3 Ways to Learn More About Your Team and How They Work All it takes is time, attentiveness and open ears.
By Syed Balkhi
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When you take the time to learn about your employees, they'll trust you as a leader and you'll work together more effectively. But that can be difficult to accomplish through shorter conversations or water cooler chit-chat. Plus, you might also need to get to know your team quickly in order to make necessary improvements to your company. So, let's explore three ways to productively and efficiently learn more about your team and how they work.
1. Have your team take personality tests.
Personality tests might seem silly, but they can actually provide powerful insights. Here are three examples that could help you learn about your team members's personalities and working styles:
The 5-Minute Personality Test is a free resource that will tell you a lot your employees's strengths and weaknesses, communication styles, greatest needs and more.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator separates your team members into 16 different types of personality categories, offering insights on how they perceive the world, make decisions, communicate and more.
DiSC is a personal-assessment tool used by more than a million people every year to improve work productivity, communication and teamwork. The DiSC assessment is broken down into 4 DiSC factors: dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness.
Related: How These Entrepreneurs Managed Team Dynamics
2. Get feedback from your employees.
As a leader, you should be constantly striving for improvement, and one of the best ways to do that is by asking your employees what's working for them and what isn't. For example, many of your employees might prefer to work under stricter deadlines. After receiving this valuable feedback, you can make changes that will increase productivity and even boost the quality of their work. Consider creating an employee-satisfaction survey for your team so that they can share their thoughts and suggestions. Plus, according to LinkedIn, managers who received feedback on their strengths showed 8.9 percent greater profitability.
3. Spend more time with them.
Aside from just chatting with your team members in the office, you need to spend more real time getting to know them as well. This can be difficult to achieve, since you can't necessarily all go out on the town after work, but you can take your team to work-related workshops and conferences or offer team-building activities. A trip to an escape room, for example, could be a great way to learn how your employees solve problems and work together.
At our company, everyone works remotely, so we don't have the opportunity to spend time together in person on a regular basis. Because of this, we hold a yearly company retreat that helps us get to know each other and build a strong company culture.
Related: 4 Steps to Building a Successful Team
A connected team is a better team. Use these tips to learn more about your team and how they work so that you can build a rock-solid business.
