. They don't have to be pages. What are. The key KPIs, the key performance indicators that you want to achieve, and you don't have to be owning a business to do this, this, this is another way of your KPI is another way of saying your goals, your purpose, you know, what do you want to achieve?

KPIs, key performance indicators, how do you measure success? Before you can measure success, you need to understand what success looks like. So get a piece of paper and a pen and write down those key performance indicators. It then involves setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and ready. Time bound goals.

I'm sick of people having amazing goals, but they don't have a time attract to them. Is it something you want to do weekly, achieve monthly, achieve in six months, 12 months, right? Put a time around them. You need to make sure that there's a time bound goal and you don't hear that that often. Make sure that you set specific measurable goals with times allocated to it.

And then you can attract. The progress, how can you track the progress? If you don't have a timing, how can you expect to achieve in one week a goal that may take 12 months, right? So one of my goals I've set, this is to be more mobile. So I'm quite strong. I'm flexible, but in a linear sense, I'm not, I don't have mobility flexibility.

So I've set myself a 12 month, 12 month goal to get more mobile, flexible, which. I can't do overnight so day by day and the morning of when I'm recording this, I can assure you I was in a lot of pain this morning in a stretch class because it wasn't your typical stretch class. It was stretching with somebody digging their elbows into my hips to unlock my hips and I was screaming.

It was crazy, right? But I've set a 12 month goal and it needs a journey once a week. Towards that goal. So make sure you have time bound goals and be realistic. And then remember, it's important to foster a culture of continuous improvement. Now, if I was to achieve that in six months, it's not tick and flick and forget.

It's how then do I approve and go to the next level. So once you sit, that is also about continuous improvement. That's why I keep talking about. tomorrow better than today, right? How are we going to be better tomorrow than what we are today? And if you keep that mindset in play, then you're going to build amazing culture.

Now in conclusion, summary, build a strong team culture involves approaching leadership with a people focused strategy. Very simple. I always talk about you have to have a people focused strategy. If you don't have a people focused strategy, then you're not going to have a good leadership. And if you don't have good leadership, you're not going to help.

Build strong teams and strong culture. You gotta remember that the employee engagement has to be prioritized. The wellbeing of your people is gotta be paramount. The wellbeing of your teams. We saw during Covid those that didn't care about their people, and we saw those that, that, that really looked after their people.

And I can assure you the ones that retained their staff were the ones that looked after their people. Uh, and in some cases, even, even in our, it meant that you fed your staff before you fed yourself. You know, the, I had to pay staff, I paid the staff before I paid myself during covid. Um, and a lot of people did.

Um, and that's what you call an employee led, you know, strategy. That's an, that's a people focused strategy is supposed to focused on employee engagement and you pay the benefits later because they're there for you in good times. They're there for you in bad times. They're there for you if you're there for them.

So remember that we always say you get back what you put in. If you watch the clock on the way in it, we're going to watch the clock on the way out. The way we measure. Engagement is how you, what are you prepared to do for the business so that the business can be prepared to do something for you, um, and go above.

And it's about what can we do for each other, not what can we take from each other, which is a great working relationship. And finally, by investing in the people you create. a positive work environment. It's very simple. You listen to the above of everything I've spoken about. If you invest in your people, you will create a positive work environment.

And with a positive work environment comes a strong team culture. And with a strong team culture, you see, you will overachieve your goals and objectives. It's very simple. And people try and twist it, burn it. It doesn't, it doesn't work. So start with your organization's goals and objectives, then work on strategies on how you're going to build team, you know, a strong team culture.

By creating a positive work environment and having a people led strategy and making your employees the priority. You do that and I guarantee that workplace is going to be amazing. And remember, I'll finish how I started. How do your people feel on a Sunday night when they're thinking about coming to work on a Monday?

Till next time, you've been listening to Phil DiBella and this is Flashcast by PDB.