As a small business owner, it is key to understand the importance of investing in your team early on in the business. You’ll have talented team members that’ll be completely loyal, and it’ll reflect on your clients and your team culture. Here are few tips on how to do it.

Today I’m going to share three ideas you can be doing to grow your culture and your team to the next level.

1. Have learning meetings on a consistent basis. For the past three years, we have been conducting learning meetings every single Friday. We pick a topic or go over an audiobook on self-development chapter by chapter. Each team member is in charge of one chapter and he/she will share what’s about. Then we’ll have an open discussion about that chapter. It’s just a great time because the team members get together, we’re sharing information, learning, even the person that’s leading the group’s probably learning more than the person receiving the info. So it’s just a great time where you can build your team culture.
2.  Create cool t-shirts. “Cool t-shirts?!” you’re probably saying, “we’re a law firm, we need to be serious, we need to dress professionally.” that’s true, but you still need to create a fun and loving culture. I recommend allowing your team members to wear jeans and this T-shirt your team designed once a week or once a month. It just brings excitement. This T-shirt can have your logo with a positive and encouraging phrase, something that connects all of you. In our agency, what we do is every three months, we come up with a T-shirt design that relates to our team’s culture. And we allow every team member to choose the design they want. So it just brings closeness, it brings excitement. And it’s really, really cool.
3. Invite your team to lunch, you can do this every month, every quarter or every six months. In our digital marketing agency, we do it every quarter, and we just order pizza or Mexican food (I love Mexican food). This is a great time where we can just gather together, eat, build relationships, get to know each other on a deeper level. It brings closeness, it’s an amazing time. So I highly highly recommend you do this because it’s going to build your culture and your team. 

Hope you like these ideas. See you in my next post.

John Henao