Ever heard about team spirit? If not, you’ve probably not looked at any job postings as of late. Catchphrases like “Team spirit lies at the core of our company values” or “We are looking for people that boost our team spirit to the max” are popping up time and time again. However, team spirit is more than just a meaningless soft skill on people’s CVs. It is the one asset that can truly make or break your company’s success.
We’ll dive right into the definition of team spirit, especially in regard to organizations. Then, you’ll hopefully be convinced of the positive effects of team spirit and want to know how to foster it with your team members. There are a myriad of solutions, like team building, game nights and everyday gestures. We’ll also look into the differences between team spirit and team work. Finally, you’ll get our personal tricks of the trait on how to build team spirit in a remote environment.
TL;DR: Team Spirit Definition
Short on time? Here’s your quick digest on what team spirit is: When talking about team spirit, people mean a positive and supportive atmosphere amongst a group of individuals that work towards a common goal. Team spirit is hard to define, and unique to every team. When looking at it from a corporate perspective, it is important because it can lead to increased productivity, a higher job satisfaction, and improved workplace culture. Let’s look at an example.
Picture this: Your company is made up of the top educated employees in their fields. Their skills are impeccable, their CVs elaborate and their education unmatched. However, they prefer working alone and struggle to cooperate. The output of your company tends to fluctuate because of that. One time results are really high, other times quite low. Your competitors, on the other hand, do not have the best workforce in town. Their skills are mediocre, but they enjoy their jobs, feel united within their team, and support each other with every task. Their stats are stable and they climb steadily. Which company do you think will succeed in the long run?
What is team spirit in an organization?
What does team spirit mean? The phrase is not only vital for sports team, but also organizations. It involves creating a sense of unity, trust, and shared purpose among employees, where everyone feels that their standpoints and opinions are valued and supported. The following aspects will help the overall performance and success of your organization. A strong and united team leads to:
Simply put, team spirit in a corporate setting is like a group of gears in a well-oiled machine. Each gear has its own style, but when they come together they form a perfect harmony. Just like a team in a corporate setting, they must all work together, spin together, and dance together to make the company’s projects succeed!
How is team spirit created?
Creating team spirit is easier said than done. When relationships within your team are not strong, you should focus on fostering them. Colleagues don’t need to be best friends, but value and respect each other’s work for the common goal. The most important steps to creating team spirit within an organization include:
By implementing these steps, leadership can create a work environment where employees feel supported, valued, and motivated. It’s essential if you want to improve your employees’ relationship with their workplace, increase their engagement and positively impact overall performance.
How team spirit helps to achieve common goals
As we have established, team spirit plays a crucial role for the long-term success of your company. It positively impacts the sense of unity, collaboration, and shared purpose that exists among team members.
Team spirit as part of team cohesiveness achieves high performing teams
Team spirit is the most important factor in team cohesiveness. There are four types of teams in terms of productivity and cohesiveness. Dysfunctional teams are characterized by poor productivity and lack of cohesiveness, with a toxic mix of negative attitudes. High Stress teams meet expectations or complete projects but do so without much group interaction, driven by pride or ego, and often result in petty conflicts. Fun-derachievers have strong relationships but underachieve as they are either unfocused or not performing their roles. High Performing teams are successful in producing results through interdependent relationships, leveraging each other’s skills and insights, and being more effectively and happily engaged as a team.
When team members have a strong sense of team spirit, they are more likely to work effectively together and achieve common goals. Here are some tips on how team spirit can help you achieve your goals.
- Improved Communication: Duh! Teams with strong team spirit have better communication and collaboration, leading to more effective problem-solving and decision-making. It’s true, a lack of communication will cost you a lot of time and may lead to missed opportunities and loads of unnecessary conflict. Show your employees the upsides for good communication, and how it will make their work easier.
- Increased Productivity: Teams that work well together are more motivated and efficient, leading to higher levels of productivity and better results. When there’s no connection between employees, shared goals are hard to establish. Team spirit also equals emotional connection to the company. If that isn’t there, employees may feel less motivated to work hard.
- Better Morale: Within your company’s journey, not everything will always perfectly go to plan. Having a strong team morale is vital for overcoming hardships. Also, when team members feel supported and valued, they are more likely to be engaged and motivated in their work, leading to higher levels of job satisfaction and lower turnover.
- More Innovation: Let’s face it: In most industries, you need unique and creative solutions to really stand out with your services. Stimulate your employee’s creative spark by fostering team spirit and collaboration! Teams that are collaborative and have a strong sense of unity are more likely to generate creative and innovative solutions to problems.
- Stronger Sense of Purpose: Employees will not do their best work when they lack purpose at work. Just think: You also wouldn’t give your all to an operation you don’t feel ecstatic about. Employees are an asset, and keeping them satisfied will work in your favor. Teams with a shared purpose and vision are more likely to stay focused and committed to achieving common goals, even in the face of challenges and obstacles.
- Better Adaptability: In business situations, your team is sometimes required to make quick decisions. Only teams that know each other and their strengths well can quickly adapt to new situations. Teams with strong team spirit are more flexible and adaptable, allowing them to quickly pivot and adjust to changes in the business environment.
The difference between team spirit and team work
Comparing team work with team spirit is a common misconception. Even though team work and team spirit are related, they are distinct concepts. Team work directly refers to collaboration between a group of individuals in order to achieve a common goal. It involves the effective communication, cooperation, and coordination of every single individual within the group to complete tasks and meet objectives. Team work requires individuals to work together and rely on each other to be successful.
Team spirit, on the other hand, is not really an action, but an atmosphere. It is the mood that exists among a team. It involves creating a sense of unity, trust, and shared purpose among team members, where everyone feels valued and supported. Team spirit cannot exist without team work, and vice versa.
Team spirit examples
Unsure how team spirit could look like for you and your team? We have collected some examples of team spirit in everyday corporate situations.
- Team Building Activities: Team building activities are a great way to give your team spirit a boost. You can either do them as a fun supporting program to a Christmas party or company gathering, or use the experience of an expert to help you work on in-depth topics during a workshop. This helps employees bond and build stronger relationships.
- Celebrating Team Successes: Your team is awesome, and accomplishes great things more often than you might think. Unfortunately, during everyday work, great wins can get lost. Make a point of celebrating them openly. It will do wonders for your team spirit. After a big win, the team could gather for a celebratory lunch or happy hour to celebrate their achievement and each other, for example. You can also schedule specific events, such as kickoff-events, where you celebrate your team and motivate them for challenges ahead.
- Fun Fridays: Give your team something to look forward to and enjoy together. Set aside one day of the week, or every two weeks, where you schedule some optional social activities, like an after hour. Here, employees can engage in fun activities, play games, or simply relax and socialize with each other. Joint experiences like this will act as a positive team memory.
- Surprising Acts of Kindness: Be kind to each other during everyday work! Busy times come and go, but a good relationship with your colleagues should be a priority. Encourage team members to go out of their way to surprise their colleagues with small gestures of kindness, such as bringing in their favorite coffee or leaving a funny note on their desk.
- Themed Dress-Up Days: Dressing up is fun, and a nice opportunity to foster your team spirit. The team agrees to dress up in a certain theme, such as Hawaiian shirts for “Aloha Friday” or silly hats for “Crazy Hat Day.” There is a plethora of fun activities you can introduce, even when working remotely. Here’s our ultimate list of online team building games and remote team activities for inspiration.
How we at teamazing foster team spirit when working remotely
Fostering team spirit can be hard as is. However, when working remotely, the whole thing becomes an even bigger task. We pride ourselves as being remote work pioneers, and have found out what works for us with a lot of trial and error over the years. Here’s our top things that made our remote team spirit skyrocket!
Get2know each other
Even though this may not ring true for every company, but having friends at work is important to us. There are a lot of studies out there that support this idea. In fact, a study by Gallup showed that having work friends positively impacts the success of most companies.
We’re all for that! That’s why our smart and lovely development-team introduced a fun new challenge a few months ago, called “Get2know teamazies“. Each month, you are automatically drawn together with another random person from the team. Then you schedule 15 minutes (offline or online) where you get to know each other. One rule: During this time, you cannot talk about anything related to work!
For many, this might seem like a waste of valuable work time. However, for us, it is an investment in our work relationships and collaboration. You simply work better with people you know and, in the best case, like. This rings even more true when your company is working remotely. It also fosters interdepartmental collaboration, since people come into contact with colleagues they wouldn’t usually work with.
Birthday Celebrations
Birthdays are fun, and we at teamazing never miss a chance to celebrate! However, over the course of the last years, we noticed that birthdays tend to get lost under the stress of everyday work. We were searching for a solution to make everyone feel celebrated.
Similar to our get2know-teamazies format, people get a random person from the team allocated. Whenever that person’s birthday comes around, they are responsible for organizing a small act of celebration, like a cake, some bubbly, a small present or special activity. We’ve found that this works offline as well as online. Almost like a Secret-Santa, but with birthdays. Real fun!
Daily
One of our most cherished traditions to keep ourselves connected with our coworkers: The Daily Meeting. Here, we come together every day at the same time in our virtual office. Each employee shortly discusses what they did on their last workday and the tasks they plan on completing today. Colleagues also address things they may be struggling with and, with that, often collaboration on certain projects follows. We all feel up to speed with our colleague’s work, which helps our team spirit massively and is vital for our online collaboration!
1on1s
As you have gathered, we value 1on1-time with our coworkers. However, it is even more important for management and the colleagues they are in charge of. That’s why we introduced regular 1on1 sessions with managers and their colleagues.
For every quarter, we schedule a 1on1 XL, where we discuss individual OKRs (relating to the business OKR) and how we want to achieve it, go over our company values and just have a chat about our general feelings, within the company as well as personal. This helps management to be up to speed with their colleagues and helps to track process and establish pain points. With setting our own (professional improvement) goals, we have a massive increase in team spirit.
What are OKRs?
The term “OKR” stands for “Objectives and Key Results”. Many companies like to define a small number of OKRs they want to achieve within a certain time, like a quarter. The objective tends to be a general goal, like “We are the leading provider of online team building events in the United States”. Key results are much more concrete, and mirror how you get there. Read more on Objectives and Key Results.
Jour Fixe personal questions
Our weekly Jour Fixe helps us stay in the loop about important company developments, numbers, learnings and outstanding accomplishments from our colleagues. That in itself is a massive boost of our team spirit. However, we also take it a little bit further: At the end of every Jour Fixe, each employee answers a personal questions. We choose a different one each week, e.g.:
It is a fun way to end a meeting and shows your coworkers that you are interested in them and their experiences, opinions and feelings. This questions also gives way to the funniest answers, and we start our week in a good mood.
Virtual Office
The heart and soul of our company: Our virtual office. It is our very own remote workspace. Even though we have physical office spaces in Vienna, Munich and Graz, they would not be necessary because of our virtual office. This is how it works:
Every employee has an avatar that they can maneuver around the virtual workspace. If two or more colleagues are standing together, a video window opens, and they can talk with each other without being disturbed. Meeting types, activities, workshops or hallway conversations can be easily transferred to the virtual office. You have a question or just want to have a quick chat with a colleague? Then you can stroll right up to the person and strike up a conversation, just as you would in the physical office.
Virtual team building
Team building is not exclusive to offline companies. We operate entirely online, and the effectiveness of team building measures has never been an issue for us. Via the tool Gather.town, which we also use for our virtual office, we come together for fun team building events with engaging games and lots of laughter.
Did you know?
We at teamazing are part of the Gather Ambassador Program. If you are interested in Gather for your company, feel free to contact our sales team for a 10% discount on the monthly Gather subscription. Also, we support you with our extensive Gather expertise!
Sign-off
So now you know, that team spirit is a true win-win-situation: Not only does it help your company to succeed in the long run, but it also makes the everyday work of you and your colleagues all the more enjoyable. Don’t forget: Focusing on numbers and figures is important, but without real human connections, your goals are much harder to achieve.
VIDEO: Team spirit and human connections
FAQs Teamspirit
Why is team spirit important for team building?
Team spirit equals great collaboration and a sense of unity amongst a team. For your team building to be successful, these aspects are important. We suggest an individual team building workshop where you can work in-depth on your team’s unique problems.
How can team spirit be promoted through sport?
In sports, people need to be excellent team players in order to succeed. A high team spirit is necessary. Without collaboration, you’ll never reach your goal. The same rings true for organizations. If you want to boost the team spirit within your company, scheduling regular sports events with your employees can be beneficial.
Team spirit is an example of which leadership factor?
Without the right leadership style, team spirit cannot flourish within your organization. Interpersonal skills especially are an important factor here. A good leader needs to have the ability to communicate effectively, build relationships, and inspire and motivate others.
