How to turn a department into a successful team

Transform a group of employees into a cohesive unit

Building a successful company is downright difficult. From finding your niche to developing a successful product to building up contacts and relationships in order to help your company grow, success in the business world takes a lot of effort. Fostering a productive and happy workforce is a necessary part of getting there. So how do you help your employees be productive, happy, and successful?

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One key element of business success is to create teams instead of departments. Focus on building strong bonds among your employees so that they work as a true team, helping each other out and understanding the strengths each employee brings to the table. You don’t want to create a department where there’s little integration, or worse, a department where employees stab each other in the back in order to get to the top.

Building a team instead of a department comes with several advantages that will help your company in the long run, including:

• Greater productivity
• Higher-quality outputs
•  Employees who are less likely to quit

This last element is important because filling vacant positions can be costly for your company — especially when the more skilled positions are involved.

Need some help turning a department into a team? Try this:

• Plan special events for the workplace that everyone can participate in, such as virtual happy hours.
•  Host holiday parties.
•  Celebrate birthdays as well as victories the team achieves.

This is important specifically to your public relations efforts, as well, even if you’ve hired a PR firm. Whether you’re turning your in-house PR department into a unified team or working to build a strong bond with a PR firm you’ve hired for the purpose, fostering those close relationships will help them produce better content that’s in sync with what you want from them. Make it fun; not only does it make doing the work more enjoyable, but it’s key tocreating successful public relations content.

If you’ve hired a PR firm to handle your PR needs, get personal with your main point of contact or the firm’s owner. Make a point to learn tidbits about them as people and invite them to out-of-office activities or reach out with happy birthday messages or congratulate them on positive things happening in their lives. Even little things that cost you nothing can add up and turn a PR firm you’ve hired into a team that’s eager to work with you and see you succeed.

Keeping to the status quo and leaving your departments as they are might seem like the easy route, but just wait until you start seeing the benefits of creating a proper team that’s happy to work with one another. When you create a team, you foster productivity and loyalty in your employees so there’s less turnover. Even when you outsource some roles to other more specialized teams, like when you hire a PR firm, you can still create close bonds where they count.

Clients love Jacob’s speed. Jacob is an inbound marketing-certified webmaster. He earned an integrated communications degree from Florida State College at Jacksonville. Jacob joined Axia PR as an intern in August 2015 and earned his way into a critical role at our PR agency.