Tag: team building

Humor Is Good for Teams and Business

LOL: Why Humor Is Good for Teams and Business

Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

There’s no contradicting the fact that a little laughter can lighten any situation.

We’ve all been in one of those situations: a tense disagreement between team members or a stressful day with a deadline looming. How these times get handled is very important to the overall well-being of a team. One way to handle them is to try and inject a little humor, a little levity, into the situation; to bring everyone back to reality.

There are a couple of advantages to using humor to break tension or build up an effective team:

  • It builds trust and group bonding through a shared experience, something they can all look back on later and laugh about again. Just putting people together on a team doesn’t mean that they will bond. The shared experience of humor can go a long way to helping individuals build that feeling of being a part of a meaningful whole.
  • It breaks the tension by taking people out of their usual comfort zones but doing so in a fun way that doesn’t threaten anybody’s position and creates open communication, improves morale and lowers stress.
  • Humor or a humoristic situation puts all team members, including the leader, on an even playing field. If managers or team leaders are viewed as ‘regular people’, the rest of the team will be able to relate to them more effectively.

Why does laughter and humor matter?

Sophie Scott gets into the science of laughter in her TED talk: “Why we Laugh”. Laughter is, she points out, an important social cue: “ And when we laugh with people, we’re hardly ever actually laughing at jokes. You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you’re part of the same group as them. You’re laughing to show that you like them. You might even love them. You’re doing all that at the same time as talking to them, and the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you. “

When you’re building or working within a team, humor and laughter can help individual team members to socialize to the group, creating a different level of connection than a ‘strictly business’ attitude would ever attain. Laughter also relaxes people physically, which can be very useful in a tense or stressful work environment.

“Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you’re doing something, when you laugh with people, that’s actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better.”

In other words, laughter is good for us, both individually and as a team.

How to engage humor to team build?

I think I’ll start with what not to do: don’t build up contrived, silly games that some of your staff find demeaning and only participate in because they feel they have to. Know your people: if you’ve got classic introverts in your group, forcing them to play a game every week, to get everyone’s laugh muscles working, is not going to be helpful.

Instead, look for the more real opportunities to engage in humor. It can be as simple as stocking up on some clever jokes that you saw online or sharing a meme from Facebook that will speak to the team members, or at least speak to their funny bones!

If you’re a team leader, self-deprecating humor can work wonders to encourage your team to see you as one of them. Make yourself the butt of the joke once in awhile, and you’ll see the other members responding.

While team-building retreats—out of the office and away from the day to day—can be great for getting a new group to understand one another and their individual strengths, it should not be at the expense of allowing a little bit of humor into the every day. Many organizations send their teams on these retreats, where they are expected to ‘let their hair down’ a little, but then it’s business as usual the minute the come back into the office. This defeats the purpose entirely. It’s a retreat, not Vegas: allow some of what happened at the retreat to filter back into the everyday, particularly anything that was humorous.

Do you use humor in team building? What works for you?

Hiring for Success: The First Step in Teambuilding

Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

team performance hiring

While team building is a key concept in HR management, hiring managers often forget that team building exercises only help employees whose goals and values closely match those of the organization.

Adequately screening and carefully selecting employees is the first step in team building.

Characteristics of employees who make good team members and who would receive team building exercises and suggestions well include:

  • They value their position in the organization and feel a personal connection to the work they do.
  • They desire to make a difference in the organization.
  • They willingly accept change and understand the drive behind it.
  • They respect their coworkers, clients, and managers and value their opinions.
  • They see criticism as an opportunity for improvement and embrace suggestion.

Of course, most candidates will make an effort to present themselves as all of these things during an interview. How do you separate the great employees from the great pretenders through the interview process?

The key is to learn how they have responded to challenging situations in the past. Because these questions ask about personal or professional experiences, candidates are unable to recite an answer from a textbook and are more likely to be honest. Hiring managers find that candidates whose behavior didn’t match the values of the organization typically do not acknowledge that by filtering their answer. More simply put, they believe they handled the situation well and accurately share their experience even when the hiring manager views their behavior as unfavorable.

Some examples of questions that may reveal helpful information include:

  • How many times did you take an unplanned day off of work in the last twelve months?
  • Tell me about a time you’ve been asked to do something you didn’t agree with and how you handled it.
  • Have you ever had to work with somebody you don’t get along with?
  • Tell me about a time you’ve had too many things to do at once and how you organized your tasks.
  • Have you ever been disciplined or terminated from a position before?

Hiring managers often feel pressure from every direction to fill positions quickly, but it’s important that both upper management and directors or supervisors support selective hiring. Hiring the first candidate or the candidate who can start the soonest makes creating and maintaining a positive work culture difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, organizations often find that terminating “bad apples” with limited legal risk can be a long and tedious process. During this process, which takes months on average, damage to morale occurs that can be lasting and difficult to repair.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when making hiring decisions:

  • Keep in mind that in order to find the right team members, you may have to make some sacrifices. Choose your sacrifices carefully; for some positions it may be acceptable to sacrifice experience and certifications (these things can be taught) but an organization should never sacrifice dedication, ability to work well with others, or values that align well with those of the organization.  
  • Every hiring decision should be made by more than one person. A great team is an HR representative and the person directly supervising the position, and a good rule of thumb is that if both parties don’t agree to hire, an offer is not extended. This ensures that you take those gut feelings seriously and can save you from hardship in the future.
  • Having an established mission statement and evaluating candidates against that mission statement can prove to be helpful in selecting the best fit.

In summary, investing in the hiring process and choosing patience and selectiveness will contribute to more effective teams, more productive players, and better end results.