Build a Culture that Fosters Cohesive Teams: Enji Best Practices

Businesses experiencing low performance can purchase the latest AI tools and project management platforms and hire the best efficiency coaches to train their teams, but nothing will change without the right work culture. Value and performance are the results of cohesive teams that understand the importance of their work. Each member of such a team believes in their contributions and is ready to offer more to reach the group's targets.

There is no way to download or buy team cohesiveness. It is built through long-term investment in processes that promote employee well-being, transparency, and collaboration. The Enji team understands the value of cohesive teams and is ready to share how to begin investing in the right culture today.

Team cohesion

It is often easy to define a team as a group of individuals working toward a common goal. Of course, the humans in a team are an essential element, but in addition to them, a team comprises the culture and system that guide how these individuals work and communicate with each other. Therefore, to understand team cohesion, it is necessary to think beyond individuals to encompass the entire context in which people work together and notice how well they support the processes to create an effective working environment. When this occurs, and teams experience strong cohesion, workflows run smoother, and team members feel better about their experience as a whole.

Signs a team has strong cohesion

It is easy to notice such teams due to the visible behavior of cohesiveness in how well they work together. These include:

• Trust and respect: Team members rely on and value each other, fostering a sense of safety and cooperation.
• Accountability: Every team member holds their colleagues accountable for their contributions to ensure the entire team is aligned with the group's common goals.
• Open communication: Ideas, feedback, and concerns are shared freely without fear of judgment.
• Shared goals and commitment: The team aligns around common objectives and works collectively to achieve them.
• Mutual support: Members offer help, encouragement, and recognition to build a positive team dynamic.
• Conflict resolution: Disagreements are handled constructively, with a focus on finding solutions rather than assigning blame.
• High participation and engagement: Everyone contributes actively, showing enthusiasm and dedication to their roles.
• Low turnover and absenteeism: Team members value being part of the group, which reduces turnover and unnecessary absences.
• Consistent performance: The team maintains steady productivity and quality, even under pressure or when facing challenges.

Each individual element above would be a positive addition to any team's culture, and together, they can drive team members and the group to achieve more ambitious professional and business goals.

Benefits of strong team cohesion

Reasons to build cohesion within a team extend beyond a simple increase in productivity. This is one of the side effects connected to a more important benefit: a long-term increase in employee satisfaction. Employee burnout negatively affects production, so preventing it will lead to optimized workflows and, of course, better performance. Cohesive teams deliver all of this through:

• Engagement and ownership: When team members understand their contributions are recognized and form part of the team's achievements, they feel increased accountability for every task they complete and perform at their best.
• Autonomy: A cohesive team works independently and can rely on its individual members without the need for management to conduct regular check-ins or intervene to resolve conflicts or misunderstandings. 
• Healthy working environment: Team members support each other and assist individuals in completing their work and achieving group success.
• More creativity: Open communication and supportive teammates allow ideas to flow without fear of undue criticism and lead to new approaches and innovation.
• Adaptability to challenges: All these characteristics give cohesive teams the ability to adjust to changing circumstances as a single unit without significant delays.

To acquire these benefits, leaders need to look beyond physical adjustments to workflows and processes and focus on building a culture that encourages the development of these teams within a business.

Enji's best practices for team cohesion

In addition to AI-powered data collection and analysis, Enji supports high cohesiveness within teams through the culture and experience of the professionals that created it. The Enji team understands the importance of trust and building a transparent working environment where everyone understands their roles and contributes to the group's success. Positive lessons and those that came from failures led to the creation of four principles that are at the heart of Enji.

Keep things in order

Micromanagement can harm team cohesion by eroding trust and independence; however, leadership still requires knowledge of what teams are doing to guide the company toward achieving its strategic goals. Through data and AI, the Enji team keeps things in order to allow stakeholders to assess progress without unnecessary interference.

Build disciplined processes

The Enji team creates its data through disciplined processes that all team members follow. Software engineering can be a fun experience when it improves the world and creates value. Without such processes, teams will not produce metrics that signal when roadblocks and other issues occur, and, as a result, software will decline in quality.

Make data-driven decisions

There is an incredible amount of data available in the world today that a business can use to drive growth and create transparency. Most importantly, this data provides an objective overview of team and individual performance and signals when assistance is required. With data, leadership can give employees access to essential information on performance and workflows, which leads to new ideas and optimization. Likewise, reviews and decisions based on objective data build trust when team members understand the rules and metrics.

Curate responsibility

The Enji team looks beyond simple numbers to assess its work. Each team member understands their responsibility to create a successful and useful product that contributes to creating high-quality software and other value in the world. Teams that strive to build cohesiveness must accept the responsibility that comes with this, such as sharing ideas and providing feedback.

Enji supports better teams

The principles outlined above form the foundation of Enji as a product. The next step is building the proper mechanics for developing a cohesive work environment with effective processes. Enji offers teams the tools they need to make this a reality.

Asynchronous stand-ups

Enji's Asynchronous stand-ups allow teams to share progress and roadblocks together without stressful and time-consuming in-person or online meetings. Quickly scroll through information to see what is happening and what plans team members have for the near future.

Worklogs

Everyone submits Worklogs that detail what they spend their time on to ease reporting to clients and other stakeholders. Enji collects this and other data to get you instant updates on teams anywhere and anytime. Worklogs establish a routine that emphasizes the importance of recording and accepting responsibility for actions within a team.

Transparent Employee Profits

Data shows everyone's contributions and value to a project and company. Enji analyzes individual performance based on stand-ups, comments, worklogs, and more to present an objective portrait of a team member's role. The availability of this information makes it easier to recognize high performance and success.

Code metrics

Enji collects Individual and Team Code Metrics to help leaders assess software development processes and establish clear goals for teams to work toward. The objective data Enji gathers serves as signals that managers and team members can use to build supportive development environments that assist younger engineers and create new responsibilities for experienced ones.

Enji's features collect the necessary metrics teams and businesses can use to identify KPI for team cohesion and support the processes that create these teams.

The importance of culture

Team cohesion fosters clear goal setting and achieving targets. Leaders who want to create cohesion need to review their business's culture. Does it encourage transparency and collaboration? Is information easily accessible to team members and stakeholders? Affirmative answers to these questions indicate that a company is invested in creating a positive work culture where cohesion will flourish.

Then, it becomes the responsibility of individual team members and management to maintain and support this environment through tools that make it easy to share data and develop disciplined processes.