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Good Teams Talk. Great Teams Connect.

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The Research: Why Communication is a Performance Lever

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The Three Essentials of High-Performance Team Communication

1️⃣ Clarity: Say What You Mean (and Mean What You Say)

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2️⃣ Inclusivity: Every Voice Matters

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3️⃣ Feedback: Say It Early, Say It Often

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How the Steople High-Performance Teams Survey™ Helps

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Final Thought: Communication Builds Culture

How to Build a Culture of Trust That Fuels Performance

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Why Trust Makes or Breaks a Team

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The Science Behind Trust and High-Performing Teams

• Trust
• Direction
• Clarity
• Commitment
• Interdependency
• Balance
• Communication

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The Research is Clear: Trust Drives Performance

1. Trust accelerates decision-making. A Harvard Business Review study found that high-trust teams make decisions 25% faster than low-trust teams. When trust is present, people don’t waste time second-guessing motives or covering their backs.
2. Trust reduces stress and burnout. Neuroscientist Paul Zak’s research on workplace trust found that employees in high-trust organisations experience 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, and 50% higher productivity.
3. Trust fuels innovation. Google’s Project Aristotle, a landmark study on team effectiveness, found that psychological safety—the ability to take risks without fear of embarrassment or punishment—is the #1 predictor of a high-performing team. Without trust, people hold back their best ideas.
4. Trust keeps teams together. Research from Great Place to Work found that organisations with high-trust cultures have 50% lower turnover rates. People don’t leave workplaces—they leave environments where they don’t feel valued or safe.

Clearly, trust isn’t just about feeling good – it’s about delivering results. But how do you build it?

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Three Levels of Trust Every Team Needs

1️⃣ Trust in Competence: “Can I rely on you to do your job?”

2️⃣ Trust in Intent: “Do you have my back?”

3️⃣ Trust in Character: “Do your actions match your words?”

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How the Steople High-Performance Teams Survey™ Helps

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Final Thought: Trust is a Game Changer

In Australia and New Zealand, 97% of businesses are classified as small, with less than 20 employees, whilst another 2% fall into the small-to-medium category, with 20 to 200 employees. These figures are even stronger in the US where over 99% of organisations are considered small businesses.

I have regularly heard small to medium-sized businesses refer to their culture as being “like a family”. This description of culture, whilst lovely, has its implications. A family culture typically has wonderful qualities such as kindness, compassion, caring, and nurturing. In today’s environment where there is a high level of stress, anxiety and burnout, these qualities are important to have.  These virtues help to drive a culture of wellbeing and belonging, which is something many people are craving today.

However, not everyone has this positive perception of ‘family’. Many families have dysfunctional attributes including bad communication, a lack of boundaries, and excessive obligations. This notion of loving family members unconditionally can lead to the toxic practice of having to ‘tolerate’ certain individuals, regardless of their behaviour. I have come to believe that this aspect of a ‘family culture’ within the workplace can be extremely unhelpful. In this environment, people are not held accountable for poor performance and inappropriate behaviours that are not aligned to the company strategy and/or the espoused company values and cultural aspirations may be allowed to continue.

So, how should we think about and describe a culture whereby there is an equal focus on the wellbeing of staff and the performance of the business?

Netflix recently came out and described what I believe is a better analogy to define the culture you want to create. That is, a high-performance sporting team. If you think of a team like the All Blacks rugby team from New Zealand, many people believe that they have been one of the highest-performing sporting teams of all time, and this high performance has lasted for over a century. During this time, many team members have come and gone and yet their performance and positive culture has been maintained. If you’re interested in finding out more about the All Blacks and how they have achieved this, I would recommend you read Legacy by James Kerr. A high-performance sporting team thrives on the expectations of mutual care, trust, compassion, and wholehearted support among its members. The best sporting teams are bound together in strong ways where they instinctively know and trust the capability of their fellow team members. Most importantly, they do not accept poor performance or behaviour and they continually strive to raise the bar and reach their combined potential. They hold each other accountable for their performance and have the necessary tough conversations to continue to drive up the standards.

I would encourage all organisations, particularly the 99% of small to medium-sized companies, to reframe the words they use to define their company culture and where appropriate, consider using the ‘high-performance sporting team’ analogy as a simple vehicle for changing some of the internal dialogue and expectations of all team members.

Together we can create a culture of care, accountability, and high performance.

If you would like to find out more, contact your local Steople office today here.

 

I have been delivering face-to-face workshops with increasing frequency recently, and have relished the delight that many people have expressed at being in the presence of others. The warmth, joy and high levels of energy have been palpable and energising for many. This enjoyment is perhaps explained by a recent statistic published by Australian National University that found that levels of face-to-face social interaction were still 15% lower than pre-pandemic levels, with the proportion of adults who met socially with other people less often than once a week, at 54.8%.  In my wellbeing coaching with high performing executives in a global organisation, many have admitted to feelings of loneliness in recent years.

Given these low levels of social interaction and the fact that many of us interact with work colleagues more often than with friends and family it is vital for employers to consider the importance of their workers feeling connected with their colleagues. Having high quality relationships with those you work with has been found to have many wellbeing and productivity benefits including improved job satisfaction, individual and team performance, motivation, and feeling positive at the end of the workday,  So how are organisations cultivating these high quality relationships? Now more than ever a few simple strategies are worth experimenting with.

Schedule time to develop relationships – Finding time to interact with others can be difficult and so intentionally scheduling time can help. This could be achieved by allocating 5-10 minutes at the start of a meeting for a casual chat, organizing a lunch with a colleague or staying back for a short while at the end of the day to interact with others. Having many 1:1s may not be realistic but a quick phone call to check-in can be effective.

Create a focal point. At the RSPCA Victoria, one of their leaders reads out a quiz at lunchtimes which creates a much-appreciated focal point of connection for many of his colleagues. At a university where I have been running workshops on civility and respect, the universal request from three schools within the one faculty was to bring back the humble ‘packet-of-biscuits-from-the-supermarket’ morning tea on a Friday which acts an excuse to meet, even for some people a reason to come into the office for the day.

Acknowledge contributions of others. Now more than ever when people are fatigued after so much change and adversity in recent years, it is invaluable to pay attention to and voice appreciation of people’s contributions in small regular ways. It is never too late to call out consistent, quiet excellence and doesn’t need a special morning tea or award. It is even more vital for people who joined your organization during the pandemic and potentially have not spent a lot of time in the office and therefore need more frequent positive reinforcement of culturally valued behaviour and actions.

 

If you would like to find out how Steople can help build better relationships within your workplace, contact your local Steople office today.

During a weekly team meeting at Company Zed, LaTonya, an employee who has worked for the company for nine months, questioned one of the company’s normal operating processes.  She offered an idea that she believed would meet the same goal while saving the company time and money.  After discussing and researching the idea, Company Zed was able to implement the new process, which resulted in a savings of both time and money.  Meanwhile, at Company Alpha’s team meeting, a long-term employee had a similar time-and-money-saving idea but refrained from bringing her idea up for discussion. As a result, Alpha continued to engage in their normal process.

What differentiates these companies and results in Zed’s high level of teamwork and ability to solve complex problems? The employee at Company Alpha appears concerned with impression management.  It is likely that her past experiences or the company’s culture has taught this employee that she is safer to withhold her thoughts, questions, or concerns.  In doing so, Alpha does not learn as a team, improve the organization, or engage in innovation.

The employee at Zed appears to feel safe voicing her idea, even though it calls for the company to make a change to operations.  Given the employee’s willingness to voice her opinion, Company Zed appears to have a higher level of psychological safety than Alpha.  Psychological safety is the belief that an individual will not be humiliated or punished for being curious, offering an idea, questioning the status quo, or admitting to a mistake.

To be competitive and successful in business today, teams must be able to develop cooperative relationships and solve complex problems. Research indicates that teams with high levels of psychological safety are more likely to be open-minded, creative, curious, confident, social, humorous, persistent, and to feel more comfortable speaking frankly about ideas, concerns, questions, and mistakes.  Teams high in psychological safety report that their work environment feels challenging but not threatening, which allows members to feel comfortable expressing vulnerability in front of a group of peers.  The ability to engage in vulnerability-inducing behaviour encourages moderate levels of risk-taking and strategic development of solutions to complex problems.

Teams high on psychological safety also exhibit differences in their brain chemistry.  Specifically, teams with high levels of psychological safety have increased levels of Oxytocin, which has been called the “love hormone.”  Oxytocin levels affect how we bond with and trust others.  In team environments, increased levels of Oxytocin lead to more trust, openness, and the ability to manage conflict, which results in improved team performance.

Creating a Safe Culture

1. How do we create or increase psychological safety on our teams?  According to research, we can engage in the following behaviours:
   Provide your team with a rationale for engaging in risk-taking and vulnerability-inducing behaviour.  One of the surest means to provide this rationale is to acknowledge that everyone’s ideas and instincts will be needed to solve a complex problem.
2. Model a culture where it is acceptable to make mistakes or be wrong. A leader can accomplish this by admitting to his or her own mistakes, asking team members to catch the leader’s mistakes, and modelling the importance of continued learning in order to improve his or her own skills.
3. Encourage collaboration, not competition. This can be done by asking team members to solve conflicts in a mutually agreeable manner, rather than by engaging in competition, criticism, or other behaviours that may trigger a fight-or-flight reaction. Collaboration works best if team members:
4. Treat one another as equal in competence, social status, and autonomy.  Team equalization changes the way teams engage in confrontation and elicits trust and other positive behaviours.
5. Decrease defensiveness and increase curiosity.  Engaging in the “blame game” tends to increase conflict, defensiveness, and disengagement.  Leaders can increase curiosity by modelling the appropriateness of asking questions and engaging in conversations in an attempt to understand another’s point of view.

Increasing your company’s level of psychological safety may provide the competitive advantage that will continue to differentiate your company from your competitors.  Please let us know if you need assistance with implementing strategies to increase psychological safety.

Discuss how to move your team to a psychologically safe culture by contacting a Steople Consultant today – Contact Us

By Audrey McGibbon, Co-Author, GLWS

“Is wellbeing a fad?”

We were asked this question recently and our instinctive response was “We hope not!”. Not given how much positive change we have seen come about through the recent focus on wellbeing. But, thinking more about it, it’s a fair question. Wellbeing/wellness programs and initiatives have popped up like mushrooms all over workplaces – and in some quarters, this could feel a little like ‘jumping on the bandwagon’. But our true response is a firm no – that like many other ‘themes’ of recent times (diversity, psychological safety, even engagement), wellbeing is an essential ingredient in creating a workplace culture where people do their best work, are creative and innovative, collaborate effectively and perform sustainably at a high level to meet organisational objectives.

There probably are people within organisations addressing wellbeing as a fad, perhaps implementing a few ‘lunch ‘n’ learns’, supporting a ‘get fit’ campaign and encouraging healthy eating at work. Nothing wrong with any of that, but they are unlikely to achieve lasting change in behaviour. Or, for that matter, any of the desirable outcomes from seeing a real uplift in wellbeing – such as reduced absenteeism, increased engagement, innovation and retention, and sustainable high productivity and performance. (If you are yet to be convinced that these are the outcomes that investment in wellbeing can bring, then please ask and we can guide you to the evidence). That’s because these programs, by and large, are not very ‘sticky’ – and, without fundamental shifts in how the leadership of the organisation engages with wellbeing, are doomed to under-achieve, if not fail.

For wellbeing to stick, and for organisations to see the benefits, it needs to be embedded in the expectations and behaviour of all leaders.

Wellbeing as a core leadership capability

We all know that initiatives in organisations have to be supported from the top to stand a chance of getting off the ground, surviving and achieving their objectives. With wellbeing, we would like to see this go one stage further – indeed, we believe this is fundamental to realising the cultural shifts required to truly embed wellbeing.

It’s time to view wellbeing as an essential leadership capability.

Organisations expect leaders to have well-developed skills in people leadership, emotional intelligence, stakeholder relationships, strategic thinking, problem-solving and so on. In this day and age, shouldn’t we also expect leaders to be capable of developing wellbeing?

And by developing wellbeing, we mean:

1. Attending to their own self-care,
2. Attending and promoting ‘other-care’ for the people they lead,
3. And being champions of wellbeing across their organisations.

Here is our attempt at a fuller definition of ‘enabling wellbeing’, and we offer this up as a gift to stimulate your minds on what might work in your own organisation: “Making purposeful and well-informed choices to optimise wellbeing for self and others, role-modelling wellbeing as a priority, embedding reliable disciplines and influencing positive change in the system for others.”

How your organisation can enable Wellbeing

To make wellbeing an essential skill, it needs to be documented within your organisation’s frameworks and integrated into performance reviews.

We propose you:

1. Update your organisation’s leadership capability framework to include wellbeing as a
   clear and explicit expectation.
2. Redesign or augment your leadership development initiatives to include leaders’ development of this capability as a core component of every leadership development program, at all levels of leadership.
3. Build engagement in your wellbeing strategy to a point where you can set wellbeing KPIs as part of every leader’s performance targets.
4. And finally, evaluate performance and reward leaders for their success in enabling wellbeing. After all, what gets measured, gets done. The world is changing. Leaders are under more pressure to perform and respond to rapid organisational, social and technological change than ever before. The best of the best will understand, model and uphold positive wellbeing practices in the workplace.

Leaders who role-model and prioritise the wellbeing skills and behaviours taught to them will become an organisation’s most powerful enablers of improved employee wellbeing and all the possible benefits that come with it. But it’s only strong leadership, behavioural and cultural change driven by wellbeing data that will deliver.

Speak to a PeopleScape consultant about your Wellbeing strategy today