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This Padlet was updated on 26/06/2025. It has sources from the course learning materials and additional sources to enhance your professional development. 

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This Padlet was updated on 26/06/2025. It has sources from the course learning materials and additional sources to enhance your professional development. 

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1. Career Guide

2. Career Development

3. 13 Leadership Styles and Their Characteristics

At some point in your career, you may consider moving into a leadership position. As a leader, you set a clear vision for your department or organisation and motivate team members, guiding them through their work process in ways that build morale. There is no one leadership style for every situation a leader faces. In this article, we discuss different leadership styles so you can choose which one may best suit your personality and goals.

Why are leadership styles important?

The leadership style you choose is important because it can significantly affect the way your team members approach their work and can boost productivity, increase timeliness and promote a healthy company culture. Some leaders adopt a singular style and use it in all situations. Others prefer to take differing leadership approaches depending on the needs of specific situations or company aims.

Types of leadership styles

Here are 13 leadership styles and their specific characteristics:

Visionary

A visionary leader is one who has a clear picture of potential innovation and can develop a strategy to attain it. Starting with a blank canvas, the visionary uses knowledge and experience to pioneer new possibilities and embark on a project that will benefit the company as a whole. As a visionary leader, you use your exceptional communication skills to help your team members see your vision and adopt your enthusiasm for the project. You also bring your employees together and guide them through the process of making the vision a reality.

The key characteristics of a visionary leader are:

Transformational

A transformational leader is a role model for motivating innovation. The transformational leader builds a strong company culture by motivating employees to create change that increases the growth of the organisation. Rather than micromanaging your workforce, as a transformational leader, you give your team members room to be creative. You also encourage employees to find new solutions to problems as they arise.

The key characteristics of a transformational leader are:

Autocratic

An autocratic leader retains authority and prefers to be the one who makes all decisions for their employees. This type of leadership is valuable in situations that require quick thinking and rapid decision making. You can also use it to your benefit when team members are inexperienced or need motivating. As an autocratic leader, you provide employees with clear instructions and a structured work schedule.

The key characteristics of a transformational leader are:

Transactional

The basis of transactional leadership is giving instructions to employees and offering rewards or penalties based on the results. By clearly mapping out expectations, you minimize misunderstandings and mistakes. As a transactional leader, it is your responsibility to encourage self-motivation in employees. You also build a company culture that encourages employees to follow instructions.

The key characteristics of a transactional leader are:

Coach-style

Compared to other types of leadership, coach-style leadership is a relatively new model. Like a sports coach, an organisational coach-style leader encourages collaboration. Unlike in autocratic leadership where hierarchy and control form the foundations, coach leaders promote partnership and a drive towards continuous improvement. When you adopt this approach, you encourage your team members to connect and work together to achieve great results.

The key characteristics of a coach-style leader are:

Strategic

Strategic leaders challenge rigid assumptions within the workforce and encourage employees to express alternative points of view. As a strategic leader, you use your managerial role to forge a tactical vision for your organisation. You also motivate your team to take that vision on board. One of the main strengths of a strategic leader is the ability to weigh options and take actions that will result in the growth of the company.

The key characteristics of a strategic leader are:

Democratic

Democratic leadership, also referred to as shared leadership, is a style that allows team members to take a more participative role in decision making. In this way, problems are solved through group deliberation. As a democratic leader, you have the authority to make the final decision for the group. However, you guide the individuals involved through the decision-making process to set goals and to achieve them.

The key characteristics of a democratic leader are:

Bureaucratic

The foundation of bureaucratic leadership is the allocation of specific duties and adherence to a set of rules. As a bureaucratic leader, you focus on your department's administrative needs. You encourage employees to follow regulations and maintain consistency in their duties. You also promote and supervise professional conduct throughout the workplace.

The key characteristics of a bureaucratic leader are:

Laissez-faire

Laissez-faire leadership, also referred to as delegative leadership, involves limiting the amount of guidance you give to employees and allowing them to fulfill their duties in their own ways. Because you leave a lot of responsibility to your employees, you prioritize their level of education and experience. This type of leadership works best in groups where members are highly skilled and capable of working independently.

The key characteristics of a laissez-faire leader are:

Charismatic

Charismatic leaders value individual employees and take the time to listen to their concerns. When you adopt this style of leadership, you use your communication skills to motivate team members through challenging times, helping them stay focused. You also help to inspire transformation throughout the workforce.

The key characteristics of a charismatic leader are:

Supportive

The supportive leader's role is two-fold. You focus on identifying where changes are needed throughout the organisation while ensuring the well-being of your team. Supportive leadership means not simply delegating tasks and awaiting results but also supporting your employees through each stage of the process. You promote dialogue with employees and provide feedback.

The key characteristics of a supportive leader a re:

Servant

The servant leader maintains a responsibility towards individual employees while also having a sense of accountability to the organisation as a whole. As a servant leader, you develop a company culture that prioritises employee satisfaction. You also facilitate an environment in which employees are encouraged to grow and develop. By empowering your team members, you foster their strengths and skills.

The key characteristics of a servant leader are:

Situational

A situational leader fully understands all the different leadership styles and is flexible enough to draw on whichever style best fits a situation. For example, if you are training a team to work with new skills, you may find it beneficial to adopt a transactional leadership approach. On the other hand, if you are part of a large organisation that is looking to expand its reach, you may choose a visionary leadership role.

The key characteristics of a situational leader are:

To find a leadership style that works best for you, it may help to consider which fits best with your field and the mission of your department or organisation. You can also make a leadership style your own by imbuing it with your own personality and work ethos. Once you find a style that meshes with your industry and your employees, you will soon see progress within your team members and the company as a whole.

Remember, you don't have to limit yourself to one or two types of leadership. As you become more familiar with the characteristics of each approach, you will be able to judge which one suits your needs depending on the circumstances and task at hand. This will enable you to achieve different goals in a variety of situations with all types of followers.

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13 Leadership Styles and Their Characteristics

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Career Guide Career Development 13 Leadership Styles and Their Characteristics At some point in your career, you may consider moving into a leadership position. As a leader, you set a clear vision for your department or organisation and motivate team members, guiding them through their work process in ways that build morale.

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Leadership styles are classifications of how a person behaves while directing, motivating, guiding, and managing groups of people. There are many leadership styles. Some of the most widely discussed include: authoritarian (autocratic), participative (democratic), delegative (laissez-faire), transformational, transactional, and situational.

Great leaders can inspire political movements and social change. They can also motivate others to perform, create, and innovate. As you start to consider some of the people who you think of as great leaders, you can immediately see that there are often vast differences in how each person leads.

Fortunately, researchers have developed different theories and frameworks that allow us to better identify and understand these different leadership styles.

Lewin's Leadership Styles

In 1939, a group of researchers led by psychologist Kurt Lewin set out to identify different styles of leadership.﻿﻿ While further research has identified more distinct types of leadership, this early study was very influential and established three major leadership styles that have provided a springboard for more defined leadership theories.

In Lewin's study, schoolchildren were assigned to one of three groups with an authoritarian, democratic, or laissez-faire leader. The children were then led in an arts and crafts project while researchers observed the behavior of children in response to the different styles of leadership. The researchers found that democratic leadership tended to be the most effective at inspiring followers to perform well.

Authoritarian Leadership (Autocratic)

Authoritarian leaders, also known as autocratic leaders, provide clear expectations for what needs to be done, when it should be done, and how it should be done. This style of leadership is strongly focused on both command by the leader and control of the followers. There is also a clear division between the leader and the members. Authoritarian leaders make decisions independently, with little or no input from the rest of the group.

Researchers found that decision-making was less creative under authoritarian leadership.﻿﻿ Lewin also concluded that it is harder to move from an authoritarian style to a democratic style than vice versa. Abuse of this method is usually viewed as controlling, bossy, and dictatorial.

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Authoritarian leadership is best applied to situations where there is little time for group decision-making or where the leader is the most knowledgeable member of the group. The autocratic approach can be a good one when the situation calls for rapid decisions and decisive actions. However, it tends to create dysfunctional and even hostile environments, often pitting followers against the domineering leader.

Participative Leadership (Democratic)

Lewin's study found that participative leadership, also known as democratic leadership, is typically the most effective leadership style. Democratic leaders offer guidance to group members, but they also participate in the group and allow input from other group members. In Lewin's study, children in this group were less productive than the members of the authoritarian group, but their contributions were of a higher quality.

Participative leaders encourage group members to participate, but retain the final say in the decision-making process. Group members feel engaged in the process and are more motivated and creative. Democratic leaders tend to make followers feel like they are an important part of the team, which helps foster commitment to the goals of the group.

Delegative Leadership (Laissez-Faire)

Lewin found that children under delegative leadership, also known as laissez-faire leadership, were the least productive of all three groups. The children in this group also made more demands on the leader, showed little cooperation, and were unable to work independently.

Delegative leaders offer little or no guidance to group members and leave the decision-making up to group members. While this style can be useful in situations involving highly qualified experts, it often leads to poorly defined roles and a lack of motivation.

Lewin noted that laissez-faire leadership tended to result in groups that lacked direction and members who blamed each other for mistakes, refused to accept personal responsibility, made less progress, and produced less work.

Observations About Lewin's Leadership Styles

In their book, The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications, Bass and Bass note that authoritarian leadership is often presented solely in negative, often disapproving, terms. Authoritarian leaders are often described as controlling and close-minded, yet this overlooks the potential positives of stressing rules, expecting obedience, and taking responsibility.

While authoritarian leadership certainly is not the best choice for every situation, it can be effective and beneficial in cases where followers need a great deal of direction and where rules and standards must be followed to the letter. Another often overlooked benefit of the authoritarian style is the ability to maintain a sense of order.

Bass and Bass note that democratic leadership tends to be centered on the followers and is an effective approach when trying to maintain relationships with others. People who work under such leaders tend to get along well, support one another, and consult other members of the group when making decisions.

Additional Leadership Styles and Models

In addition to the three styles identified by Lewin and his colleagues, researchers have described numerous other characteristic patterns of leadership. A few of the best-known include:

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is often identified as the single most effective style. This style was first described during the late 1970s and later expanded upon by researcher Bernard M. Bass. Transformational leaders are able to motivate and inspire followers and to direct positive changes in groups.

These leaders tend to be emotionally intelligent, energetic, and passionate. They are not only committed to helping the organization achieve its goals, but also to helping group members fulfill their potential.

Research shows that this style of leadership results in higher performance and more improved group satisfaction than other leadership styles. One study also found that transformational leadership led to improved well-being among group members.

Transactional Leadership

The transactional leadership style views the leader-follower relationship as a transaction. By accepting a position as a member of the group, the individual has agreed to obey the leader. In most situations, this involves the employer-employee relationship, and the transaction focuses on the follower completing required tasks in exchange for monetary compensation.

One of the main advantages of this leadership style is that it creates clearly defined roles. People know what they are required to do and what they will be receiving in exchange. This style allows leaders to offer a great deal of supervision and direction, if needed.

Group members may also be motivated to perform well to receive rewards. One of the biggest downsides is that the transactional style tends to stifle creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.

Situational Leadership

Situational theories of leadership stress the significant influence of the environment and the situation on leadership. Hersey and Blanchard's leadership stylesis one of the best-known situational theories. First published in 1969, this model describes four primary styles of leadership, including:

1. Telling: Telling people what to do

2. Selling: Convincing followers to buy into their ideas and messages

3. Participating: Allowing group members to take a more active role in the decision-making process

4. Delegating: Taking a hands-off approach to leadership and allowing group members to make the majority of decisions

Later, Blanchard expanded upon the original Hersey and Blanchard model to emphasize how the developmental and skill level of learners influences the style that should be used by leaders. Blanchard's SLII leadership styles model also described four different leading styles:

1. Directing: Giving orders and expecting obedience, but offering little guidance and assistance

2. Coaching: Giving lots of orders, but also lots of support

3. Supporting: Offering plenty of help, but very little direction

4. Delegating: Offering little direction or support

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It seems like there are as many different styles of leadership as there are leaders. Discover some of the most common leadership style frameworks.

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In a group with poor group dynamics, people's behavior disrupts work. As a result, the group may not come to any decision, or it may make the wrong choice, because group members could not explore options effectively.

What Causes Poor Group Dynamics?

Group leaders and team members can contribute to a negative group dynamic. Let's look at some of the most common problems that can occur:

Weak leadership: when a team lacks a strong leader, a more dominant member of the group can often take charge. This can lead to a lack of direction, infighting, or a focus on the wrong priorities.

Excessive deference to authority: this can happen when people want to be seen to agree with a leader, and therefore hold back from expressing their own opinions.

Blocking: this happens when team members behave in a way that disrupts the flow of information in the group. People can adopt blocking roles such as:

The aggressor: this person often disagrees with others, or is inappropriately outspoken.

The negator: this group member is often critical of others' ideas.

The withdrawer: this person doesn't participate in the discussion.

The recognition seeker: this group member is boastful, or dominates the session.

The joker: this person introduces humor at inappropriate times.

Groupthink:this happens when people place a desire for consensus above their desire to reach the right decision. This prevents people from fully exploring alternative solutions.

Free riding: here, some group members take it easy, and leave their colleagues to do all the work. Free riders may work hard on their own, but limit their contributions in group situations; this is known as "social loafing."

Evaluation apprehension: team members' perceptions can also create a negative group dynamic. Evaluation apprehension happens when people feel that they are being judged excessively harshly by other group members, and they hold back their opinions as a result.

Strategies for Improving Team Dynamics

Use these approaches to improve group dynamics:

Know Your Team

Tackle Problems Quickly

If you notice that one member of your team has adopted a behavior that's affecting the group unhelpfully, act quickly to challenge it.

Define Roles and Responsibilities

Teams that lack focus or direction can quickly develop poor dynamics, as people struggle to understand their role in the group.

Break Down Barriers

Focus on Communication

Open communication is central to good team dynamics, so make sure that everyone is communicating clearly. Include all of the forms of communication that your group uses - emails, meetings, and shared documents, for example - to avoid any ambiguity.

If the status of a project changes, or if you have an announcement to make, let people know as soon as possible. That way, you can ensure that everyone has the same information.

Opinionated team members can overwhelm their quieter colleagues in meetings. Where this happens, use techniques such as Crawford's Slip Writing Method, and make sure that you develop strong facilitation skills.

Pay Attention

Watch out for the warning signs of poor group dynamics.

Pay particular attention to frequent unanimous decisions, as these can be a sign of groupthink, bullying, or free riding. If there are frequent unanimous decisions in your group, consider exploring new ways to encourage people to discuss their views, or to share them anonymously.

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Improving Group Dynamics - Helping Your Team Work More Effectively

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Learn how to help your people work together more effectively.

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14 Effective Team Management Strategies From 22 Managers | Glasscubes

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Whether you’re a new or veteran manager, the tips these managers have to share are sure to boost your team management efforts.

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Organisational change is constant and driven by both internal and external forces including customers, markets and technology. Yet research shows that most change initiatives fail to achieve their intended outcomes. The impact of not managing change effectively can be significant. Therefore, people professionals' knowledge and capabilities are useful supports for change management initiatives.

This factsheet looks at why change management is important. It considers the implications of not managing change effectively. It also offers a series of techniques to help ensure change is effectively embedded.

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Why organisations need to change

There are many drivers of organisational change. These include:

Growth opportunities, especially new markets.

Economic downturns and challenging trading conditions.

Shifts in strategic objectives.

Technological developments.

Competitive pressures, including new entrants, mergers and acquisitions.

Customer or supplier pressure, particularly shifting markets.

Government legislation/initiatives.

Change is not only constant, it can be unpredictable and complex. Many factors require organisations to evolve and adapt. Recent examples include financial pressures, government economic policy, corporate scandals and greater public scrutiny. The COVID-19 pandemic lead to a significant need for change across organisations, the impacts of which are still felt. Meanwhile, technology continues to drive new ways of working and forms of employment relationship. All this has fundamentally changed the way businesses operate.

In this context, organisational change is required to achieve organisational objectives. Commitment of an organisation's people needs to be maintained throughout any change, often at the same time as ensuring business continuity. So, it's vital to consider carefully the way any change is managed.

Why managing change is important

People are at the centre of many changes in the workplace. People professionals and HR functions are often best placed to drive effective change. They have a role and responsibility to ensure appropriate and effective change, including:

organisational development,

training,

due process,

employee voice, and

clear communications.

People professionals work across different departments, which enables them to anticipate, design, and shape organisational change collaboratively. This contributes to an organisational understanding of the people implications of change.

Change management matters. Not least because change is taking place at an accelerating pace. Technological change has introduced new ways of working. This has improved communication, knowledge sharing and flexibility. However, it is often cited that a high percentage of change initiatives fail. Not introducing change effectively can have a significant impact. It can cause loss of market position, stakeholder credibility and key employees. It can also reduce employee engagement and motivation.

Change initiatives are believed to fail for various reasons. Often these reasons involve lacking what is considered necessary for effective change, for example:

Lacking an understanding of the type and complexity of the change.

Not addressing individual impacts and emotions associated with the change, leading to resistance.

Failure to create a culture of change and gain buy in.

Lack of visible commitment to change, particularly by senior leaders.

Poor communication of the reasons for the change.

Lacking effective project management.

Over-managing the change initiative at the expense of enacting change.

Failing to take steps to embed the change.

Individual and group resistance to change

Individuals or groups may block or disrupt an attempt to introduce change. This is known as resistance to change. Resistance is not necessarily negative. Resistance to change may be a deep rooted threat response, designed to keep us safe. This is demonstrated by our Neuroscience in action research. Reasons for resistance are often not related to the change itself. Instead, they involve fear of personal losses. Other reasons include shock, uncertainty, inconvenience and competence fears. It is therefore important to diagnose the cause of employee resistance. This will help determine the focus of effort in trying to address the issues presented.

Making change management more effective

Change is complex and there isn't a single solution to managing it. However, there are a number of key areas of focus. Our research on transformational change (archived: member-only resource) was undertaken with the University of Bath. It identified ten techniques that fall into three themes. These can be applied to a variety of change management scenarios. The key actions outlined by the research are detailed below. These areas should always be considered when planning change programmes. However, the pace of change sometimes dictates the need for a faster response. In these situations, clear communication and voice are most important. They ensure the best possible result in difficult circumstances.

Our Embracing and leading organisational change podcast also explores effective change.
Designing the transformation
Leaders and designers of change need to be able to 'read' their organisation's context. This helps to identify any aspects that might hinder change. Building organisational change capacity is the first step in any change programme. Any obstacles to enabling the desired change also need to be identified and overcome.
Aligning strategy and culture
For transformation to succeed, the change needs to align strategic and cultural aspirations. The new strategic goals of the organisation should be used as a starting point. The aim is to create a supportive and goal-consistent culture, reinforced through relevant beliefs and behaviours.

Open discussion and debate should be encouraged in the top team. This enables more proactive, opportunistic change to happen and allows movement away from old irrelevant business models.

Techniques for building understanding
Ambiguity and purposeful instability
A transformational change vision should be ambitious, but should also be presented in unambiguous terms. However, individuals will make sense of the situation through active questioning. Therefore, the change design stage should retain some ambiguity.
Narratives, storytelling and conversations
Shared change narratives and stories can be used as communication devices. This makes the content and implications of new strategies easier to understand and will enhance individuals' ability to translate change into meaningful actions for themselves. Organisation development can help navigate the complexities of communicating change.
Physical representations, metaphors and play
Participative design is an alternative to traditional, and often rather dry, change workshops. Participation can involve the creation of shared representations of the change. These may include metaphors and symbols. This supports individuals to translate change rhetoric into meaningful change-related actions.

Managing the transformation
Relational leadership
Change is rarely implemented effectively using authority and control. Instead, leaders can achieve transformational change through negotiation and social interaction.
Building trust
For significant change to thrive it requires high levels of trust. Trustworthiness is enhanced by designing change competently. The needs of the business, employees and the wider community need to be addressed. This should be done with integrity. Fair human resources processes during change also foster trustworthiness.
Voice, dialogue and rethinking resistance
Employees who raise concerns about change should not be labelled as resisting. Instead, this should be reframed and reinterpreted as legitimate employee voice. A frequently utilised positive initiative is to introduce change 'champions', who can inspire others to engage with the programme of change. They can also provide feedback on colleagues' views regarding the change.
Emotion, energy and momentum
Change is often an emotional process. Therefore, emotional awareness by those leading and designing change is required, in order to anticipate and respond to reactions to change. Momentum also needs to be maintained throughout the change process.

People professionals' role in managing change

Our transformational change research (archived: member-only resource), carried out with the University of Bath, explores HR and L&D's role in managing change. This is illustrated though four case study organisations. The research provides various recommendations for people professionals.

People professionals have a significant role to play in any change management process. They often act as 'stage directors of change' playing a critical role behind the scenes. To be successful expert initiators and facilitators of transformational change, people professionals should:

Be willing to work as the 'hidden hand' of change, highly relevant to its success. Work in partnership with the CEO/business leader and their executive team. This involves being 'backstage' support for the leaders' 'front stage' activity.

Translate the overall vision through mass communication. This should make use of techniques that change interactions and challenge entrenched systems.

Empower change advocates, remove obstacles, act on data and ensure leader visibility.

Change is a 'core' knowledge area of our People Profession Map. People professionals can become trusted advisors by applying situational judgement. They should also demonstrate moral integrity. This helps the organisation create long-term sustainability. HR is responsible for making decisions that affect workers' lives. Therefore, it's important that practitioners uphold professional standards, even in difficult situations.

Further reading

Books and reports

Cameron, E. and Green, M. (2019) Making sense of change management: a complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organisational change. 5th ed. London: Kogan Page.

Holbeche, L. (2018) The agile organization. 2nd ed. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

On change management. HBR's 10 must reads (2011) Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Visit the CIPD and Kogan Page Bookshop to see all our priced publications currently in print.

Journal articles

Aguirre, D. and Alpern, M. (2014) 10 principles of leading change management. Strategy+Business. No 75, Summer, pp65-71.

Anand, N. and Barsoux, J-L. (2017) What everyone gets wrong about change management. Harvard Business Review. Vol 95, No 6, Nov/Dec, pp78-85.

Brown, G. (2018) Six ways to help guide employees through multiple changes. People Management (online). 14 June,

Lawrence, P. (2015) Leading change: insights into how leaders actually approach the challenge of complexity. Journal of Change Management. Vol 15, No 3, pp231-252.

Montreuil, V. (2024) Developing organizational change capability: towards a dynamic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal model. Journal of Organizational Change Management. Vol. 37, No 2, pp423-438.

Peters, R. (2020) What lessons can COVID-19 teach us about organisational change? CIPD People Profession Insight. 12 June.

Wiedner, R., Barrett, M. and Oborn, E. (2017) The emergence of change in unexpected places: resourcing across organizational practices in strategic change. Academy of Management Journal. Vol 60, No 3, pp823-854. Reviewed in Bitesize research.

CIPD members can use our online journals to find articles from over 300 journal titles relevant to HR.

Members and People Management subscribers can see articles on the People Management website.

Related content

Practical guidance and links to interactive tools to help people professionals manage and embed change effectively in their organisations

Explore our other factsheets

Outlines employers' health and safety obligations in the UK

Factsheets

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Organisational change is both an opportunity and a challenge. Learn how to manage, enable and support change management initiatives effectively.

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Employee motivation is a hot topic in today's workplace, and evidence suggests that those companies that go above and beyond to offer features that keep workers engaged may attract a better level of staff.

Not all of us are lucky enough to have the luxury of nap rooms and slides in our office. However, in a study last month by CV-Library, more than half (56 per cent) of professionals would be more likely to apply for a job that had a unique or cool workplace.

The survey of 1,200 workers found that the younger generation were the most likely to look for work in companies with 'funky' workplaces, with 81.2 per cent of millennials and generation Z workers agreeing to this.

Employee engagement

But employee motivation is about more than just funky office features - it's about engaging employees through a unified company philosophy that everyone is comfortable buying into. Below, we chat to the business owners that managed to create a motivated and engaged workforce, and explore how you can recreate their success.
Matthew Reed, founder of Equipsme, discusses how businesses should go about achieving a motivated workforce.
Keeping the workforce motivated is a challenge that every employer faces; some bosses will crack the whip and hope that this works for them, while others will offer pizza Fridays or regular after-work drinks thinking that this will keep their employees working hard from 9-5.

The world of business is becoming increasingly competitive, which means employers will be need to retain their employees while also encouraging productivity. If you push your employees too hard, you may see your staff turnover take a turn for the worse, which can be incredibly costly for a business.

A great way to retain and motivate your workforce is to implement employee benefits. These additional bonuses will help enforce the point that you care for your employees and that their wellbeing actually means something to you. These benefits are far more impactful than the cheaper and easier pizza Fridays, especially in the long run.

After speaking to 2,980 adults in full-time employment, we found that employee benefits are the second most common reason as to why employees stay loyal to a company, only beaten by salary.

Employee retention is incredibly important when you're talking about motivating your workforce; nothing looks worse to those working for you than having their fellow colleagues disappearing like a murder mystery film. It can cast a negative attitude on the office, which in turn leads to lower productivity and possibly taking that phone call from the recruiter they may have otherwise ignored.

If you want to avoid this fate, as well as motivating your employees with encouraging words and deserved annual increments, why not consider some of the following employee benefits.

Look after employees' health

Health is something we all stress out about; most of us will get sick, Google our symptoms and then think we're on death's door.

It's an incredible source of motivation for your employees when you, as their employer, attempt to take away some of their stress by gifting them a healthcare package which includes things like 24/7 access to medical professionals, hospital treatments and physio sessions.

"Everyone, no matter who they are, enjoys being rewarded when they do something well"

Offering additional extras such as stress support can also be a huge benefit to your employees; stress is often rife in the workplace and making any attempt to combat these issues commendable.

We've found that 70 per cent of our SME customers have included our optional stress support in their health insurance plan which to us implies that SMEs are finally taking mental health support for their staff seriously.

Any employee would be thrilled to know their employer cares so much for their wellbeing and will happily work hard for such a figure.

Provide training

Personal growth is an imperative part of any job; everyone is constantly learning new things on the job and evolving into a more developed worker.

There are factors related to personal growth that you can consider as an employer though, should you wish to motivate your workforce. Training days, personal development time and workshops are incredibly beneficial perks that you should be offering your staff.

Not only will these days improve your workforce's skill set, but it will also let them know you are taking a vested interest in bettering themselves, which, in turn, should encourage motivation.

Give your staff rewards

Everyone, no matter who they are, enjoys being rewarded when they do something well. This could be as simple as a bottle of wine or a chocolate bar, or it could be making sure there are publicly recognised.

If you think your employees have done a good job, make sure they know about it. Positive reinforcement is always a great motivator, but do ensure you aren't accidentally just treating the same people in the office time and time again, as this can discourage other employees.

Be flexible

Flexibility is a great way to encourage your employees to work hard, as it shows that you are allowing them to have their own life which is vital.

Having a militant regime isn't going to encourage hard workers, it will end in your workforce rebelling against you and possibly even quitting.

Allowing your employees to leave the office early for personal matters, as long as they can make the time up, is a great motivator.
Lana Elie, CEO of Floom
One of the main things I do, and have always done, to ensure employee motivation and productivity is as high as can be, is being transparent about the skills I have and the ones I lack. It's important that the people on the team feel not only like the experts of their departments, but with it they have the responsibility of growing and professionalising those skills in order for the business to be able to grow - which provides motivation for them to do the best they can both on an individual and team level.

The vision is clear, and constantly shared, and with that vision we try to make sure each member of the team can see where they want to be at that stage. For example, if we want to be this kind of a business, doing these things, at this size, in three years, what are they doing with in it? My team are fully aware of this transparency, and are honest themselves about the skills they have, and the skills they lack - allowing us to help provide them with those skills, in turn benefitting the business.
Simon Couchman, creative director of ICG
We're committed to motivating our employees and believe that it's fundamental to delivering excellent work and maintaining productivity levels, our employees always deliver far more than expected from them as a result.

The way we motivate varies; this is to ensure each staff member benefits. Our company updates are one of the main ways to motivate the team as a whole. We communicate plans for the business and share case studies of great work. This monthly meeting ensures that everyone is on the same page, we all have a clear vision of the future and company objectives are communicated. This ensures each individual is inspired as well as generating a culture of like-mindedness and shared visions.

"The annual bonuses give us a chance to reward staff as individuals"

Company updates also give us a chance to share financial developments. One of the most unique ways we motivate our staff, is by offering them a share of the profit made each year as an annual bonus, so it's in both the companies and it's employees best interest to work towards improving that profit and it's imperative that we're completely transparent with our staff, something that they truly value.

The annual bonuses give us a chance to reward staff as individuals. This is based on their own personal development and approach to their role; it encourages them to focus on how their attitude and work ethic impacts the business as a whole and more importantly the profit share becomes their bonus. They get rewarded and we see a team constantly seeking new ways to improve our offering and results.

Team getaways

We continuously promote a sense of togetherness throughout the year, starting with our annual team get-away in late January. Instead of a traditional Christmas party during December when everyone is busy with end of year deadlines and festive celebrations, we banish those January blues with a trip overseas. We've been to Bruges, Malaga, Madrid and Prague to name but a few with plans for January 2019 already in the pipeline.

We attempt to get together outside working hours every few weeks, whether that's for a game of bowling, attending charity balls or taking part in triathlons - we recently just won the Cheshire Triathlon as a relay team.

We celebrate summer with a BBQ and sports day games. Friends and family members are also invited and it gives us another chance for us to applaud the whole team and recognise their efforts throughout the year away from the general day-day, resulting in an increase in motivation when we're back in the office.

"The collaborative working spaces give us a chance to learn from our peers"

Contributing to the success of others is now embedded in our culture; we see the importance of this when it comes to morale. We constantly seek chances for our work to be recognised and acknowledged at industry awards. Being shortlisted and often winning means everyone involved is left with a thirst for more.

Our recent office refurbishment, established as a result of employee feedback, encourages collaborative working, with informal breakout spaces, a digital 'pod' and outside decking area. Plans are in place to add a themed brainstorm room and a pool table.

The collaborative working spaces give us a chance to learn from our peers; share our knowledge or best practice and develop our skill sets. It helps people break away from their everyday tasks and contributes towards people feeling open minded to trying something new for our clients and as result, the outcome of campaigns are extremely successful.

Not forgetting the every day treats; from free fizzy drinks as well as tea and coffee, snacks and birthday cakes - all help with keeping morale, motivation and moods high.
Marianne Page, founder of The McFreedom System
As a company we are committed to making sure that the values we set out in our business are lived by all of us. We are so incredibly lucky to have such a great team, and it's no accident that we share the same values and work ethic.

We know that a happy team is a productive team, and that a motivated and engaged team means a happy business owner and a healthy business. This can be achieved in many ways, but the main message I'd like to get across is that it has to be genuine. We have all worked in a company where your boss screams at you one day, and then brings doughnuts in the next day and creates such a difficult and turbulent atmosphere that you can't relax, much less work effectively - and who wants to work for someone like that? They're never going to gain your respect or receive all of your energy.

Rewarding your team can increase productivity without a doubt, but if the foundations of your business aren't strong then there will be an immediate slump again, and whatever niggles and gripes were there beforehand will have returned.

"If your employees feel they can come to you with a problem and that you will give them your time and help them, they will feel supported"

So, our recommendation is to make sure that you have strong people systems in place. Make sure your team are hired to your values, don't just hire anyone in a hurry to plug a gap. Take the time to train them in 'the way we do things around here'. Deliver regular feedback, have scheduled reviews, invite discussion. The best ideas will always come from your team. Show them you are listening.

Your team need consistency. They need to know their roles, and how these roles contribute to the business as a whole. ​ Be transparent about the business goals, figures, difficulties and wins, and celebrate these wins. As a team they will pull together to achieve this, because they believe in the business. Communication is another key factor. If your employees feel they can come to you with a problem and that you will give them your time and help them, they will feel supported. They will be able to ask for training in an area they feel that they need development rather than fudging their work because they're afraid of approaching you.

So, yes by all means introduce perks and rewards - allow flexible working time if it fits your business, because you know that your team will pull together and want to succeed. Arrange for flowers in the workplace, or free food... whatever you like, because you have strong people systems working for you underneath all this, the foundations are strong and these perks serve to remind your team of what they already know - that you are invested in them and appreciate them and trust them to do their job whether you're there or not.
David Hallam, OrderWise
As an employer, OrderWise provides an environment that offers staff stimulating employment, but also opportunities to benefit in terms of wellbeing and work-life balance. In addition to the initial and ongoing training already outlined, there are a range of benefits, incentives, schemes, facilities and events that make working at OrderWise a rewarding experience, and which provide opportunities to develop professionally, personally and socially. The company also regularly conducts staff feedback surveys, to get an idea of what staff expect.

Employees' efforts are crucial to the success of the business and the management team meets regularly to discuss nominations for staff awards. Currently the awards are: Employee of the Month, Support Star of the Month and Employee of the Year. These awards demonstrate OrderWise's commitment to recognising the dedication shown by staff each day.

Several staff have received long service awards which recognise over ten years of employment with the company. The awards are a great example of the loyalty of staff at OrderWise and there are currently 12 members of staff that have achieved this award.

The company's recent building expansion features a subsidised staff café serving hot and cold food, along with social seating areas, TV, PS4 and phone charging ports. The facilities in the staff recreation room contribute to keeping staff happy, healthy and motivated. The room has a fully equipped gym that staff can use for free before or after work and a table tennis table which can be used during breaks to help employees unwind. For those staff using the gym or who cycle or run to work, there are shower facilities too. In addition, a complimentary basket of fresh fruit is supplied to each department every week.

"All staff can benefit from an attendance bonus scheme and departmental bonus schemes"

We appreciate the additional challenges faced by employees who have children and is keen to help where possible. Operating the Childcare Voucher Scheme enables employees with children to choose to have some of their wages paid in the form of childcare vouchers and make savings on both tax and national insurance contributions.

This year will see the introduction of a flexible working policy enabling staff to achieve enhanced work-life balance through more flexible management of personal and family commitments and work time. As an addition to 22 days' holiday entitlement plus bank holidays, staff can also have their birthdays off work with pay.

In addition to competitive salaries which are regularly reviewed, the company operates a pension scheme for all employees. All staff can benefit from an attendance bonus scheme and departmental bonus schemes which reward performance.

Each year, we host our very own free festival known as OrderFest for staff and their families to enjoy a day of live music, karaoke, games and more. Those attending can enjoy an array of fun activities including bouncy castles, sumo suits, enormous slides, gladiator batons, football and rounders matches, to name just a few. However, fun at our company isn't just an annual event. Throughout the year, the company also holds numerous seasonal events and has regular department nights out, making us a place to make friends, have fun and build a career!
See also: Fifteen ways to remain productive at work - a list of fifteen new tips to encourage workers to ditch bad habits and up their work game.

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How a small business can improve employee motivation

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Employee motivation is a hot topic in today's workplace, and evidence suggests that those companies that go above and beyond to offer features that keep workers engaged may attract a better level of staff. Not all of us are lucky enough to have the luxury of nap rooms and slides in our office.

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Project Management Tutorial

By KnowledgeHut

Motivation is a state of mind, filled with energy and enthusiasm, which drives a person to work in a certain way to achieve desired goals. Motivation is a force that pushes people to work with a high level of commitment and focus, even if things are going against them. Motivation translates into a certain kind of human behavior. In short, motivation is the driving force behind human actions.There are many different forces that guide and direct our motivations. It is important to ensure that every team member in an organization is motivated and meets the best project management course bottom line. Various psychologists have studied human behavior and have formalized their findings in the form of various motivational theories. These motivational theories provide insights into the way people behave and what motivates them. Motivation theory is a way of looking at the motivation of a person and how this influences their behavior, whether for personal or professional reasons. It's important to every aspect of society but is especially relevant to business and management. Motivation is the key to more profitable employees, as a motivated employee is more productive.What are the 5 Theories of Motivation? Motivation is a huge field of study. Psychologists have proposed many different theories of motivation. Some of the most famous motivational theories include the following: 1. Maslow's Theory of Hierarchical Needs Abraham Maslow postulated that a person will be motivated when all his needs are fulfilled. People do not work for security or money, but they work to contribute and to use their skills. He demonstrated this by creating a pyramid to show how people are motivated and mentioned that ONE CANNOT ASCEND TO THE NEXT LEVEL UNLESS LOWER-LEVEL NEEDS ARE FULFILLED. The lowest level needs in the pyramid are basic needs and unless these lower-level needs are satisfied people do not look at working toward satisfying the upper-level needs. Below is the hierarchy of needs: Physiological needs: are basic needs for survival such as air, sleep, food, water, clothing, sex, and shelter. Safety needs: Protection from threats, deprivation, and other dangers (e.g., health, secure employment, and property) Social (belongingness and love) needs: The need for association, affiliation, friendship, and so on. Self-esteem needs: The need for respect and recognition. Self-actualization needs: The opportunity for personal development, learning, and fun/creative/challenging work. Self-actualization is the highest-level need to which a human being can aspire. The leader will have to understand at what level the team members are currently, and seek out to help them to satisfy those specific needs and accordingly work to help fulfill those needs. This will help the team members perform better and move ahead with the project. A PMP certification will help you better understand this concept. Also, as their needs get fulfilled, the team members will start performing, till the time they start thinking of fulfilling the next upper level of need as mentioned in the pyramid. 2. Hertzberg's two-factor Theory Hertzberg classified the needs into two broad categories; namely hygiene factors and motivating factors: poor hygiene factors may destroy motivation but improving them under most circumstances will not improve team motivation hygiene factors only are not sufficient to motivate people, but motivator factors are also required Herzberg's two-factor principlesInfluenced by Hygiene Factors (Dis-satisfiers)Improving motivator factors increases job satisfactionInfluenced by motivator factors (Satisfiers) Working conditionCoworker relationsPolicies & rulesSupervisor qualityImproving the hygiene factors decreases job dissatisfactionAchievementsRecognitionResponsibilityWork itselfPersonal growth3. McClelland's Theory of Needs McClelland affirms that we all have three motivating drivers, which do not depend on our gender or age. One of these drives will be dominant in our behavior. The dominant drive depends on our life experiences. The three motivators are: Achievement: a need to accomplish and demonstrate own competence. People with a high need for achievement prefer tasks that provide for personal responsibility and results based on their own efforts. They also prefer quick acknowledgment of their progress. Affiliation: a need for love, belonging and social acceptance. People with a high need for affiliation are motivated by being liked and accepted by others. They tend to participate in social gatherings and may be uncomfortable with conflict. Power: a need for controlling own work or the work of others. People with a high need for power desire situations in which they exercise power and influence over others. They aspire for positions with status and authority and tend to be more concerned about their level of influence than about effective work performance. 4. Vroom's Theory of Expectancy Vroom's expectancy theory of motivation says that an individual's motivation is affected by their expectations about the future. In his view, an individual's motivation is affected by - Expectancy: Here the belief is that increased effort will lead to increased performance i.e., if I work harder then it will be better. This is affected by things such as: Having the appropriate resources available (e.g., raw materials, time) Having the appropriate management skills to do the job Having the required support to get the job done (e.g., supervisor support, or correct information on the job) Instrumentality: Here the belief is that if you perform well, then the outcome will be a valuable one for me. i.e., if I do a good job, there is something in it for me. This is affected by things such as: A clear understanding of the relationship between performance and outcomes - e.g., the rules of the reward 'game' Trust in the people who will take the decisions on who gets what outcome Transparency in the process decides who gets what outcome Valence: is how much importance the individual places upon the expected outcome. For example, if someone is motivated by money, he or she might not value offers of additional time off. Motivation = V * I * E The three elements are important when choosing one element over another because they are clearly defined: E>P expectancy: our assessment of the probability that our efforts will lead to the required performance level. P>O expectancy: our assessment of the probability that our successful performance will lead to certain outcomes. 5. McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y Theory X and Theory Y were first explained by McGregor in his book, "The Human Side of Enterprise," and they refer to two styles of management - authoritarian (Theory X) and participative (Theory Y). Theory X: Managers who accept this theory believe that if you feel that your team members dislike their work, have little motivation, need to be watched every minute, and are incapable of being accountable for their work, avoid responsibility and avoid work whenever possible, then you are likely to use an authoritarian style of management. According to McGregor, this approach is very "hands-on" and usually involves micromanaging people's work to ensure that it gets done properly. Theory Y: Managers who accept this theory believe that if people are willing to work without supervision, take pride in their work, see it as a challenge, and want to achieve more, they can direct their own efforts, take ownership of their work and do it effectively by themselves. These managers use a decentralized, participative management style. 6. Alderfer's ERG TheoryC. P. Alderfer, an American psychologist, developed Maslow's hierarchy of needs into a theory of his own. His theory suggests that there are three groups of core needs: existence (E), relatedness (R), and growth (G). These groups are aligned with Maslow's levels of physiological needs, social needs, and self-actualization needs, respectively. Existence needs concern our basic material requirements for living, which include what Maslow categorized as physiological needs such as air, sleep, food, water, clothing, sex and shelter and safety-related needs such as health, secure employment, and property. Relatedness needs have to do with the importance of maintaining interpersonal relationships. These needs are based on social interactions with others and are aligned with Maslow's levels of love/belonging-related needs such as friendship, family, and sexual intimacy and esteem-related needs such as gaining the respect of others. Growth needs describe our intrinsic desire for personal development. These needs are aligned with the other part of Maslow's esteem-related needs such as self-esteem, self-confidence, and achievement, and self-actualization needs such as morality, creativity, problem-solving, and discovery. Alderfer is of the opinion that when a certain category of needs is not being met, people will redouble their efforts to fulfill needs in a lower category. Maslow's theory is very rigid and it assumes that the needs follow a specific and orderly hierarchy and unless a lower-level need is satisfied, an individual cannot proceed to the higher-level need i.e., an individual remains at a particular need level until that need is satisfied. Whereas, according to Alderfer's theory, if a higher-level need is aggravated, an individual may revert to increasing the satisfaction of a lower-level need. This is called the frustration-regression aspect of ERG theory. ERG theory is very flexible as Alderfer perceived the needs as a range/variety instead of perceiving them as a hierarchy i.e., an individual can work on growth needs even if his existence or relatedness needs remain unsatisfied. For e.g., when growth needs aggravate, then an individual might be motivated to accomplish the relatedness need and if there are issues in accomplishing relatedness needs, then he might be motivated by the existence needs. Hence in this manner, frustration or aggravation can result in regression to a lower-level need. Another example could be, if someone's self-esteem is suffering, he or she will invest more effort in the relatedness category of needs. Implications of the ERG Theory All managers must understand that an employee has various needs that must be satisfied at the same time. According to the ERG theory, if the manager focuses solely on one need at a time, then this will not effectively motivate the employee. The frustration-regression aspect of ERG Theory has an added effect on workplace motivation. For e.g., if an employee is not provided with growth and advancement opportunities in an organization, then he or she might revert to related needs such as socializing needs. To meet those socializing needs, if the environment or circumstances do not permit it, he might revert to the need for money to fulfill those socializing needs. By the time the manager realizes and discovers this, they will take more immediate steps to fulfill those needs which are frustrated until such time that the employee can again pursue growth.You can further explore KnowledgeHut's best project management course which goes into full detail about the same.ConclusionMotivation is the state of mind which pushes all human beings to perform to their highest potential, with good spirits and a positive attitude. The various motivation theories outlined above help us to understand what are the factors that drive motivation. It is a leader's job to ensure that every individual in the team and the organization is motivated, and inspired to perform better than their best. This is neither quick nor easy, but in the long-term, the gains that are derived from happy employees far outweigh the time and effort spent in motivating them!

Project Management Tutorial

Motivation is a state of mind, filled with energy and enthusiasm, which drives a person to work in a certain way to achieve desired goals. Motivation is a force that pushes people to work with a high level of commitment and focus, even if things are going against them. Motivation translates into a certain kind of human behavior.  In short, motivation is the driving force behind human actions.

There are many different forces that guide and direct our motivations. It is important to ensure that every team member in an organization is motivated and meets the best project management course bottom line. Various psychologists have studied human behavior and have formalized their findings in the form of various motivational theories. These motivational theories provide insights into the way people behave and what motivates them.

Motivation theory is a way of looking at the motivation of a person and how this influences their behavior, whether for personal or professional reasons. It's important to every aspect of society but is especially relevant to business and management. Motivation is the key to more profitable employees, as a motivated employee is more productive.

What are the 5 Theories of Motivation?

Motivation is a huge field of study. Psychologists have proposed many different theories of motivation. Some of the most famous motivational theories include the following:

1. Maslow's Theory of Hierarchical Needs

Abraham Maslow postulated that a person will be motivated when all his needs are fulfilled. P eople do not work for security or money, but they work to contribute and to use their skills. He demonstrated this by creating a pyramid to show how people are motivated and mentioned that ONE CANNOT ASCEND TO THE NEXT LEVEL UNLESS LOWER-LEVEL NEEDS ARE FULFILLED. The lowest level needs in the pyramid are basic needs and unless these lower-level needs are satisfied people do not look at working toward satisfying the upper-level needs.

Below is the hierarchy of needs:

Physiological needs: are basic needs for survival such as air, sleep, food, water, clothing, sex, and shelter.

Safety needs: Protection from threats, deprivation, and other dangers (e.g., health, secure employment, and property)

Social (belongingness and love) needs: The need for association, affiliation, friendship, and so on.

Self-esteem needs:  The need for respect and recognition.

Self-actualization needs:  The opportunity for personal development, learning, and fun/creative/challenging work.  Self-actualization is the highest-level need to which a human being can aspire.

The leader will have to understand at what level the team members are currently, and seek out to help them to satisfy those specific needs and accordingly work to help fulfill those needs. This will help the team members perform better and move ahead with the project. A PMP certification will help you better understand this concept. Also, as their needs get fulfilled, the team members will start performing, till the time they start thinking of fulfilling the next upper level of need as mentioned in the pyramid.

2. Hertzberg's two-factor Theory

Hertzberg classified the needs into two broad categories; namely hygiene factors and motivating factors:

poor hygiene factors may destroy motivation but improving them under most circumstances will not improve team motivation

hygiene factors only are not sufficient to motivate people, but motivator factors are also required

Herzberg's two-factor principles

Influenced by Hygiene Factors (Dis-satisfiers)

Improving motivator factors increases job satisfaction

Influenced by motivator factors (Satisfiers)

Working condition

Coworker relations

Policies & rules

Supervisor quality

Improving the hygiene factors decreases job dissatisfaction

Achievements

Recognition

Responsibility

Work itself

Personal growth

3. McClelland's Theory of Needs

McClelland affirms that we all have three motivating drivers, which do not depend on our gender or age. One of these drives will be dominant in our behavior. The dominant drive depends on our life experiences.

The three motivators are:

Achievement :  a need to accomplish and demonstrate own competence. People with a high need for achievement prefer tasks that provide for personal responsibility and results based on their own efforts.  They also prefer quick acknowledgment of their progress.

Affiliation :  a need for love, belonging and social acceptance. People with a high need for affiliation are motivated by being liked and accepted by others.  They tend to participate in social gatherings and may be uncomfortable with conflict.

Power :  a need for controlling own work or the work of others. People with a high need for power desire situations in which they exercise power and influence over others.  They aspire for positions with status and authority and tend to be more concerned about their level of influence than about effective work performance.

4. Vroom's Theory of Expectancy

Vroom's expectancy theory of motivation says that an individual's motivation is affected by their expectations about the future. In his view, an individual's motivation is affected by -

Expectancy: Here the belief is that increased effort will lead to increased performance i.e., if I work harder then it will be better. This is affected by things such as:

Having the appropriate resources available (e.g., raw materials, time)

Having the appropriate management skills to do the job

Having the required support to get the job done (e.g., supervisor support, or correct information on the job)

Instrumentality: Here the belief is that if you perform well, then the outcome will be a valuable one for me. i.e., if I do a good job, there is something in it for me. This is affected by things such as:

A clear understanding of the relationship between performance and outcomes - e.g., the rules of the reward 'game'

Trust in the people who will take the decisions on who gets what outcome

Transparency in the process decides who gets what outcome

Valence: is how much importance the individual places upon the expected outcome. For example, if someone is motivated by money, he or she might not value offers of additional time off.

Motivation = V * I * E

The three elements are important when choosing one element over another because they are clearly defined:

E>P expectancy: our assessment of the probability that our efforts will lead to the required performance level.

P>O expectancy: our assessment of the probability that our successful performance will lead to certain outcomes.

5. McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y

Theory X and Theory Y were first explained by McGregor in his book, "The Human Side of Enterprise," and they refer to two styles of management - authoritarian (Theory X) and participative (Theory Y).

Theory X: Managers who accept this theory believe that if you feel that your team members dislike their work, have little motivation, need to be watched every minute, and are incapable of being accountable for their work, avoid responsibility and avoid work whenever possible, then you are likely to use an authoritarian style of management. According to McGregor, this approach is very "hands-on" and usually involves micromanaging people's work to ensure that it gets done properly.

Theory Y: Managers who accept this theory believe that if people are willing to work without supervision, take pride in their work, see it as a challenge, and want to achieve more, they can direct their own efforts, take ownership of their work and do it effectively by themselves. These managers use a decentralized, participative management style.

6. Alderfer's ERG Theory

C. P. Alderfer, an American psychologist, developed Maslow's hierarchy of needs into a theory of his own.

His theory suggests that there are three groups of core needs: existence (E), relatedness (R), and growth (G). These groups are aligned with Maslow's levels of physiological needs, social needs, and self-actualization needs, respectively.

Existence needs concern our basic material requirements for living, which include what Maslow categorized as physiological needs such as air, sleep, food, water, clothing, sex and shelter and safety-related needs such as health, secure employment, and property.

Relatedness needs have to do with the importance of maintaining interpersonal relationships. These needs are based on social interactions with others and are aligned with Maslow's levels of love/belonging-related needs such as friendship, family, and sexual intimacy and esteem-related needs such as gaining the respect of others.

Growth needs describe our intrinsic desire for personal development. These needs are aligned with the other part of Maslow's esteem-related needs such as self-esteem, self-confidence, and achievement, and self-actualization needs such as morality, creativity, problem-solving, and discovery.

Alderfer is of the opinion that when a certain category of needs is not being met, people will redouble their efforts to fulfill needs in a lower category.

Maslow's theory is very rigid and it assumes that the needs follow a specific and orderly hierarchy and unless a lower-level need is satisfied, an individual cannot proceed to the higher-level need i.e., an individual remains at a particular need level until that need is satisfied.

Whereas, according to Alderfer's theory, if a higher-level need is aggravated, an individual may revert to increasing the satisfaction of a lower-level need. This is called the frustration-regression aspect of ERG theory. ERG theory is very flexible as Alderfer perceived the needs as a range/variety instead of perceiving them as a hierarchy i.e., an individual can work on growth needs even if his existence or relatedness needs remain unsatisfied.

For e.g., when growth needs aggravate, then an individual might be motivated to accomplish the relatedness need and if there are issues in accomplishing relatedness needs, then he might be motivated by the existence needs. Hence in this manner, frustration or aggravation can result in regression to a lower-level need.

Another example could be, if someone's self-esteem is suffering, he or she will invest more effort in the relatedness category of needs.

Implications of the ERG Theory

All managers must understand that an employee has various needs that must be satisfied at the same time. According to the ERG theory, if the manager focuses solely on one need at a time, then this will not effectively motivate the employee. The frustration-regression aspect of ERG Theory has an added effect on workplace motivation. For e.g., if an employee is not provided with growth and advancement opportunities in an organization, then he or she might revert to related needs such as socializing needs.

To meet those socializing needs, if the environment or circumstances do not permit it, he might revert to the need for money to fulfill those socializing needs. By the time the manager realizes and discovers this, they will take more immediate steps to fulfill those needs which are frustrated until such time that the employee can again pursue growth.

You can further explore KnowledgeHut's best project management course which goes into full detail about the same.

Conclusion

Motivation is the state of mind which pushes all human beings to perform to their highest potential, with good spirits and a positive attitude. The various motivation theories outlined above help us to understand what are the factors that drive motivation. It is a leader's job to ensure that every individual in the team and the organization is motivated, and inspired to perform better than their best. This is neither quick nor easy, but in the long-term, the gains that are derived from happy employees far outweigh the time and effort spent in motivating them!

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Motivation Theories [5 Famous Motivation Theories]

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Motivation is a state of mind, filled with energy and enthusiasm, which drives a person to work in a certain way to achieve desired goals. Motivation is a force that pushes people to work with a high level of commitment and focus, even if things are going against them.

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Hierarchical and flat organisational structures - Organisational structures - Edexcel - GCSE Business Revision - Edexcel - BBC Bitesize

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Learn about and revise the use of organisational structures in businesses with BBC Bitesize GCSE Business - Edexcel.

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Large or small, every organization should operate with a defined organizational structure. A well thought out and strategic business configuration clarifies reporting relationships and supports good communication - resulting in efficient and effective work process flow.

The board and senior leadership should be the group who determines the type of organizational structure that would best support the internal operations, how work is carried out and the chain-of-command.

Determining the best structure is done by answering the questions:

Senior leadership looks at all functions and determines how they would like work activities to be organized and carried out. This process also identifies natural reporting relationships and chain-of-command. Reporting relationships can be both vertical as well as horizontal.

8 Common Business Organizational Structures

1. Hierarchical Organizational Structure

Organizations that use a traditional hierarchical structure rely on a vertical chain of command as the prime method of organizing employees and their responsibilities. Military, government, and other very large organizations use a hierarchy to determine the level of control employees have over their work as well as their rank relative to others.

Hierarchical structures typically feature multiple layers of management and are therefore prone to bureaucracy and the creation of silos that prevent cross-team collaboration.

An example of hierarchical organizational structures:

Pros:

Easy layout to understand

Communicate reporting relationships

Built-in understanding of future promotion opportunities

Cons:

Ready to build your own organizational chart?

2. Flat or Horizontal Organizational Structure

Companies with flat or horizontal structures often have fewer levels of management or executives over employees. Most people that have worked for a small company such as a startup will have experienced this type of structure. At most, there is one layer of middle managers between an executive(s) and employees, but oftentimes there are no middle managers present at the company.

The advantage of a horizontal structure is that it gives employees more responsibilities which in turn requires them to have more transparency within the greater organization. It also removes the bureaucratic nature of large hierarchical structures, allowing for quick decisions to be made and executed on.

The disadvantage of a flat structure is that it requires multidisciplinary professionals who don't desire to specialize. Middle managers also have a tendency to be stretched thin within this structure as they'll be overseeing many types of professionals and projects.
Recommended Reading: Hierarchical vs. Flat Organizational Structures and Benefits of Each

Employees often receive more responsibilities

Requires employees given more transparency

Allows for quick communication and decision making

Pros:

Cons:

3. Matrix Organizational Structure

A matrix structure provides for reporting levels both horizontally as well as vertically. Employees may be part of a functional group (i.e. engineer) but may serve on a team that supports new product development (i.e. new album). This kind of structure may have members of different groups working together to develop a new product line.

For example, a recording engineer who works for a music publisher, may have engineers who report to him but may also use his expertise and work with teams to develop new music albums.

Pros:

Cons:

4. Functional Organizational Structure

Functional organizational structures are the most common. A structure of this type groups individuals by specific functions performed. Common departments such as human resources, accounting and purchasing are organized by separating each of these areas and managing them independently of the others.

For example, managers of different functional areas all report up to one director or vice president who has responsibility for all of the operational areas.

The advantage of this type of structure is that functions are separated by expertise but the challenges comes in when different functional areas turn into silos that focus only on their area of responsibility and don't support the function of other departments.

An example of functional organizational structures:

Pros:
Ready to build your own functional organizational chart?
Cons:

5. Product Organizational Structure

Another common structure is to be organized by a specific product type. Each product group falls within the reporting structure of an executive and that person oversees everything related to that particular product line.

For example, an executive over Kraft products would be responsible for every product under that label - dressings, meats, sauces, etc.

The advantage of this type of structure is that it organizes products by category but can create completely separate processes from other product lines within the organization.

An example of product organizational structures:

Organizes products by categories

Focus on specific market segments

Allows for specialization

Can encourage healthy competition between departments

Pros:

Other product teams might be cut off from innovations and learning opportunities by other teams at the same company

Can create inefficient/duplicative functions and resources

Can nurture negative rivalries across departments

Ready to build your own product organizational chart?
Cons:

6. Customer Organizational Structure

Certain industries will organize by customer type. This is done in an effort to ensure specific customer expectations are met by a customized service approach.

An example of this would be in healthcare. A patient seen as an outpatient has very different needs than those of patients who spend time in the hospital as inpatients. A customer centered structure creates customized care for those patients.

The advantage of this type of structure is that it specializes in the needs of each customer group but can ignore the needs of different customer types.

An example of customer organizational structures:

Pros:
Ready to build your customer organizational chart?
Cons:

7. Geographic Organizational Structure

For organizations that cover a span of geographic regions, it sometimes makes sense to organize by region. This is done to better support logistical demands and differences in geographic customer needs.

Typically a structure that is organized by geographical regions reports up to a central oversight person. You see this type of structure in companies that go beyond a city or state limit and may have customers all across the country or in multiple states.

An example of geographic organizational structures:

Pros:
Ready to build your geographic organizational chart?
Cons:

8. Network Organizational Structure

Network organizational structures work for businesses that employ freelancers, subcontractors, and vendors dispersed between satellite offices. This type of structure organizes the proper distribution of the company's resources. Employees can visualize workflows, processes, and relationships with on- and off-site coworkers.

The communication inherent in network organizational structures encourages employees to collaborate to complete projects. As there isn't a strict hierarchy, employees are empowered to take initiative and make decisions.

An advantage of the network organizational structure is that it emphasizes open employee communication in the workplace over hierarchy. There isn't a chain of command. It lets employees know each other's project involvement so they can easily collaborate.

An example of network organizational charts

Pros:

Cons:

Start Building Your Organizational Structure With Pingboard

Deliberate time and thought should go into the design of an organization's structure and the build out of an org chart. This is important so employees have a visual of how the organization functions and understands the chain-of-command. Operating within a defined structure, with good communication processes and work-flows, help to ensure efficient management of resources - people, time and money.

Build an org chart today by importing your people data into Pingboard or simply drag and drop people into the org chart. Workforce planning is easy with Pingboard because you can create multiple versions of your org chart and share a private link with colleagues for collaboration. When you are ready to share with your staff give everyone a secure link to the org chart so they can see reporting structures across your organization, and insightful employee profiles of coworkers.

Try us out for free today! If you need any help setting up your account we're always here.

Browse Organizational Structure Templates By Industry
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We make it easy to structure your business and add transparency for all levels of employees. After compiling data from thousands of org charts, we invite you to check out our pre-built org chart templates designed with your industry in mind.

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8 Types of Organizational Structures [+ Downloadable Org Chart Templates] | Pingboard

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Review examples & templates for hierarchical, matrix, functional, product, customer, geographic & network organizational structures.

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Accountability vs. responsibility: what are they, how are they different, and what are some examples? This article will explore these characteristics and provide tips to develop them.

Consider a time when everyone at your company was working toward a big goal that required cross-functional collaboration. Perhaps you were rolling out a new product, undergoing a rebrand, or expanding into a new geographic area or market segment. Each team member has their own responsibilities and deadlines in order to meet the company goal.

For instance, the marketing team may be working on a new website. That could mean one person is responsible for website copywriting, another for design, and yet another for technical implementation. The team may hit a snag when another department fails to furnish the required information for the new website. Now, the entire project is at risk of falling off track.

Who's ultimately accountable? Leaders.

Leaders must take a proactive approach to ensure that cross-functional collaboration is effective, tasks are completed adequately, and deadlines are met. They must support their teams in whatever ways they need to meet their responsibilities. This could mean opening better lines of communication with other teams, hiring additional support staff, or reprioritizing tasks.

The difference between accountability and responsibility is ever so slight, which is perhaps the reason these terms are often used interchangeably.

What is responsibility?

Responsibility is the ability to respond to situations and events in our lives, as well as to perform or complete assigned tasks.

Paradoxically, responsibility is often associated with blame, fault, or guilt which could be one of the reasons people are quite resistant to taking responsibility. In reality, it is a personal, mature, and conscious choice.

What is accountability?

Accountability is the recognition and acknowledgment of our responsibilities, and being answerable for the outcomes of our actions, decisions, and mistakes.

Accountability includes:

Acceptance: consenting to receive or undertake something offered.

Obligation: accepting the binding power of promise.

Ownership: taking responsibility for an idea or problem.

Answerability: explaining actions or decisions.

Choice: making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities.

Commitment: being emotionally compelled to an agreement or responsibilities.

Accountability vs. responsibility

In a nutshell, the difference between these two concepts is: you are responsible for things and you're accountable to people, but both are a conscious choice that comes from within.

Although these terms are often used as synonyms, several characteristics separate them.

Responsibility refers to the obligation to perform the task or comply with the rule; accountability implies answerability for the outcome of the task or process.

Responsibility is imposed whereas accountability is accepted.

Responsibility can be partially delegated, but it is impossible to delegate accountability.

Responsibility may or may not be measured as part of an employee's performance, unlike accountability which is-and should be-measured.

Responsibility defines our duties to ourselves and others. Accountability demands us to be answerable upon fulfillment or non-fulfillment of our responsibility.

Responsibility is binary and linear, whereas accountability is non-binary and nonlinear.

What are accountability and responsibility in the workplace?

Responsibility vs. accountability comes down to effort vs. results. That is, a team member may be responsible for completing a task or project, and accountable for ensuring it's done correctly. This can apply to leaders and individual contributors alike.

Let's look at a few examples of accountability in the workplace:

1. A sales team leader commits to increasing quarterly revenue by 10 percent after growing their team. After realizing they don't have enough deals in the pipeline to accomplish that goal, they set to work on a plan. They mentor under-performing team members, sync with the marketing department on upcoming campaigns, and jump in to knock out cold calls with the sales development team. This commitment to accountability inspires the rest of their team to go above and beyond to meet team goals.

2. An engineer estimates that it will take 25 hours to complete coding on a new product function. As the project nears 15 hours, they realize they underestimated the project scope. Rather than rushing, and submitting a sub-par project, they let their manager know the project will require an extra day of work than originally anticipated. The manager can then reallocate resources and reprioritize tasks among the team to ensure goals are met.

3. A healthcare provider bills a customer for services that should have been covered entirely by insurance. When the customer calls the healthcare provider to dispute the bill, the customer service representative tells them they need to contact their insurance company instead. However, the insurance company has no record of receiving a claim from the healthcare provider. Rather than passing the buck back to the healthcare provider, the insurance representative offers to call the healthcare provider to sort things out. Then the insurance representative calls the customer back to explain how the issue has been resolved.

These accountability examples represent proactive accountability. This is far better than reactive accountability, in which team members and leaders hold themselves accountable for failures without taking adequate steps to prevent them.

For instance, a leader may hold themselves accountable and accept blame when a deadline is missed, a customer is lost, or another mistake is discovered. This type of leadership accountability isn't quite as useful.

How to build a culture of accountability

A culture of accountability encourages all leaders and individual contributors to assume control over their own outcomes. When accountability is a way of life for all employees, companies can benefit from:

Making better, faster decisions

Tapping into the skills and opinions of all members

Avoiding wasting time and energy on conflict

Having more engaged employees

Increasing productivity

Providing better customer service

Having less micromanaging and more autonomy in teams

Developing trust

Decreasing silo culture

Achieving better results

Build a culture of accountability by applying the three Cs:

1. Clarity. Provide clear, specific expectations and goals to your team members. For example, saying, "This project is due for our meeting on Thursday at 9:00 am" is clear and specific. Saying, "Finish this project sometime next week," isn't.

2. Commitment. Encourage team members to commit to specific outcomes. "I'll try" isn't a commitment; "I promise or I commit" is. If a team member has valid objections or doubts about the desired outcome, negotiate the expectation or discuss other ways to achieve the desired results.

3. Consequences. Outline consequences for not achieving the desired, agreed-upon outcome. Or let your team members come up with their own possible consequences for not attaining their goals.

Tips for managers to develop accountability and responsibility

While accountability ultimately lies with company leaders, each team member can still be individually accountable for their own role in reaching team goals.

Here are some tips to encourage accountability and responsibility:

Accountability starts with you. Be an example of behaviors that you want to see in your company. You're accountable for your team´s failures and successes. If you don't walk the talk, why should your people be interested in doing so?

Build trust. Without trust, you will see the culture of blame, and victims hiding information that employees think could be used against them. To create trust, listen to and understand people's concerns, ideas, and problems.

Promote cultural alignment. Act and speak consistently about "how things are done around here." It involves living the values, supportive supervision, clear expectations, and teamwork protocols, behaviors, and ethics.

Measure objectively. Provide clear metrics by which all team members know they will be measured. Goals and objectives must be based on results and facts and not on opinions, politics, or power struggles.

Provide timely feedback on performance. Provide a safe space to share information on how to improve performance as well as to discuss difficult issues without blaming anyone. The goal should always be to solve problems and to find solutions.

Engage employees. Take steps to increase employees' motivation. Use brainstorming sessions, world café discussions, meet the CEO question-and-answer sessions, employee committees, and town hall meetings.

Provide support. Set up review sessions to ask how people are doing. It gives you an opportunity to provide support when and if needed, or give praise and encouragement when things are going well.

Don't hold people accountable. With continuous support, people need to make themselves accountable and accept the consequences of their actions. Don't punish people for making mistakes, but make it clear the mistakes have consequences.

Final thoughts on accountability vs. responsibility

Going back to the basics of accountability and responsibility in our daily life and work is vital. It's vital for being aware of ourselves, and our thoughts, emotions, and feelings. It's vital for how and why we take actions and make decisions. It's vital for changing ourselves and our environment. And it's vital for our reputation and how we are seen by others.

Leadership cannot be successful without accountability. Each team member and leader has a job to do to ensure company goals are achieved-but leaders must own the overall result. A leader's ability to understand and assume accountability is critical for business success.

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Accountability vs. responsibility for leaders

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Accountability vs. responsibility: what are they, how are they different, and what are some examples? This article will explore these characteristics and provide tips to develop them. Consider a time when everyone at your company was working toward a big goal that required cross-functional collaboration.

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Today, we're in almost constant contact with our coworkers. You might not put a lot of thought into saying "hi" to your coworker, grabbing virtual coffee with a remote team member, or sending a gif of a cat wearing pajamas to your team-and that's ok. Even though you're communicating at work, there's a difference between these types of messages and communication in the workplace.

Communication in the workplace refers to communication you do at work about work. Knowing when and how to effectively communicate at work can help you reduce miscommunication, increase team happiness, bolster collaboration, and foster trust. Teams that know how to communicate effectively about work are better prepared for difficult situations. But building good communication habits takes time and effort-and that's where we come in. Here are 12 ways to take your workplace communication skills to the next level.

What does "workplace communication" mean?

Workplace communication is any type of communication you do at work about work. This includes things like communicating about individual tasks, sharing project status updates, or giving feedback to managers or employees. Knowing how to communicate in the workplace is a key part of effective collaboration-because if you can't communicate clearly, then you risk miscommunication, confusion, or even unintentionally hurting someone's feelings.

Communication in the workplace can happen face-to-face, in writing, over a video conferencing platform, or in a group meeting. It can also happen in real time or asynchronously, which happens when you're communicating about work over email, with recorded video, or in a platform like a project management tool. Some examples of workplace communication include:

What makes communication good?

Now that you know what type of communication can be included in workplace communication, how do you start getting better at it? There are a few key tenets of good communication that you can use no matter the type of communication it is. In particular, good communication:

Aims for clarity. Whether you're sending a Slack message, drafting an email, or giving an off-the-cuff reply, aim to clearly communicate your message.

Seeks to solve conflicts, not create them. The reason you're communicating is to solve a problem or promote effective collaboration on a project or task. Good communication in the workplace can bring up blockers or provide feedback-but make sure the goal is to get to a better place than where you are now.

Goes both ways. Every instance of communication in the workplace is an exchange of information-even if one person is only communicating nonverbally.

Read: How to give effective project feedback in 7 steps
The benefits of open workplace communication
Read: What is a matrix organization and how does it work?
Clear, effective workplace communication can:

7 tips for more effective communication in the workplace

Effective communication in the workplace is all about where, how, and when you're communicating. Try these seven tips to become a stronger communicator.

1. Know where to communicate-and about what

Communication happens in many different forms-face-to-face, over email, via instant messages, and in work management platforms. To be most effective, make sure you're following communication guidelines and messaging about the right things in the right places.
Read: Why a clear communication plan is more important than you think
Sometimes, knowing where to communicate is half the battle. Your company may have different communication tools -which makes knowing which tool to use all the more important. Which tool is appropriate for your question or comment? Do you need to communicate in real time, or is it ok to send an asynchronous message? If you're not sure, ask a team member or manager where you should be sending different types of messages. It is important for everyone to be on the same page. For example, at Asana, we use:

2. Build collaboration skills

Collaboration is the bedrock of effective teamwork. In order to build strong team collaboration skills, you need to practice open and honest communication. This doesn't necessarily mean always agreeing on things-knowing how to disagree and work through those differences is a key part of collaboration, too.

Collaboration and communication skills are kind of a "chicken and egg" scenario. You can build good collaboration by communicating effectively-but knowing how to collaborate is a key component of strong communication. Essentially, this just means you'll have to practice improving both collaboration and communication skills over time. As you improve team collaboration, you'll get better at conveying information and opinions in a work environment-and as a result, that honest communication will make collaboration feel more effortless.

3. Talk face-to-face when you can

Perhaps the most tried-and-true way to avoid miscommunication is to talk face-to-face. If your team is virtual, speaking via video conferencing also works. Face-to-face communication is particularly important if you know a conversation is going to be hard. Tone can be difficult to communicate through writing so ideally, you want your team member to be able to see your facial expressions and body language.

If your team is remote or distributed, communicating via a phone call instead of a video conference could work as well. Video conferencing fatigue is real, and it can make collaboration and communication particularly difficult for remote teams. Communicating over the phone reduces some of the visual strain, while still giving you the ability to hear your team member's voice and tone.

4. Watch your body language and tone of voice

Communication isn't just about what you say-it's also about how you say it. Make sure you aren't crossing your arms or coming off as curt. Oftentimes, your body language may have nothing to do with the current situation-maybe you're tired or stressed about something in your personal life. But your team members, who might not have that context, could see your actions and assume you're angry or upset about something. Particularly for hard conversations, try to relax your body language and facial expressions to avoid giving off any unintentional cues.

5. Prioritize two-way communication

Listening is just as important to communication in the workplace as talking. Part of being a collaborative team member is listening to other people's ideas instead of just trying to put your own ideas out there.

There are two common types of listening: listening to reply and listening to understand. When you listen to reply, you're focusing on what you're going to say next, rather than what the other person is saying. With this type of listening, you risk missing key information or even repeating what the other person just said.

Instead, try to listen to understand-that is, listen to what the other person has to say without thinking about how you're going to reply. If you do think of something you want to say, jot it down so you can go back to listening to understand, instead of trying to remember the thing you want to say next.

6. Stick to facts, not stories

"Facts vs. stories" is a technique recommended by the co-founder of the Conscious Leadership Group, Diana Chapman. In this case, "facts" are things that have actually happened-things that everyone in the room would easily agree on. A "story," on the other hand, is your interpretation of the situation.

For example, say your manager gives you live feedback during a small team meeting. That is a fact. You weren't expecting the feedback, and you feel like your manager shared the feedback-instead of saving it for your 1:1-because they're dissatisfied with your work. This is a "story" because you have no way of knowing if this is true or not.
Read: How to write a memo for effective communication (with template)
Stories are inevitable-we all create stories from facts. But try to separate stories from facts, and avoid acting on stories until you're able to validate them. For example in this case, you might want to talk to your manager during your next 1:1 and ask why they shared feedback in a team meeting.

7. Make sure you're speaking to the right person

Effective workplace communication is as much about who you're talking to as it is about what you're saying. Poor communication often occurs when you're talking to the wrong people, or trying to share information in the wrong setting.
Read: What is a project stakeholder analysis and why is it important?
To avoid this, make sure the right people are in the room or receiving the message. If you aren't sure who that would be, go through an exercise to identify any important project stakeholders who might be missing.

5 tips to build leadership communication skills

If you're a leader, you have the power to set and establish communication conventions on your team. Strong communication can build healthy company culture, trust among your employees, and break down silos between cross-functional teams. Here's how:

1. Address any underlying changes

Before you start improving your team's communication skills, ensure there are no underlying issues that keep everyone from communicating honestly. Does everyone feel comfortable talking openly? Is there anything that might make a team member feel like they can't be their full selves?

One theme that kept coming up in our employee engagement surveys was that we could improve information sharing and communication across the organization, so we looked for a way to do that."

-Usama Khan, Director of Finance, Islamic Relief Canada

Read: Islamic Relief Canada increases its impact by 75% with Asana
One of the most valuable things you can do as a leader is to make sure your employees feel comfortable showing up to work as their whole selves (or as much of themselves as they want to bring). Whether that means voicing disagreements, talking about their passions outside of work, or being honest about what type of communication works best for them-make sure to understand each team member's needs, and ensure they're being met in the team environment.

2. Frequently ask for feedback

If you don't ask for feedback on your communication style, you may never get it. Even though communication in the workplace impacts every other interaction, team members might not immediately think of it as something to provide feedback on. By asking your employees for feedback on your communication style, you can continue to improve and develop clear communication strategies for your team.

3. Understand team communication styles

Another effective way to communicate with your team is to ask them how they want to communicate. Communication preferences shouldn't be a secret-or a guessing game-and knowing off the bat if your team members prefer video conferences or phone calls, early morning meetings or afternoon jam sessions, can help you create an environment where they can thrive.

Are they an early bird or a night owl?

Do they like structured meetings or prefer free-flow brainstorming sessions?

Do they do their best thinking out loud, on the spot, or on paper?

What personality type do they identify with: introvert, extrovert, or ambivert?

Do they feel like they know their team members, or would they prefer more team bonding activities?

What type of meetings or tasks are most energizing for them?

Read: The manager's guide to communication styles
Important questions to ask include:
Read: 110+ best icebreaker questions for team building
4. Make time for team building or icebreakers

Getting to know your team is a critical part in knowing how to communicate with them. It's particularly important to make time to get to know your team outside of a workplace setting. Icebreaker questions can help bring an element of personality and fun to every meeting, so consider starting with a light chat before diving into your meeting agenda.

5. Set the tone

As an organization grows, communication starts to bottleneck. At Hope for Haiti, we've seen those inefficiencies hurt us: when we can't run like a well-oiled machine, we're not serving as many people as we could be-and it's our responsibility to improve upon that."

-Skyler Badenoch, CEO, Hope for Haiti

Read: Hope for Haiti improves the lives of more Haitians with Asana
Remember: the way you communicate and collaborate will impact your entire team. It's up to you to set the standard for open and clear communication in the workplace. Once you set and communicate this standard, your team will follow suit.

Every few months, make a note to check back in on how everyone is feeling about team communication. Are there any habits that have cropped up in the last few months that you want to cull or encourage? Regularly thinking about how your team communicates-instead of "setting and forgetting" your team practices-can help you be more intentional about your communication methods.

More types of workplace communication

Most discussions about communication in the workplace assume the "workplace" is in person. But there are a variety of ways to communicate across different locations-from global offices to remote teams. Most communication best practices still apply to any type of team, but there are a few additional considerations and best practices you can use to help team members truly connect.

Distributed teams

Distributed teams work across multiple national or global offices. These teams might span different time zones and languages, and each office will have its own culture and habits. Don't expect each distributed team to communicate in the same way-in fact, one of the advantages of distributed teams is the variety of thought you're exposed to by working with teammates from all over the world.
Read: Reuniting and thriving in a distributed world with Asana
If you work on a distributed team, it's critical to over-communicate so that team members in different time zones and offices stay in the loop. Make sure to document everything in a central source of truth that team members can access when they're online, and look for a tool that updates in real-time so no one has to slow down due to information lag.

Keep in mind that time zones might affect how people come to a conversation. Try to schedule meetings when everyone is available, or offer recordings and notes if team members can't make it. It's also critical to double check that the right people are in the loop, and that they aren't just being left out because they're in a different office than the majority of your team.

While working remotely, we've had to re-learn how to communicate in many ways. Slack, Asana, and integrations between these tools has replaced or supplemented a lot of in-person ways we used to communicate."

-Casey James, Head of Creative Operations, JKR Global

Read: Jones Knowles Ritchie designs brands for scale, disruption, and good with Asana
Online coworkers

If you're working with a virtual team, it's critical to establish where you're going to communicate and how frequently. Knowing exactly what each communication tool should be used for can help team members feel connected-even while they're remote.
Read: 3 guiding concepts for successfully managing a newly remote team
Remote team members can feel siloed and disconnected from one another, so consider doing an exercise with your entire team about preferred communication habits. Some team members might love cold calls, while others might prefer scheduled meetings with clear agendas. Because team members have fewer chances to interact in person, it's critical to establish these preferences as a team, so you can keep the communication channels open.

Finally, make sure to bring team members in for regular team bonding events. Whether you're doing icebreaker activities at the beginning of every meeting or scheduling some time to just chat at the end of each week, dedicated team time can help team members connect no matter where they're dialing in from.

The cherry on top of effective workplace communication

The last component of clear communication is having a central source of truth for all of your communication and work information. Using a centralized system like a work management tool can help you coordinate work across all levels of your team. Learn more about how work management makes project coordination and communication easier in our introduction to work management article.

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12 Tips for Effective Communication in the Workplace [2023] * Asana

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Teams that communicate effectively about work are better prepared for difficult situations. Learn how to build good communication habits with these 12 tips.

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It's a good idea to make sure that all bases are covered if you're planning a meeting ahead of time, so that you know it'll go smoothly.

But there's plenty more to do than just getting your slides and talking points ready while you're in preparation for the meeting.

From working out a clear structure to getting your team prepped and ready, there's a lot to consider.

Let us walk you step-by-step through the meeting preparation process that works for us at Slido and share some of the best practices that were game-changing for us.

1. Set purpose and goals

First, define the meeting purpose, or the ' Why ' behind your meeting. Why are you meeting? Is it to brainstorm? Is it to have a discussion or plan the next steps? If you set one clear objective, it'll be much easier for you to design an agenda for your meeting.

Second, specify the main goal, or the ' What ' of the meeting. What should come out of the meeting? What is the main deliverable? Set a tangible meeting outcome and stick to it. If it's to make a decision about X, don't leave the meeting without seeing it through.

These will be the guideposts that will help you set the right expectations and steer the meeting in the right direction.

2. Create & share an agenda

Now that you've set your meeting objectives and goals, it's time to create a bulletproof agenda.

A meeting agenda is an outline of all the activities and discussion points to cover during a meeting in order to reach the meeting goal/s. In short, a structure that your meeting will follow.

While there isn't a one-size-fits-all meeting agenda template, there are several best practices to keep in mind when designing an agenda for a) recurring and b) one-time/first-time meetings.

Recurring meetings

With meetings that you run regularly - e.g. team syncs - it is tempting to think there's no need for an agenda. Your colleagues already know the format, so what's there to design? Well, there are still things to consider.

The main keyword here is simplicity. A simple agenda goes a long way and will hold your meeting together like a skeleton. All you need is a list of action points to go through.

Write down the main discussion points that you want to touch on during the meeting. You can even assign owners that will drive the discussion around each point.

Here's an example from one of our meetings:

💡 Don't forget to share the agenda with your team members ahead of the meeting (1-3 days) via your internal comms channels, such as Slack, Webex, or Microsoft Teams.

One-time meetings/First-time meetings

With new meetings for which you don't have an already established format, you need to go deeper. In these instances, you need to design the whole meeting agenda from scratch.

The main keyword here is alignment. Given that your team members don't know the format, it's crucial to:

Communicate clearly the purpose, expectations and goals of the meeting

Describe the structure and length

Explain what needs to be prepared and what the responsibilities of each member are

Crowdsource any questions or discussion points in advance of the meeting

If there are multiple speakers who will present at the meeting, align with them prior to the meeting. Set a time frame for each of the meeting sections. Be as specific as possible.

Get inspired by our first-ever 'Cross-team alignment' meeting, for which we set a very bold objective - to bring together 3 teams (20+ people) and get them aligned.

A lot also depends on the size of the meeting. If you're preparing an all-company meeting, there's a whole different strategy to employ. Read more about how to design an all-hands meeting agenda here.

3. Send out meeting invites

Send meeting invites to everyone involved in the meeting at least two weeks in advance so your colleagues have enough time to work it into their schedules.

Add all the important details in the meeting invite description. Share the meeting goals and the agenda (regardless of whether you already shared it or plan to share it later - make it available in the invite as well).

In case you're meeting online or in a hybrid setup, also include the link to the video conference call so that nobody can miss it, and can easily access it via their calendars.

Here's an example of a meeting invite for our summer brainstorming session:

💡 For even better invites, add links to Slido so you can start collecting people's input, like questions or ideas before the meeting. Learn more in the next point.

4. Collect questions and ideas from your team

Gathering input from the team members before the meeting works well with some meeting formats.

Brainstorming & planning

For example, if you're having a brainstorming session or a planning meeting, start collecting your team members' ideas beforehand. Attach a link to Slido to the meeting agenda or to the meeting invite and ask your colleagues to type their ideas into the app.

This gives your colleagues a safe space for submitting their ideas and levels the playing field - everyone can contribute equally, even the ones who fear speaking up in the meeting. They can even do so anonymously if they wish.

Plus, it's more efficient than brainstorming during the meeting. It allows you to review all the submissions before the meeting and then spend the meeting time discussing and prioritizing.

In preparation for our meetings at Slido we use this technique a lot:

Retrospective meetings

A team retrospective is another meeting type where you can benefit greatly from collecting insights beforehand.

Send a stop-start-continue survey for your participants to fill out in advance.

Go through people's submissions and look for patterns, items mentioned repeatedly, or any other important feedback. This way, you can identify the most burning issues which you can then use to create an agenda, and drive discussions during the meeting.
Create your own poll or survey in Slido and hear from everyone.
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All company meetings/All team meetings

Larger meetings such as all-hands, town halls, or strategic team meetings provide an opportunity to address questions or concerns that your team members might have. Give your team a chance to post their questions into Slido even before the meeting.

You can then address them during the meeting - either in a dedicated Q&A session, or address them continuously throughout.

We start collecting questions from our employees about a week before every company all-hands meeting.

This way, our executive team has time to prepare their answers and our colleagues have a chance to go through the submitted questions and upvote the ones they identify with. We also give our colleagues a chance to ask anonymously which means our leadership gets more honest questions.

You can find more tips and ideas for all-hands meetings at our all-hands hub.

Read also: How to Host More Effective Meetings by Collecting Input in Advance

5. Distribute supporting materials

If there's material that you want your meeting participants to review before the meeting, or if there's something that you want your team to prepare, communicate it well in advance. You may, for instance, add it as an attachment to your meeting invite or share it in your internal comms channel.

It's good for getting everyone aligned and familiar with the forthcoming discussion.

However, it's good practice to clarify expectations and make a clear distinction between what's a must and what's nice to have. Perhaps not everyone needs to read through a 50-slides-long presentation. Sometimes, it's enough to get a gist of what will be discussed.

6. Prepare your slides

Getting the slide deck ready is a drill you surely know very well, but here are a few tips that can make your life a little easier.

Apply a minimalistic approach to your slides. Keep them simple - one idea/one number/one sentence per slide. People don't want to read huge bodies of text on slides. Plus, it's more visually appealing.

Use the 'Rule of three' method - three bullet points, three columns, etc. It's easier for people to process

Cut the number of slides too. Spend the meeting time on a fruitful discussion rather than going through an 80-slides-long presentation.

Use visuals like images, graphs, tables, etc. Preferable to making people read, apply the 'show & tell' approach - show something visual and describe what people are looking at.

If there will be multiple presenters at your meeting, have one master deck. Share it with all the contributors before the meeting and ask them to add their slides there. It's much smoother than switching presentation decks.

As you prepare slides for your meeting, think of all the points of interaction with your meeting participants (see the next point). For instance, you can insert live polls directly into your slide deck with Slido for Google Slides and Slido for PowerPoint.

7. Create opportunities for interaction

When designing a meeting, create multiple ' interaction points ' - the spots on the agenda where you purposefully create a space for your meeting participants to actively contribute.

This is important for creating meaningful engagement throughout your meeting. If you let your participants sit passively through the meeting, you will eventually lose their attention.

Forbes reports that the average person loses focus within 10 minutes.

If, on the other hand, you give them space to be actively involved in the meeting, you will engage them.
So, how do you create these interaction points?
Go through your meeting agenda and think about at which point it would make sense to hear from your participants.

For example, after you've brainstormed some ideas for projects, ask your teammates: "Which of these projects do you think we should prioritize in the next quarter?"

Turn it into an interactive poll. Add your project ideas as options in a multiple choice or a ranking poll and let your teammates vote.

It's a way to make your meetings more democratic - you'll give everyone a voice - and engaging - you'll involve everyone in co-creating the meeting and influencing its outcomes.

Learn more about how to create interaction spots in your presentation here.

💡 You can add a Slido poll, quiz, or Q&A directly into your slide deck with Slido's integration with PowerPoint and Google Slides - it will be added as a separate interactive slide. You can manage every interaction as you click through the slides.

8. Prepare the opening

How you kick off the meeting may lay the foundations for the rest of the meeting, so leave nothing to chance and make sure to prepare your opening well.

Welcome everyone; if your meeting includes remote participants, give them a special greeting to make them feel included from the start.

To loosen people up, prepare a little icebreaker, using our selection of icebreaker questions, or, if you need a quick interactive activity that will get people talking, fire up a fun poll question.

For example, check the mood in the room and ask your colleagues how they feel in a word cloud poll. You can even let them express their feelings in emojis.

Use the poll results to trigger a small chit-chat at the start - it's good to start the meeting with a bit of socializing, and make sure to ask open-ended questions if you want to get people really talking.

Once you kick off the official part, provide a quick context for why you're meeting up today and briefly run people through the agenda once again.

9. Set up the meeting

Lastly, make sure you have the meeting room arrangements figured out - whether you're meeting in an actual room or in a virtual one.

Meeting room: Face-to-face meeting

Book a meeting room and add the room number in the meeting invite or write it in your team's internal comms channel so everyone knows where it is you'll be meeting.

Consider the number of participants; make sure everyone will have a place to sit. Arrange some extra chairs just to be safe - more is better than less.

Make sure the seating doesn't favor anyone - everyone should feel equal and able to contribute. Ensure everyone can hear each other well. If it's a large meeting, ensure there's a microphone at people's disposal.

Arrange for refreshments; at least supply water, so people don't need to leave the room to get a drink.

Meeting room: Hybrid meeting

Book a room with a large screen and a tech setup that allows for a conference call with good audio and video.

Good audio is key. Make sure that all participants - both on-site and remote - can see and hear each other well. If your online colleagues can't hear what's happening in the room, they'll have trouble joining the discussion. Ensure all your meeting rooms are equipped with quality external speakers.

Have microphones available in the meeting room to make sure everybody online can hear their on-site colleagues if they speak up. This is important especially for meetings with a larger number of participants.

Check if people online can hear you well. Everybody has to hear everything - and feel like they're heard.

Online room: Fully remote meeting

Make sure everyone has easy access to the video conferencing link where the meeting will happen. Share the link in your team's internal comms channel or in a calendar invite (see point #3).

Send a meeting reminder via your team's internal comms channel some 5 minutes before the meeting.

Start the video conference a couple of minutes early, to avoid any delays. Test the audio and troubleshoot any potential tech issues.

Ensure every participant can hear you well as people start joining the call. You can do a little 'thumbs up' check - just ask your participants to put their thumbs up if they hear you well.

Encourage people to turn on their cameras so your meeting feels more personal.

Ready to kick off your meeting?

The quality of pre-meeting preparation can make or break your meeting. You can never be over-prepared. But fail to prepare at your own peril.

With the tips that we've shared above, you will be 9 steps closer to a stellar meeting. We wish you good luck.

And in the meantime, go ahead and try Slido for free. Start by adding one or two polls to your meeting presentation to keep your team members actively engaged. You can always add more later.
Here's to better meetings! 🥂 Try Slido at your meeting

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How to Prepare for a Meeting: Step by Step (With Examples) - Slido Blog

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Here are 9 best practices for how to prepare for a meeting with lots of practical tips that will help you design and lead a great meeting.

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Team performance is important for production, profitability and progress within a department. Measuring and improving team performance over time can help improve positive aspects of your team and remove negative ones. Learning how to improve your team management can help your department continuously increase its processes over time. In this article, we review what managing team performance management is and provide tips on how to do it successfully.

What is team performance management?

Team performance management is the act of ensuring that team performance is continuously improving, whether it's dividing the employee base into groups, performing evaluation checks or setting diversified goals. Team performance management involves returning to activities not only to evaluate how the team can perform them better but also how each part of the team reacts to the goal, including leaders.

If the team performs as leaders expect, or better, management prepares team rewards and progress instruction examples to help the team continue to perform well. For a system, the goal of team management is to ensure each part of the process works together to achieve an optimal goal. Team performance exercises have standardized settings, are repeatable and aligned toward strategic methods of improvement, especially in a situation where a team may be less efficient.

Related: Why Performance Management Is Important for Your Team

Why is managing team performance important?

Team performance management is important for some of the following reasons:

It helps build improvement

Team performance management is important because it helps build improvement in almost every aspect of the team. It helps team members individually improve concerning their goals, standards and margin of error in work. Evaluating team progress can also improve the rate at which a team works, including the total margin of error allowed for a project.

It encourages teamwork

Team performance management can be important for a team because it helps improve teamwork. Some team performance management tactics involve creating multiple teams, even in a department where teams aren't as common as others. Creating teams purposely for the sake of evaluation encourages teamwork and building.

It monitors progress

Exercising team management skills improves overall progress. Because team management involves checking the progress of employees on an individual and team-based level, exercising team management can help improve a department on both accounts. Team management allows department managers to evaluate progress with focused intent, allotting more focus toward team evaluation rather than orchestrating goals or deliveries independently.

How to manage team performance

If you want to manage your team for performance goals, consider some of the following steps:

1. Set effective goals

To have a team understand and complete new goals, consider making them SMART goals. These are objectives with qualities that make them easier to perform due to their clarity of expectation and detail. SMART goals meet the following sets of criteria:

Specific: Be specific concerning expectations, measurements and due dates of team members.

Measurable: Try to use units that are measurable and easy to understand. This can help establish expectations quickly.

Achievable: Setting goals well within your team's capabilities ensures you can evaluate their performance on an accurate scale.

Relevant: While the purpose of performance evaluation is a measurement, the goals your team completes should still be relevant to the company. Keep your goal relevant to company duties and current employee obligations in the workplace.

Time-based: Make your evaluated goals time-based. This can ensure expectations have a limit so that proper evaluation of work can result from your SMART goal.

Related: 7 Examples of Important Teamwork Skills

2. Select capable leaders for each team

When managing team performance goals, consider appointing leaders to each team who are either management employees or capable leaders. Appointing capable individuals to lead your teams can ensure knowledgeable and skilled employees are available to consult during projects. Not only does this help lessen the stress of staff during this time, but it also builds communication between team members and the leadership skills of all leading employees.

Related: 6 Tips for Effective Teamwork

3. Schedule training

As you evaluate each team during the management project, consider scheduling training for each team based on the data you find. If you notice a team excels in one aspect of the project and not another, creating training courses for individual members, or the entire team, can help evaluate results and determine the next steps toward progress. Training may be the best path toward an increase in production, as it provides your team with new skills and more confidence in their abilities.

Related: Characteristics of Good Teamwork (With Tips)

4. Ensure communication is available and reactive

If you've established leaders during this project, ensuring communication is available for all employees can be easy and effective. If you haven't already, consider appointing leaders who are available for answering questions or addressing concerns during a project. Employees may have questions concerning project criteria, such as due dates, deliverables, changing expectations or project notes.

Having leaders available for communication throughout the entire project can help evaluate not only your team but also your communication methods. For example, if enough team members ask questions concerning delivery dates, you might realize the delivery dates aren't clear enough in your goal statement.

5. Align team goals with organizational or familiar goals

When you manage your team performance, try to create goals that align with expectations that are familiar to your employee base. Having familiar or similar goals that your employees understand can help simulate what normal, daily goals look like in the typical schedule. This makes your evaluation more accurate.

Having familiar goals can also ensure that employees understand the expectations they receive, and they can prepare to complete goals in a timely manner. Another reason teams should have goals that align with the company goal is that having these goals can help both the team's progress and overall company expectations. If your goal aligns with the company's need, such as more new hires, then the evaluation period serves two purposes instead of one.

Tips for managing team performance

If you want to manage your team's performance, consider some of the following tips you can apply to your goals:

Clarify goals

When evaluating team performance, regardless of how large the team you're evaluating, set clear, actionable goals. Goals that are clear and actionable have steps that employees can apply to their job specifically, no matter their level. Some key aspects of a good goal statement are :

It sets an acceptable work standard.

It clarifies its purpose and direction in the company's goal.

It requires commitment.

It shows employees how they can reach the goal.

It's easy to understand.

It is reachable but ambitious in comparison to previous goals.

Goals that are clear and actionable can help improve the quality of your team evaluation by ensuring that management spends less time explaining goal needs. If your team effectively understands the goal, how they can reach it and why they're reaching it, you can more successfully evaluate their progress.

Use KPI goals

Another way to improve your measurement of team goals is to introduce KPI goals to your team. KPI goals are smaller, more measurable goals that a team achieves every period, usually either a month, day or week. If your team already uses KPIs, using them for your evaluation goals may help your ability to evaluate progress. If your team isn't used to using KPIs, the introduction may help expose the different strengths or weaknesses of your teams.

Be transparent

Transparency is the management act of being clear concerning goals, expectations and current performance. Remaining transparent about current goals can help your team. For example, if your team is excelling at a goal, being transparent about this can lead to encouragement. Even if the team isn't performing as efficiently as needed, being transparent about these facts can help motivate the team to try harder. If the team understands how they're progressing, they can work toward goals more effectively.

Host regular meetings

Another way to improve team performance management is to host frequent meetings concerning the team's progress. Frequent meetings not only help reestablish goals throughout your team but also help evaluate progress more closely. For a larger team or set of teams, frequent meetings can help center objectives and evaluate individual details as much as possible.

Have encouraging team culture

Another way you can achieve good team changes is by encouraging a positive team culture throughout the evaluation. You can do this by rewarding those excelling at goals or rewarding entire teams for exceeding their goals during a period. Doing this for multiple periods not only ensures that each period has proper evaluation but also encourages a friendly competitive nature between teams.

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How To Manage Team Performance Successfully (With Tips)

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Team performance is important for production, profitability and progress within a department. Measuring and improving team performance over time can help improve positive aspects of your team and remove negative ones. Learning how to improve your team management can help your department continuously increase its processes over time.

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Leadership: How to manage an underperforming team

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Does an MBA degree make leaders exceptional at their roles? In some cases, yes. An MBA does give them the textbook knowledge on how to lead people and teams; alongside which they’ve most likely picked up ‘real-life’ skills such as effective communication and negotiation.

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Most of us spend a large portion of our waking hours at work, so the quality of our working environment and relationships has a significant impact on our wellbeing. In any workplace there will be many different experiences and perspectives: we each see the world in a different way. This means we react in our own way to situations at work, which will affect the relationships we have with those around us. This diversity of experience and thinking is a good thing, but it can sometimes lead to misunderstanding and conflict between people. Some conflict can be positive, such as a healthy amount of competition between team members to reach goals. But negative conflict, like bullying or personality clashes, can harm individuals and undermine teamworking.

As a manager, you need to be at the forefront when workplace conflict occurs. If you don't tackle this conflict head on at an early stage, it's likely to escalate. Our report, Managing Conflict in the Modern Workplace, also reveals that managers themselves can often be the cause of conflict. It is therefore essential you reflect on your own management style and the impact your behaviour has on others.

This guide will help you proactively identify and manage conflict at work. It covers the people management skills you need to become part of the solution to resolving workplace conflict - not the problem. It focuses on how to handle workplace conflict at an early, informal stage - before issues escalate into serious disputes that require the use of formal procedures.

What does workplace conflict look like?

A work issue, like poor attendance or timekeeping, can cause conflict. Workplace conflict can also stem from a disagreement between people. It can occur across a wide spectrum of behaviour (often broadly referred to as workplace incivility), ranging from a personality clash to more serious types of unfair treatment - like bullying and harassment. It can be obvious - like a heated argument - or less visible - like excluding someone from a work social event.

Obvious sources of conflict at work include:

low-intensity deviant acts, such as rude verbal and non-verbal behaviours

any form of bullying behaviour or harassment A guide to dealing with bullying and workplace conflict

any form of discriminatory behaviour

poor performance

poor attendance and time-keeping

unacceptable language

excessive personal use of the internet or email

theft

drink or drug problems.

Other, less obvious sources include:

uncivil behaviour, such as not replying to an email

differences in personality style or working

taking credit for other people's work or ideas

not valuing other people's views, background or experiences

talking over people in meetings

failing to include people in round-robin emails

ignoring people or being discourteous

poor personal hygiene.

Often, it's these more subtle behaviours that, over time, if not tackled, lead to workplace disputes.

Related manager behaviour

You may find it helpful to think through your capacity to and create an environment that is open, respectful, kind, fair and consistent, to ensure you are in the best position to identify workplace conflict at the earliest possible stage.

In the UK under the Equality Act 2010, harassment is unlawful, and defined as 'unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, which has the purpose or effect of violating an individual's dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that individual'.

The protected characteristics relevant to harassment are age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. There are two types of harassment related to sex, both of which involve 'unwanted conduct' that has 'the purpose or effect of violating an individual's dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that individual'.

Though there's no legal definition of bullying in the UK, the Acas guide on bullying and harassment at work states that it can include 'offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour, an abuse or misuse of power through means that undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient'.

Bullying or harassment may involve single or repeated incidents across a wide spectrum of behaviour. This can range from extreme forms of intimidation, like physical violence, to more subtle forms, like an inappropriate joke or ignoring someone. Both bullying and harassment can be seen as severe versions of workplace incivility. This term describes low intensity deviant acts, such as rude verbal and non-verbal behaviours towards a member of a team, group or organisation, characterised by ambiguous intent to harm. This term A guide to dealing with bullying and workplace conflict is often used to encompass other constructs as well as bullying and harassment, such as social undermining and abusive supervision.

Based on our research, the most common types of bullying or harassment experienced by employees are:

being undermined or humiliated in one's job

persistent, unwanted criticism

unreasonable pressure about job performance

public humiliation

shouting or very heated arguments

verbal abuse

isolation or exclusion from social activities

Related manager behaviour

You may find it helpful to think through your capacity to handle conflict and people management issues and create an environment that is open, respectful, kind, fair and consistent, to ensure you are in the best position to identify conflict in your team at the earliest possible stage.

The first defence: prevention is better than cure

Workplace conflict is likely to fester and intensify if you ignore it. As a manager, you need the skills and confidence to intervene at an early stage to nip disagreements in the bud before they escalate. Handling workplace conflict in a proactive and positive way will help you improve your team's morale, retain valuable skills and talent, and reduce sickness absence. Reflecting on your management style and learning to handle workplace conflict and people management issues will be key to this.

Below, we outline the practical steps you can take to prevent serious workplace conflict from occurring in the first place.

By getting to know the people in your team as individuals and building and sustaining relationships with each team member, you'll be better placed to:

foster good working relationships with them

anticipate any potential conflict within the team

understand any personal pressures which might be affecting them at work

talk frankly about any problems they might be experiencing with their colleagues (or the job itself).

Things to consider

Understand what really matters to your team and remember that everyone's different. What are their personal triggers for stress? Do they feel secure and supported in their role? Do they have a sense of belonging and inclusion in their team?

Give every team member a good induction when they start in a new role. This helps you get to know them, and helps them settle in.

Get to know their preferred working styles. This encourages effective teamworking and reduces the risk of conflict.

Make yourself personally available to talk. Show empathy and listen to their concerns. This encourages them to open up and approach you should they have a problem.

Try not to shy away from personal issues. People aren't always able to leave their domestic responsibilities and worries at home. If you know someone has suffered a bereavement or is going through a relationship breakdown, they may be understandably more emotional and have a lower tolerance level at work than they would do under normal circumstances.

Related manager behaviour

This relates closely to the behaviour area Building and sustaining relationships. Look at Exercise 5 for advice on how to develop this area.

It only takes one person to cause disharmony within a team as a result of their negative behaviour or poor performance.

Examples of behaviour and performance that can create stress at work:

being overly critical

having a short temper

making personal remarks

not sharing information

talking about others behind their backs

avoiding unpopular team tasks

poor time-keeping or attendance.

Things to consider

Encourage people to talk to you if they have concerns about a work issue or are experiencing difficulties in their personal lives. By understanding an employee's context and situation, you'll be closer to understanding how it impacts their behaviour at work, how they're dealing with it, and how you can address it accordingly.

Be prepared to step in and talk to the individual as soon as you're aware there's a problem (irrespective of whether it's a performance or behavioural issue). In many cases the person might be unaware of how they (or their behaviour) is perceived by others and will quickly - and positively - respond to a quiet word. If it's a performance issue causing conflict (like poor time-keeping), encourage a conversation to understand if there's in fact a deeper, underlying problem (for example, a health or personal issue).

Related manager behaviour

This relates closely to the behaviour area Being open, respectful, fair and consistent. Look at Exercise 1 for advice on how to develop this area.

Though a certain level of office gossip is inevitable and need not cause any problems, office politics can be a source of misunderstanding and tension. Maintain objectivity and resist the urge to join in; this will only add fuel to the fire.

This is part of creating an environment that is open, respectful, kind, fair and consistent. Refer to Exercise 1 for advice on developing this behavioural area.

Things to consider

Using performance management to prevent workplace conflict

Encouraging informal ways to resolve workplace conflict

Despite the preventative measures we've explored above, workplace conflict can still develop. If it does, you'll need to take action to resolve it early and informally. This can appear daunting, but it's a core part of your role as a manager. If you ignore unacceptable behaviour, problems can escalate until formal disciplinary or grievance procedures have to be used. This can make it much harder to achieve a successful resolution and repair relationships.

Be proactive and initiate informal discussions if you think a problem's brewing. Conflict at work can lead to absences, so return-to-work interviews are also a good opportunity for you to ask questions about any issues that might be bothering employees.

Depending on the size of your organisation, your HR department should always be available in the event that you need informal advice to help you deal with conflict, so do seek appropriate support when you need it.

Related manager behaviour

Developing your capacity to handle conflict and people management issues will allow you to step in appropriately when needed. Refer to Exercise 3 for advice on developing this area.

To provide a foundation to help you have these conversations, it is important that you build and sustain relationships with team members. Refer to Exercise 5 for more information.

The last resort: using formal procedures to resolve workplace conflict

Even when you have made every effort to resolve the conflict, sometimes, the situation can develop to the point where it's appropriate to use formal procedures to address unresolved conflict at work (when, for example, an allegation of bullying or serious harassment occurs, or if a complainant has requested the situation be investigated).

Please note that formal methods should only be used if absolutely necessary, and in those cases where informal problem-solving has been unsuccessful.

If a complaint is serious or the individual wants it investigated formally, they should have the right to pursue a grievance. Where serious incidents occur - such as alleged harassment or discrimination, persistent bullying or out-of-character outbursts of verbal abuse or physical intimidation - they must be dealt with promptly and taken seriously.

Avoid shying away from using the formal disciplinary process in those cases where an individual's misconduct or underperformance demands it. One of the most important judgements you'll need to make as a manager is to recognise the point at which informal approaches to dispute resolution have failed and formal disciplinary action needs to be taken. You will need to draw on all your ability to handle workplace conflict and people management issues, build and sustain relationships, and be open, respectful, kind, fair and consistent if you need to do this. HR can provide useful advice at this point, so seek appropriate support when you need it.

Related manager behaviour

This relates closely to the behaviour areas Handling conflict and people management issues, Building and sustaining relationships and Being open, fair and consistent. Look at Exercise 3, Exercise 5 and Exercise 1 for advice on developing these areas.

Key takeaways

Good people management is fundamental to fostering positive working relationships in your team and wider organisation, spotting early signs of workplace conflict, and initiating early intervention.

Managing conflict is an integral part of your role as a manager. To a large degree, it's about good communication, providing ongoing feedback, and effective coaching and development. It's also about recognising good work and effective performance management.

Always make your expectations for performance clear. Address poor performance at an early stage, and always in a positive way. Performance management goes a long way in preventing the build-up of conflict at work.

Understand how workplace conflict can occur and be alert to any signs of it (including uncivil behaviour, bullying and harassment). Challenge any kind of inappropriate behaviour immediately to foster a culture based on dignity and respect.

Get to know your team and treat every person with the same importance.

Lead by example, and continually reflect on your management style. Appreciate the impact your behaviour can have on people. Aim to be open, collaborative and supportive as a manager.

Monitor team relationships so that you're aware of any simmering tensions between people. Use one-to-ones to have informal conversations about any concerns your team may have.

Workplace conflict will only escalate if it's left alone. Be confident to tackle it head on and get to the root of the problem.

Aim to resolve conflict at work early and informally and take a problem-solving approach to help people reach consensus and move on.

Use formal procedures, where appropriate, to resolve workplace conflict.

Read our report Managing Conflict in the Modern Workplace , which examines the current state of working relationships in UK organisations, or our evidence review on workplace incivility. You can also refer to our guide on tackling bullying and conflict at work for HR professionals to gain an understanding of processes and policies.

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CIPD | Dealing with bullying and workplace conflict: a guide for managers

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This guide will help you proactively tackle bullying and workplace disputes

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Behaviours that support Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at work | Newman Stewart

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In order to achieve equality, diversity and inclusion in your workplace, you first need to assess the current organisational behaviours.

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Promoting and delivering EDI in the workplace is an essential aspect of good people management. It's about creating working environments and cultures where every individual can feel safe and a sense of belonging, and is empowered to achieve their full potential.

Whilst legal frameworks vary across different countries, in the UK the Equality Act 2010 provides legal protection for nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

However, an effective strategy should go beyond legal compliance and take an intersectional approach to EDI, which will add value to an organisation, contribute to the wellbeing and equality of outcomes and impact on all employees. Things to consider include: accent, age, caring responsibilities, colour, culture, visible and invisible disability, gender identity and expression, mental health, neurodiversity, physical appearance, political opinion, pregnancy and maternity/paternity and family status and socio-economic circumstances, amongst other personal characteristics and experiences.

Intersectionality means that we all have multiple, overlapping identities that impact on our experience, and therefore multiple ways we can experience discrimination and disadvantage.

It's important to recognise that a 'one-size-fits all' approach to managing people does not achieve fairness and equality of opportunity and outcomes for everyone. People have different personal needs, values and beliefs. Good people management practice needs to be consistently fair but also flexible and inclusive to support both individual and business needs.

What is equality, diversity, and inclusion?

Equality

First used in the early 15th century is 'the state of being equal'. In modern usage in the UK, equality is about ensuring equality of access, treatment, outcomes and impact in both employment and service delivery. It is rooted in ideas of justice and fairness and enshrined in the United Kingdom Equality Act 2010 (EA10) which highlights that every individual must have an equal opportunity to make the most of their lives and talents. It is also the belief that no one should have poorer life chances because of their background, personal identity or experience.

The achievement of equality of outcomes requires identifying the barriers and biases and taking targeted action (including positive action as permitted under the EA10) to overcome specific inequalities, discrimination, disadvantages and marginalisation experienced by certain groups and individuals including those protected characteristics under the EA10. Inequalities can be manifested through prejudice, oppression and discrimination - direct and indirect - and can be systemic through behaviour, policies, practices and cultures. Equally vital is to identify the EDI benefits for the workforce and business/service delivery which will ensure that the EDI strategy is positively framed to add value to the organisation.

Equality of impact assessments through feedback from discriminated against and marginalised individuals are therefore essential in determining whether the EDI strategy is effective and is achieving the desired outcomes.

Some users of the term equality have associated it with the idea of 'sameness - same access or treatment'. However, this is a grossly inaccurate interpretation, as sameness is akin to 'colour blind' approaches - which can be discriminatory. Equality is not the same as equity. Equity is concerned with the actions taken to achieve a state of equality of outcomes.

Diversity

Diversity is the differences in colour, ethnicity, abilities, age, gender, beliefs, interests, socioeconomic (class), marital or partnership status, sexual orientation, geographic, academic/professional backgrounds, opinions, backgrounds, thinking, experiences and many other characteristics

Diversity recognises that everyone is different in a variety of visible and non-visible ways, and that those differences are to be recognised, respected, valued, promoted and celebrated. They may include, but are not limited to, differences protected by equalities law.

Research shows that diverse workforces are beneficial for decision making, innovation and problem solving as people bring a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences with them. However, it's important to note that just simple tolerance of difference and having a diverse workforce is not enough - people need to feel empowered, a sense of belonging, and feel safe to contribute their ideas and viewpoints and to achieve their full potential.

Inclusion

Inclusion is the practice of including people in a way that is fair for all, values everyone's differences, and empowers and enables each person to be themselves and achieve their full potential and thrive at work.

An inclusive workplace culture is one in which everyone feels that they belong through feeling safe in being themselves, that their contribution matters, policies and practices are fair and diverse range of people are supported to work together effectively.

To achieve genuine inclusion there must be positive action, including measures under the Equality Act 2010 to address past, present and potential discrimination and barriers to enable and empower:

Equal access

Equal opportunities

Equal treatment

Equal resources

Equal outcomes

Equal impact

The moral case for building fairer and more inclusive labour markets and workplaces is indisputable: recognising and valuing our identity, background or circumstance, we all have a right to the opportunity to develop our skills and talents to our full potential, work in a safe, supportive and inclusive environment, be fairly rewarded and recognised for our work and have a meaningful voice on matters that affect us.

It's also vital for the sustainability of businesses and economies. Everyone stands to benefit when we embrace and value the diversity of thoughts, ideas and ways of working that people from different backgrounds, experiences and identities bring to an organisation. So, organisations must ensure their people management approaches do not put any group at a disadvantage. People professionals are seen as the guardians and custodians of EDI policy and practice and therefore have a critical role to play in role modelling and championing EDI best practice in their organisation - find out more about this in our Profession Map.

Standards, such as the BSI and ISO human resource management suite and Investors in People (IiP), provide principle-based frameworks and guidelines to help organisations recognise the actual and potential value of their people and ensure their people polices and working practices are bias free. See more on HR and standards.

The concept of 'intersectionality' is that we all have multiple, overlapping identities that impact on our experience, including multiple discrimination and disadvantage.

Differences include visible and non-visible factors, for instance, personal characteristics such as background, culture, personality, work-style, accent and language. It's important to recognise that a 'one-size-fits all' approach to managing people does not achieve fairness and equality of opportunity and outcomes for everyone. People have different personal needs, values and beliefs. Good people management practice needs to be consistently fair but also flexible and inclusive to support both individual and business needs.

In the UK, age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, sex and sexual orientation are 'protected characteristics' covered by discrimination law to give people protection against being treated unfairly.

Discrimination can:

Impact an individual's wellbeing, performance at work and intention to stay.

Adversely affect employment opportunities.

Result in failure to recognise skills-based abilities, potential and experience.

Result in significant legal costs, compensation and settlements paid to avoid defending expensive discrimination claims.

For example, 'neurodiversity' is a growing area of workplace inclusion. It refers to the natural range of differences in human brain function. Among employers, it's used to describe alternative thinking styles including dyslexia, autism and ADHD. Together with Uptimize, we've produced Neurodiversity at work, a practical guide for employers to help create a neurodiversity-friendly workplace where people can utilise their strengths. Most adjustments are simple and low-cost, but can make a significant difference to an individual's working life. Listen to our Neurodiversity podcast.

Building

Our report assesses the evidence on inclusion - what does inclusion look like in practice, and how can people professionals and the wider organisation be more inclusive?

The social justice case for EDI

The social justice case is based on the belief that everyone should have a right to equal access to employment, training and development based solely on merit. Everyone should have the right to be free of any direct or indirect discrimination and harassment or bullying. This can be described as the right to be treated fairly and the UK law, principally in the Equality Act 2010, sets minimum standards.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has published a range of guidance on all aspects of the Equality Act 2010, including a Code of practice on employment. Whilst not legally binding documents, the codes give important guidance on good practice and failure to follow them may be taken into account by tribunals or courts.

For more information on particular aspects, see our various factsheets on age, disability, harassment and bullying, race, religion, sex discrimination and gender reassignment and sexual orientation discrimination.

Equality, diversity, and inclusion are good for people and for business

The main business benefits of taking inclusion and diversity seriously are talent and corporate reputation.

Talent

Research on the psychological contract shows that people want to work for employers with good employment practices. They also want to feel valued at work.

To be competitive, organisations need everyone who works for them to make their best contribution. Increasingly, employers recognise the importance of inclusion and diversity in recruiting and retaining the skills and talent they need.

As well as designing appropriate and fair people practices, it's important to create open and inclusive workplace cultures in which everyone feels valued, respects colleagues, and where their contribution is recognised.

Flexible working and job design are also important components of diversity strategies and part of attracting and retaining a wide pool of talented people.

Corporate reputation

Businesses need to consider corporate responsibility (CR) in the context of diversity as social exclusion and low economic activity rates can limit business markets and their growth. CR used to be centred on environmental issues, but an increasing number of employers now take a wider view, seeing the overall image of an organisation as important in attracting and retaining both customers and employees.

Better business performance

Openness to diversity widens access to the best talent. Inclusion allows engagement with talent effectively. Equality enables delivery of fair outcomes. Together, this leads to enhanced innovation, creativity, productivity, reputation, engagement and business results.

Managing equality, quality, and inclusion

Overcoming prejudice, bias (including unconscious and micro-aggressions) and changing entrenched negative attitudes can be difficult. To progress EDI, organisations should take a systemic approach, including developing an inclusive culture, inclusive approaches to employment policies and practices, to personal behaviours, and by managing EDI issues in ways that also support business contexts.

Our report Diversity and inclusion at work: facing up to the business case reviews the evidence on the touchpoints in the employee lifecycle that may contain barriers to equality. Businesses should examine their own people management practices and diversity data to understand where barriers lie, taking action accordingly.

As well as targeted initiatives, a coherent strategy is needed to ensure that working practices across the organisation support an inclusive culture which embraces difference. The strategy needs to be supported by organisational values and leader and manager behaviour which reflect the importance of EDI. Our report Diversity management that works draws on research evidence and professional expertise to make practical recommendations in six key areas of diversity practice and strategy. Explore the actions people professionals need to take to build inclusion.

Although there's no legal requirement to have a written EDI, it's a good idea to produce one to demonstrate the organisation takes its legal and moral obligations towards being a diverse employer seriously. It can also encourage employees to treat others equally. Any EDI policy and strategy will have greater buy in and sustainability if it is developed in collaboration with the lived experience of marginalised and discriminated against staff and middle managers.

Overall strategy

Recognise that a diverse workforce may not achieve equality of outcomes and needs an inclusive environment and cultures to flourish.

Ensure that initiatives and policies have the support of the board and senior management.

Remember that managing diversity and developing a culture of inclusion is a continuous process of improvement, not a one-off initiative.

Develop a strategy with the lived experience if marginalised staff to support the achievement of business goals, including ways of addressing the diverse needs of customers.

Keep up-to-date with the law and review policies through checks, audits and consultation.

Design guidelines and provide training for line managers to help them respond appropriately to diversity needs, as they are vital change agents, but give them scope for flexible decision-making.

Link diversity management to other initiatives such as such as Investors in People (IIP), BSI 76000 Valuing People and ISO 9001 Quality Management.

In an organisation that operates internationally, be aware that the approach to managing diversity will need to take account local legislation, norms and social issues, and the ways that individual working styles and personal preferences are influenced by national cultures.

Prioritise collecting and using good quality people data, especially from marginalised and discriminated against individuals and groups to identify barriers and solutions.

Workplace behaviour

Train all employees to understand and engage with EDI in how they do their jobs and work with colleagues.

Reflect equality, respect and dignity for all in the organisation's values and ensure these are shown in the way the organisation and its employees operate on a daily basis.

Describe desirable behaviours to gain positive commitment.

Make clear that everyone has a personal responsibility to uphold the standards.

Embed EDI in performance management frameworks and all managers' roles; they have a key role to play, behaving in an inclusive way and contributing to diversity goals.

Focus on accountability and transparency, ensuring that merit, competence and potential are the basis for all decisions about recruitment and development, and be alert to the influence of conscious and unconscious biases.

Introduce mechanisms to deal with all forms of harassment and bullying, making clear that such behaviour will not be tolerated and setting out the consequences of breaking the organisation's behaviour code.

Communication

Develop an open culture with good communication channels based on open dialogue and active listening.

Ensure appropriate channels for employee voice and that different groups feel able to access them.

Use different and accessible methods such as newsletters, in-house magazines, notice boards and intranets to keep people up to date with diversity policies and practices.

Actively seek people's ideas and take action on feedback.

Learning and development

Build EDI concepts and practices into staff training courses, management training and teambuilding programmes to increase awareness of the need to handle different views, perceptions and ideas in positive ways. Find out what diversity training is most effective in our Diversity management that works report.

Consider awareness-raising programmes as part of wider ongoing EDI training integrated into continuous professional development (CPD).

Include EDI issues in induction programmes, including raising awareness of employee network groups, so that all new employees know about the organisation's values and policies.

Train all leaders and managers to help them understand the issues and drive their support for organisational and operational policies and practices.

Measure, review and reinforce

Establish effective governance of the EDI Policy and Strategy to ensure effective leadership, accountability and delivery

Regularly audit, review and evaluate progress, using quantitative and qualitative data on both inclusion and diversity, to highlight where barriers exist (for example, via recruitment data) and show the impact of initiatives, making appropriate changes to activities if needed.

Use employee surveys and marginalised employee lived experience to evaluate initiatives, to find out if policies are working for everyone, and to provide a platform for improvement.

Add EDI objectives in job descriptions and performance reviews, and recognise and reward achievement. For example, staff surveys could ask questions about the team culture and the perception of equality of opportunity.

Benchmark progress against other organisations and explore what others are doing to adopt and adapt ideas where appropriate.

Network with others from inside and outside the organisation to keep up-to-date and to share learning.

Diversity management

Discover our practitioner-focused recommendations which come from an evidence-based view of diversity and inclusion

This factsheet was last updated by Lutfur Ali, Public Policy Advisor, Inclusion and Diversity, CIPD
Lutfur joined the CIPD in October 2021 and is also Non-Executive Director for the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) the professional body for business continuity and resilience experts. With a career spanning over three decades in the public, private and third sector, Lutfur has championed the delivery of social justice, equality, diversity, inclusion (EDI) and sustainability throughout his life.

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CIPD | Equality, diversity and inclusion in the Workplace | Factsheets

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Workplace equality, diversity and inclusion is about valuing every employee as an individual. Learn how an effective EDI strategy can improve the business.

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DWP and DHSC response: ‘Health is Everyone’s Business’ consultation

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The government has published its response to the ‘Health is Everyone’s Business’ consultation.The Department for Work and Pensions and Department of Health and Social Care ran a joint consultation in 2019, which asked for views on different ways in which government and employers can

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We all know it makes the dream work-but where does good teamwork actually come from?

How teams work together is changing quickly. As some organizations shift toward a more flexible model of hybrid working, others are returning to the office to take advantage of in-person collaboration. But while these changes have created new ways of working, the fundamentals of great teamwork remain unchanged.

Teamwork is primarily about how people interact with one another. Great teamwork happens when the skills and attributes of a group's individual members can be combined in an effective way.

But even those factors don't always guarantee that a group of people will work well together. Other variables can have an impact on teamwork too: the company's outlook, the attitudes of leaders, the structure and hierarchy of the group, and more.

In this article, we'll take a closer look at some of the core characteristics of great teamwork, why it's important to try to build good teams within an organization, and how leaders can help create the ideal conditions for truly effective teamwork to flourish.

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What does teamwork mean?

Teamwork can be defined as the combined effort of a group to achieve a shared goal. It's the secret sauce that makes a team's output more than just the sum of the efforts of its individual members.

Where this teamwork comes from can seem like a mystery-and not every group ends up working well together. On paper, you might think that pairing two of your most talented minds would double their effectiveness. In reality, it might halve it or triple it, or result in something else.

Understanding the characteristics of great teamwork and how they apply to the people around you can help you build teams that don't fall to pieces.

Why it's important to have great teamwork

As a leader, it's safe to assume that one of your main goals is the success of your business. Teamwork can make reaching that goal more likely. Teams solve problems more quickly by sharing knowledge. Teams work more efficiently by sharing responsibilities. And teams promote stronger relationships between employees.

When people are part of an effective team, they're encouraged to do their best work in an environment that's trusting and supportive. They feel empowered to not only pursue the shared goal of the team but to work toward their personal goals too. That sense of camaraderie is what helps to drive better overall performance, as people feel more invested in the success of the business they're a part of.

Building great teams is the first step

To begin building a great team, you need a particular set of leadership skills. You should be able to identify the talents of your employees and how they mesh with the talents of others.

You should know how to assign the right tasks to the right people, and where they would be most effective in the group hierarchy. Consider the personalities of each member and how they could potentially clash with the rest of the group.

Beyond that, it's up to the team and its leader to make it work. The very best teams are self-motivated and can quickly create solidarity and belonging within the group, which naturally leads to effortless, ongoing teamwork.

Characteristics of effective and great teamwork

Depending on the type of work they do, every team is going to look different. That means the definition of great teamwork changes too. What makes a good team working in bridge construction might not be the same as what makes a good team working at a dog café.

But as disparate as those examples are, there are certain characteristics that effective teams share. Here are nine of them:

Good communication. Each member of the team should be able to communicate efficiently and openly with other members of the team. Interpersonal skills are as useful as writing skills in this context, as flexible teams are expected to switch between collaborating online and off-.

Individual talent. Each member should bring their own experience, ambition, and specialist skills to the table, particularly when working on a high-performance team. Unique talents drive overall performance and help to cement a member's place within the group.

Team sense of belonging. Understanding where you fit into the wider team and how your skills interact with those of others will help create social bonds and build trust and order within the group.

Strong leadership. There's a big difference between managers and leaders. The person in charge should be able to inspire their team, communicate the company's vision, and encourage individuals toward a shared goal.

Clear structure. A simple and well-understood hierarchy is an important feature of effective teamwork. Knowing the structure of the team helps with decision-making and conflict resolution.

Achievable goals. Unrealistic targets can be like kryptonite to great teamwork. If people sense that success is impossible, enthusiasm for the work can fall by the wayside. When negative feelings are shared by teammates, they can become compounded, causing collaboration to suffer.

Feedback. Teams need feedback to learn and grow, and leaders who rarely offer it can unwittingly foster a competitive workplace environment in which teamwork may struggle to flourish.

Positive attitude. Confidence is infectious-as long as there's not too much of it-and a positive outlook can quickly spread throughout a team. Great teamwork comes about when leaders and workers believe in the mission of the business and want to see it succeed.

Solution-focused teams. Nobody can predict the future, but great teamwork allows groups to adapt to challenging new conditions, and to remain focused on solutions rather than dwelling on problems.

Conclusions

Great teamwork happens wherever great teams can be together. Whatever ways your teams collaborate, you should have an office that fits your company's unique needs. WeWork designs workplace solutions with flexibility in mind, creating customized hubs that help foster better teamwork.

Whether you're looking to downsize your existing headquarters or create a centralized hub with the high-spec amenities to enable teamwork and innovation, WeWork provides beautifully designed, adaptable workspaces with flexible terms.

For even greater flexibility, WeWork All Access and On Demand let you and your teams access workspaces and meeting rooms in hundreds of locations across multiple cities, so they can do their best work wherever they are.

Steve Hogarty is a writer and journalist based in London. He is the travel editor of City AM newspaper and the deputy editor of City AM Magazine, where his work focuses on technology, travel, and entertainment.

Rethinking your workspace?

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How do you build a good team? It starts with great teamwork. Here are nine qualities of effective teams.

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Our section on Working in Groups and Teams, starting with What is a Group?, defines groups and explains some of the issues and challenges of working in a group. It explains the Group Life-Cycle, and how groups can change over time.

This page builds on those, and sets out some of the specific skills that you may need when working in a group or a team.

Effective Teams

Our page on Group Roles explains that there are a number of roles that any one person can take on in a team.

In summary these are:

Belbin's Team Roles

1. Shaper - drives work forward and gets things done, has a clear idea of the desired direction of travel;

2. Implementer - also gets things done, looking for ways to turn talk into action and generate practical activity;

3. Completer-Finisher - focuses on completing tasks, and tidying up all the loose ends;

4. Coordinator - manage the group dynamics, often in a leadership role;

5. Team Worker - helps the team to work effectively by supporting personal relationships;

6. Resource Investigator - gathers external resources and information to help the team;

7. Plant - generates ideas and creative solutions, not all of them practical;

8. Monitor-Evaluator - good at critically assessing ideas and proposals, and at making decisions; and

9. Specialist - brings expert knowledge to the group, not always necessary to effective functioning.

Research shows that the most effective teams have someone who can take on each of the nine key roles. That doesn't mean that a team has to contain nine people, as most people can take on two or even three roles at a time.

Teams that struggle to operate effectively, however, tend to lack one or more of the nine key roles.

Task vs. Process Team Roles

Belbin's team roles can be divided into Task and Process roles.

Task roles focus on 'what': the job in hand, and getting it done. The key 'task-focused' team roles are Shaper, Implementer, Completer-Finisher, Monitor-Evaluator, Plant and Specialist.

Process roles focus on 'how', and particularly on the people involved. They include Coordinator, Resource Investigator, and Team Worker.

The most effective team-workers are those who can see what skills are available within the group, and use their own skills to fill any gaps. People tend to be either task- or process-focused, rather than a mixture.

It is perfectly possible to learn to take on the other focus, if you want to do so, and this will make you a highly effective team member.

Key Task-Focused Team Skills

The skills which are needed to take on task-focused team roles include:

Organising and Planning Skills
Being organised is essential to getting tasks done.
If you don't know what needs to be done, and by when, it's quite hard to make it happen by your deadline. Shapers, Implementers and Completer-Finishers are all characterised by good organising skills, and can usually be relied upon to put in place strong systems for managing projects well.

Some people are naturally more organised than others, and if this is an area in which you struggle, take a look at our pages on Organising Skills and Time Management for some ideas. For larger projects, have a look at our pages on Project Management, Project Planning and Action Planning.

Decision-Making
Being able to make decisions is also crucial to moving things forward.
It is often important to take time to gather information, and ensure that the decision is right. However, there may come a time when any decision is better than none.
Group decision-making often requires compromise, and sometimes a willingness to give up one's own point of view in favour of the group's shared decision. However, as our page on Group Decision-Making makes clear, group decisions are not always correct simply because they are agreed by the whole group.
Shapers and Monitor-Evaluators are both good decision-makers.

Shapers tend to make their own decisions quickly and then may struggle to compromise. They should try to allow others to speak first to avoid biasing the group. Their willingness to argue their point regardless of views expressed by previous speakers will be helpful to the group's decision-making process.

Monitor-Evaluators tend to look for the right decision from the available evidence, and may be slow to make a decision if there is a shortage of evidence. They may also lean too heavily on evidence known to more people, and on the views of more senior group members.

For more about this area, see our pages on Decision-Making Skills and Group Decision-Making.

Problem-Solving
Task-focused people are often adept at problem-solving, especially if the problem relates to the task.
Plants look for innovative ideas to solve the problem, and Implementers will turn ideas into practical action.

Shapers will see the 'big picture' and the overall plan, making sure that the solution to the problem does not result in a change of direction.

For more about good problem-solving skills, see our pages on Problem Solving.

Key Process-Focused Team Skills

Process-focused skills tend to be about people, and about building rapport within the group and making it work cohesively and effectively. Those who take on process-focused group roles tend to have very good interpersonal skills, and in particular:

Communication Skills

Good Coordinators, Team-Workers and Resource Investigators are good at Verbal Communication, Listening, and Questioning. They work hard to ensure that the group communicates well, helping to make sure that there are no misunderstandings or unexpressed difficulties between team members.

For more about developing these skills, see our page on Improving your Communication Skills.

Ability to Build Rapport

These people are also good at developing a sense of harmony within the group. They help to build rapport with others, creating a coherent team.

Persuasion and Influencing Skills

One of the key areas of process skills is in persuading and influencing. If the group is to come to a shared decision, for example, several members may need to be persuaded of the merits of a particular course of action.

See our page on Persuasion and Influencing Skills for more on this, and for an example of a particularly adept piece of influencing in a group situation.

Facilitation Skills

Managing a process is basically about facilitating it, or making it easier. Good facilitation skills are therefore vital in team-working, although they are often wrongly seen as crucial only for managing workshops.

For more about this, see our page on Facilitation Skills.

Feedback Skills

Giving and receiving feedback well is essential in any team-working situation. Being able to give clear and effective feedback to others is vital to keep the group process running effectively, and to plan. It also helps to ensure that you do not get irritated and angry with the way that others are behaving. It follows that you also need to be able to receive feedback gracefully, and then act on it calmly.

See our page on Giving and Receiving Feedback for more.

Skills in Chairing Meetings

Group work often involves meetings, whether those are committee meetings or much bigger and more formal meetings. Skilled Coordinators often have highly developed skills in chairing meetings, and use them in small and large groups alike.

For more about this, see our page on Conducting a Meeting.

Conflict resolution

Finally, you have to recognise that there may be situations when you need to deal with difficult people or situations, or even resolve a conflict.

For more about this, see our pages on Difficult Group Behaviour, Conflict Resolution and on Communication in Difficult Situations.

And Finally...

...it is important to remember that all team-working situations are fundamentally about working with other people.

If you have good interpersonal skills, and are open to receiving feedback and improving them as a result, then you will become, and be, a good person to work with in a team. It truly is as simple as that.

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Our section on Working in Groups and Teams, starting with What is a Group?, defines groups and explains some of the issues and challenges of working in a group. It explains the Group Life-Cycle, and how groups can change over time.

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HSE: Information about health and safety at work

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Advice, guidance, news, templates, tools, legislation, publications from Great Britain's independent regulator for work-related health, safety and illness; HSE

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How to Report a Health & Safety Problem at Work | Peoplesafe

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Reporting health & safety concerns to your employer can be daunting. This guide will help you navigate RIDDOR and decide how best to proceed.

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How to give a business presentation

Have you ever watched a presentation and been blown away by the presence or charisma of the speaker?

The truth is that the best speakers included,use a set of specific skills which they have learned and developed over time. It's not a fluke that they have taken you on a journey, made you feel like the only person in the room, and inspired you to take action on what they say. They are following a process and using a set of tactics that elicit this reaction. And our goal here is helping you achieve that.

Each component of their presentations is still deliberate and learned. Even the very best comedians, who appear to display the epitome of "off-the-cuff" commentary, meticulously plan and practice every aspect of their shows so that they come across as natural and witty.

Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, is renowned for being one of the most well-prepared speakers in the world.

‍ Seinfeld says, "Every comedian, like every athlete, has a little routine... I never vary it. It just feels comfortable."
‍
From pitching a potential client to persuading your CEO to ramp up the marketing budget, each presentation has subtle differences which determine whether or not they are effective in achieving the desired outcome.

With that said, there are a few universal guidelines when it comes to delivering an effective business presentation. This guide will provide an overview of the different types and delve deeper into the elements that work together to deliver impact.

Here are some of the most important business presentation skills you should learn and improve over time:

Practice and prepare

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "I know this stuff" and "winging it" when it's time to present. Some may even think that an delivering an excellent business presentation is as easy as speaking. However, the best presenters prepare meticulously.

For important presentations, plan on a minimum of 10 run-throughs. By doing so, you increase your chances of the presentation going off without a hitch and your ability to ability to engage with the audience in the moment.

Be present

When presenting, it's easy to get lost in your slides, caught reading notes or worried about what you will say next. But if you prepare appropriately, you can truly be present during the presentation-the most effective way to engage an audience and maintain their attention.

However, we know that is easier said than done. Here's a quick but effective guide to help you give killer presentations without notes:

Tell a great story

Studies suggest that stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts. Stories connect with us on a personal level, tapping into emotion-just one reason they have been a crucial foundation of human society, passing on knowledge for generations.

Storytelling, however, isn't as easy as it sounds. It's a skill and a formula that the best presenters use to capture an audience.

This TED Talk by Nancy Duarte showcases not only an impactful presentation, but highlights the power of storytelling in conveying a message.

The 10-20-30 rule

Helping others understand a complex topic in simple language is perhaps the greatest skill of an effective presenter. If you overload a presentation with information, the people watching are more likely to leave being confused or simply disengage during the presentation. Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule is a good structure to follow:
‍

Inexperienced presenters have a tendency to overload their slide deck with information and run out of time right before they get to the juicy part of their message. Using the 10-20-30 rule is a good way to condense a presentation and reduce the chance of running out of time.

Did you know that 55% of the way someone interprets your communication is attributed to body language, and 38% attributed to your tone of voice? That leaves only 7% of interpretation based on the actual words said.

Given these statistics, the way we prepare for presentations should be weighted towards understanding how what our body language and tone of voice says, rather than obsessing over simply the words we say.

As with any new skills, these presentation skills won't develop overnight. To truly become an excellent presenter and communicator in the workplace, you need to practice and refine your skillset habitually.

Now let's talk about how to create the presentation deck itself.

How to make a business presentation slide deck

What is the audience looking at when you are presenting? Your slides.

There will be moments when you engage one-to-one in eye contact with people, but for the most part, they are using their visual senses and looking at your slides to better understand what you are talking about.

Given this behavior, the look and feel of your slides can either help or hinder the consumption and retention of your message. As a result, the way you design your slide deck is critical. If you're short on time or resources, SketchDeck just might be the perfect solution to get high-quality, on brand presentation design.

Here are some best practices to follow when it comes to presentation design:

Types of business presentations

There is a fairly broad spectrum of pitches, speeches, and meetings that business professionals both encounter and carry out in their day-to-day work. As a result, it is important that before we talk about how to create one, we define what it is.

A business presentation is the delivery of a message to a group or individual with the purpose of influencing their perception of a topic so that it aligns with a desired set of outcomes. While these presentations take several forms, we can group them into three primary categories: ‍

1. Sales presentation: A sales presentation or sales pitch refers to a structured message which attempts to persuade someone to buy a product or service. ‍

2. Marketing presentation: Unlike a sales pitch, a marketing presentation is typically delivered to other representatives within a business. The purpose of this business meeting presentation is to educate and influence internal decision-makers or budget holders to buy into a plan for promoting a product or service. ‍

3. Other business presentations: ‍On top of marketing and sales presentations, there are any number of professional presentations that could be categorized as business presentations. These include information sessions, training initiatives, reporting on results, innovation brainstorms, problem-solving collectives, and much more.

Use brand guidelines

Your business should have a set of design guidelines in place which all collateral, including presentations, abide by. Things such as primary colors, secondary colors, layout, fonts, style, and flow should all be itemized and described in this document.

For an example, check out the SketchDeck Brandbook.

Business presentation templates are your friends

In addition to using your brand's set of design guidelines, it's helpful to create a series of themed templates for each type of business presentation. This way, whenever someone in your organization is conducting a presentation they have an on-brand framework to work from.

Have a design library

To ensure consistency across your brand, develop a design library for employees that is hosted in the cloud. This library will provide quick and easy access to your guidelines, templates, and a set of pre-approved images and graphics.

PowerPoint best practices

For our next step, let's check a few PowerPoint best practices (works for Google Slides and pretty much any other presentation software, too):

Adopt the KISS approach

Say it with us-keep it short and simple and you'll keep your viewers happy. Limit yourself to one key idea per slide:

Not only will this allow you to inform your audience without overwhelming them, but it will also keep you from diluting the importance of each piece of information with tangents.

This doesn't apply to only text, though-crowding every corner with graphs, animations and even logos prevent the key points from being communicated. As posited by Edward Tufte, " PowerPointPhluff " is a trap many presenters fall prey to, replacing serious analysis with chart junk, over-produced layouts, cheerleader logotypes, and branding, not to mention corny clip art.

As a general rule, you should aim to include no more than three pieces of information on one slide-all of which contribute to one idea.

Draw attention to key points

Use contrasting colors, font variations, and moving graphics to draw people's attention to the most important points in your presentation.

In the example below, you can see how a simple variation in fonts can have a powerful visual impact on the way someone interprets a slide:

Be bold

Additional business presentation tips

Once you've practiced your presentation skills and refined your design, you may ask: what else can you do to deliver a powerful presentation? Here are some additional tips, ideas and best practices:

Seek feedback

As with anything, if you want to get better at presenting, the best way to do so is to seek constructive feedback and use that feedback to improve.

For best results, go beyond asking a friend or colleague "how it went" or "how you did." Instead, enlist a coach, mentor, or accountability partner who can provide structured and meaningful feedback.

Entertain

‍ Even though you are conducting a business presentation, don't neglect the entertainment factor.

People like to feel -whether it be laughing, crying, being held in suspense, and/or drawn to the edge of their seat. Entertainment and emotion are components that grab attention and will inevitably help you convey your message.

Make it visual

Research suggests that a staggering 65% of people are visual learners. Not only that, but studies show that the retention of knowledge is significantly increased when visuals are used rather than text, so keep this in mind when creating your slide deck.

This presentation from Andreas von der Heydt shows off the power of visuals in presentations with only minimal text on each slide.

©Andreas von der Heydt-The Magic to Think Big

Now let's get visual and check a few great business presentation decks available online!

Here is a collection of 15 of the best business presentations, including key insights and takeaways for your next deck.

Sample business presentations

Putting together a presentation like this one is no easy task. It is lighthearted but extremely professional and relevant at the same time. Each slide makes you curious to see what's next, and they keep it fun without fluff. Bravo!

Some say this is the best sales deck ever. For us, it's hard to say this is the best business presentation we've seen, seeing as we've designed over 4,000 presentations for amazing clients-but it is surely one of the more powerful presentations out there.

We like how Zuora's deck tells a compelling story through great visuals and a perfectly structured narrative. They press the right buttons throughout to make their target audience uncomfortable enough to pay attention, yet hopeful enough to crave for their solution.

And while finding good business pictures for presentations can be challenging, Zuora takes it to the next level by using on-brand visual aids to support their message on each slide.

PowerPoint is not boring-dull slides and corny animations are.

With creativity and skill, you can make wonderful presentations in PowerPoint. This presentation we made for Dialpad was a big hit thanks to the engaging animations that both embodied the brand's exceptional quality and displayed in-depth service details in a clean, dynamic way. (Again, all in PowerPoint!)

In order to resonate with your audience, you must know your audience-something Reddit excels at.

Not only is this deck 100% on-brand, it's also funny and interesting in a relevant way for their audience. They did a great job with their company presentation, showing how Reddit works and their strong policies against spammers and attempts to "game" the platform.

The deck also excelled at showing success cases, using both creative and down-to-earth ads to show that their platform brings a good ROI if you follow their guidelines, whether you have a brilliant marketing campaign or a set of simple, on-point ads.

This deck is living proof you don't need to toot your own horn in a professional business presentation.

In this 9 slide deck about key reasons to move your clients to Microsoft Office 365, Hiperdist remained laser focused on the solution that was relevant to their audience. They only mentioned their own brand in the final slides, with contact information and a one-sentence description.

Perhaps the only area that they could've done better in is following the golden rule-one key point per slide! To ensure you are concise and not wordy in your own presentation, create a business presentation outline before designing your deck.

This deck does a magnificent job by cutting to the chase quickly and presenting relevant data without clutter. Simple, on-brand, to the point and well-designed-a great example of how business presentation slides should look and feel.

After providing top-notch business presentation services for years, we've developed a sixth sense when it comes to great presentations. We can usually tell if a deck is good or bad from the first slides.

Adgibbon was a hit from head to tail, dynamically showcasing their product, one feature per slide and keeping things light, fun, and 100% on-brand.

With a clean, on-brand look and feel, Launchrock showcases everything they need in 16 crisp slides.

And the best thing about their clean design? If they need new business presentations, all they need to do is use this one as a template and they're ready to go!

That's one of the major benefits of a professional business presentation PPT template: you can easily streamline outstanding decks, keeping guesswork out of the equation.

Giving a presentation about something as complex as marine science and conservation could be considered overwhelming. That didn't stop Schmidt Ocean Institute, however, from killing it with their 2018 Visions to Reality deck.

This deck is a masterclass on how to make a business PowerPoint presentation look great by harmonizing beautiful photography, illustrations, data points, blockquotes, technical knowledge and company achievements without clutter, fluff or dullness.

With major companies like Dropbox and Okta on their portfolio, Greylock Partners has in-depth knowledge and experience in their field. They also know how to show their expertise in a digestible and compelling manner.

If you're stuck and need some tips on how to give a powerful presentation, take a deep dive into this deck. They use subtle background authoritative images to build trust with their audience...

And not only do they ask the billion dollar question...

But they also answer it with uncanny precision and great visual aids.

Finally, they use data-driven graphs to back up their answer and simultaneously show the audience their expertise.

Pitching investors demands your A-game. And since 91% of professionals feel more confident when they have a beautifully designed presentation, design plays a major role in prepping for success.

When Air was preparing for an important presentation for a group of investors, they decided they needed a new look. Within two weeks, we had worked together to create a beautiful final presentation. The presentation was a hit, and they wowed their investors!

Remember: beautiful design is not only an aesthetic need, but also a profitable decision that can make or break huge opportunities.

With vibrant colors and fun illustrations, each slide from Office Vibe's deck is delightful and informative. It's captivating enough to make you want to flip through the entire deck more than once-a good marker of a winning PowerPoint business presentation deck.

Degreed's takeaway slides are just what every audience needs-a breakdown of data-heavy slides into digestible tidbits.

Their capacity to illustrate data is also worth mentioning, as it increases information retention.

Hubspot presentations are on-brand, fun, and engaging, and their Zero to IPO deck is no different.

And of course, full of memes.

Disclaimer: we're not saying you should use memes, but they can help engage the audience if on-brand (assuming your audience is as fond of memes as many marketers are!)

Have a tight timeline for an important business presentation, but not confident your current deck is good enough to make a stand for your brand?

That's why we exist! Thrive Savings was a young startup without firm brand guidelines, but that didn't stop us from creating a pitch deck that personified their brand. Taking inspiration from their social media marketing, we worked together to create a fresh and dynamic deck design in under a week, from start to finish.

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High Impact Business Presentations - SketchDeck

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Have you ever watched a presentation and been blown away by the presence or charisma of the speaker? The truth is that the best speakers included,use a set of specific skills which they have learned and developed over time.

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Summarize, design, and transcribe your PowerPoint presentations with AI-enhanced tools.

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This certification aims to broaden your knowledge of business improvement techniques, including streamlining the workplace, building effective teams, and fostering productive work connections. It also highlights the importance of refining procedures and protocols by implementing visual management systems and flow process analysis.

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Certificate in Understanding Mental Health First Aid and Mental Health Advocacy in the Workplace (Assessment) | Level 2 | P13055 | Burton and South Derbyshire College

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