Hello, everyone. Welcome to Strengthening the Team. This is an educational presentation that's part of the 2025 Deer Oaks EAP AllOne Health Supervisor Excellence webinar series. I'm Greg Brannan from AllOne Health. Good to be with you today. Thank you for joining us. Before we get started, I want to make sure our technology is working for us.

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So today, we're talking about strengthening the team. Now, obviously, when a group of people form a team, how they get along, how they bond, how they interact together is going to determine the morale in the environment, it's going to determine the motivation of the team members. And at the end of the day, it's going to determine the productivity of everyone.

And so that's why I think it's really important that when you're in a supervisory role, and I know probably because this is a supervisory excellence webinar series, a lot of you on the call today are, it's really important that we're intentional about team building. And that's really what we're going to talk about today. The importance of intentionally creating a team that bonds well together, that builds great relationships, making sure that the workplace environment or culture is positive and motivating.

So again, people will be able to do their very best work. And again, look forward to coming to work every day, enjoy each other's company, and be highly, highly productive. And so let's get into the details. All right. What are the benefits of, again, team building? I talked a little bit of the reason that we want to have this conversation and why it's important to intentionally focus on team building when you're a leader.

But I want to drill down into specific benefits. Think about this. If you've got a well-functioning team, a team that bonds well together, that cares about each other as people, not just as colleagues, and actually senses that they're part of a work family.

When you have an environment like that, individuals absolutely enjoy coming to work better because the environment is going to be-- it's going to be more positive. It's going to be more welcoming. It's going to have more good energy. People are going to look forward to coming to work every day.

And when people enjoy the people they work with, they end up liking their jobs more. And they're much less likely to leave that job and go somewhere else. Job satisfaction surveys are pretty clear. And noting that when people really enjoy the people that they work with, when they feel like their team is like a work family, and they really look forward to seeing their teammates at work every day and enjoy the time that they spend with them and interact effectively together, people enjoy their jobs more.

When people enjoy their jobs more, They're going to be more engaged and more productive. And so again, these are more specific reasons why, for those of us in leadership positions, we need to be more intentional about team building. Creating these atmospheres and these work family environments.

And that's what we're going to talk a lot about today. But even if you're not in a supervisory role, even as a teammate, each one of us has a contribution to make. We can be part of creating that positive workplace environment. We can be a good colleague. We can be supportive and helpful and encouraging to the people around us.

And again, support our leadership team in creating that workplace environment where people enjoy coming to work, want to be there, and at the end of the day, are highly productive. As a matter of fact, there was a research study quoted in The Leadership Challenge book. This is a book by Kouzes and Posner.

Again, the book is The Leadership Challenge. They said the teams where individuals care about each other as human beings and like each other, where they don't just say that those are my coworkers, but this is my work family and these people have my back, I have their backs, we enjoy each other, we're a really tight knit team-- when you have those environments, those teams are as much as 70% more productive than teams that say, you know, those people in that room down the hall, those are just my coworkers.

So it really behooves us-- again, whether you're an individual employee or whether you're a leader of a team, it really behooves us to work together to create a great workplace environment where that work family feel exists.

All right. Now, what are the barriers? We've talked a lot already today about the benefits of having a really great workplace environment and building a strong team. Right? But what are the barriers? Because not all teams are like that. I've been in the workplace now over 40 years, and about half the time, I've been very fortunate enough in my career to work on really, really strong teams.

The Deer Oaks EAP team that a lot of you are familiar with, the team that I've been working on for the last 14 years, has been a very, very strong team. And the AllOne Health team is a very, very strong team and we're now part of the AllOne Health family.

And so I'm very fortunate to be part of a very strong team right now. And I have been for a long time. But there have been times in my career when I was not part of a strong team. And so where people were more in-- you know, they acted less like a team and more like individuals where they were competitive with each other, where they didn't have a lot of leadership support, and this is years ago.

But I had a couple of experience, one experience in the '90s, back in the 1990s, I know I'm dating myself, where I was working on a team that did not have strong leadership and it became a very competitive, very unsafe environment where people would walk on eggshells and they just weren't comfortable together and didn't feel like they had a lot of leadership support in that environment back in the '90s.

I mean, it was very uncomfortable. We had a lot of turnover. People didn't get along very well. They kept to themselves. And morale was not good at all. It was a very negative environment. And so in some of the things that caused negative environments like that include a lack of focus on team building by leadership. And so that definitely was true on that team I was a part of back in the 1990s.

The folks that were in place in leadership back then, they were not focused on team building at all. We didn't do team building events. I mean, the leaders create a very competitive environment, where it was everybody for themselves. And it wasn't a real comfortable environment, where people felt a sense of belonging.

It just wasn't safe for people. People hesitated to speak up in meetings for fear of being criticized or-- and again, when you get in an environment like that where leadership is not creating a positive environment, it's not all on leadership, right? It's important for everybody on a team to make a commitment to an environment where it feels like a work family. Where people feel safe, they feel supported, they feel like they can take initiative and share their ideas without fear of being criticized or rejected.

And so, again, some of the barriers to team synergy is if leadership doesn't set the tone and if the individual colleagues aren't committed to creating a work family environment where people are kind to each other and respectful to each other and have each other's back, so that can be a barrier to team synergy.

And those kinds of environments don't just happen. It has to be intentional. I mean, leadership setting the tone in each individual employee, really taking ownership to making an environment positive and respectful and supportive where people feel good about coming to work every day.

That doesn't happen by accident. It takes leaders setting the tone and individual employees buying in and continuing to do that individually and be there for each other respectfully every single day. Another barrier to team synergy is a lot of stress. High stress environments can really get in the way from team synergy.

There's been a lot of research around high stress environments where maybe there's a lot of pressure on people to perform at the highest levels. Now, of course, every leader and every environment, every team wants to succeed. They want to be productive. But sometimes, environments can have so much stress and pressure put on people that again, they feel more like--

I mean, they don't feel that safe sense of team and that sense of belonging. And so we wanted to be careful. We want to be careful that we don't create environments that are uncomfortable for people. If environments are uncomfortable for people, if it's too competitive, if there's too much pressure put on people, if supervisors have unrealistic expectations, if people aren't encouraged to bond together as colleagues, those environments can be very uncomfortable.

Some people call those toxic environments or negative environments, but in those environments, morale typically isn't very good. People don't-- they don't enjoy working together. And a lot of times there's a lot of turnover. And at the end of the day, people don't stay around very long. And while they're there, they're not as productive as they would have been if they were in a more motivating environment.

All right, folks. Let's get into some of the how-to's. How do we create a more comfortable environment where people are going to feel a sense of belonging, they're going to feel cared about, they're going to feel valued and respected, where they're going to enjoy being together every day, where they're going to feel well-led by their leaders.

So that people, again, will want to do their best work. Will enjoy coming to work every day. Will be comfortable in that environment and want to stay for the long-term. And at the end of the day, be as productive as possible. And so I think it starts with making sure there's a good communication structure in place.

And so I wanted to share some ideas around that. What I mean by communication structure, sometimes teams don't like to meet on a regular basis. They feel like there's too many meetings, but some team meetings are necessary. Think about it. It's hard for people to bond. Let's say you're on a team of a dozen people and, of course, on a team of a dozen people, there's going to be a lot of differences between people, right?

There'll be some cultural diversity on every work team nowadays. People from different backgrounds, different cultures. There might be some language barriers between some individuals. There may be generational differences. We now have five generations in the American workforce.

So there could be differences between people who grow up in different time periods and how they see the world and how they communicate, those kinds of things. And so, again, in order to create an environment where people get comfortable together, where they can create that work family feel and enjoy the environment and have good morale, leaders really need to foster bringing people together. And that starts with regular team meetings.

In terms of one of the best teams I've ever been a part of is what's gone on here at Deer Oaks the last bunch of years. And we did regular-- our leaders had regular one-on-one meetings with staff. So on a regular basis, some teams within Deer Oaks were doing weekly one-on-one meetings. Some were doing biweekly.

But because we were meeting regularly, the supervisors were meeting with all the staff members on a regular basis, and connecting together, making sure that those relationships were strong, showing employees that we care about them as people, not just as employees, but as human beings, right?

People have enjoyed being a part of this organization. And it's really, really helped us have a good culture where people are comfortable. And we've had very little turnover. We've had a lot of people stay for a long time. I've been in this environment now for almost 14 years.

People don't tend to leave environments very quickly when they find a place that has a good culture, where leadership is very supportive and respectful, where teammates take good care of each other and have each other's back. And that doesn't just happen. It happens when leaders regularly bring people together.

So I'm a big advocate of regular team meetings. Regular one on one meetings between leaders and each individual employee that reports to them. Team meetings I truly believe, we were doing bi-weekly team meetings on my team at Deer Oaks for a long time. And during the pandemic, we decided to go to weekly team meetings to stay bonded at a time when everyone was working remotely and we weren't seeing each other in-person very often.

And so we went to weekly meetings, and the team was agreeable to that. And it wasn't something I decided-- as the team leader, I went to the team and I said, I really feel like we need to spend more time together during these difficult times. And the team agreed. Let's try it and see if it works. And we never went back to weekly team meetings. Or excuse me. Never went back to biweekly. We stayed with weekly even after the pandemic.

And so the combination of having one-on-one meetings between leaders and their direct reports, again, to make sure that you're staying connected, getting to know each other, taking an interest in each other, and finding out what's important to people, again, letting employees know that they're cared about as human beings, not just for the work that they can do for you and for the organization, that strengthens the team. Absolutely.

People want to be there more when they have that kind of leadership support. And then bringing the team together on a regular basis. And we've been doing weekly team meetings for a long time. And they've gone very, very, very well. And so again, if you create a communication structure, there's opportunity for people to be less reactive and more proactive about bonding.

Catching up with each other, finding out what's important to each other. Just treating each other well as people and forming that team identity, right, where you feel like you're part of something important. You're part of something comfortable. You have a sense of belonging. You identify with that team.

I think that's such an important thing to do. And then the supervisors also doing those one-on-one meetings again, so that those relationships are great. I tend to see it as team bonding, as being vertical between supervisors and their employees, and horizontal, where all of the individual team members are bonding together.

But in order to do that, you have to meet regularly. And so I think it's so important when supervisors bring people together for those team meetings on a regular basis, and you can give the team input. And some teams can meet-- every other work can be fine. Some teams can meet once a month and be fine and bond really well together. And some teams may want to meet on a weekly basis.

So you can figure out what the best cadence is for your particular team. And as a leader, I think it's good to give the team members input into what they think. Instead of just dictating as a leader how often the teams should meet, bring the team together and give them input as to how often they would like to meet, and come up with a joint decision that will feel comfortable for the team and everybody, as to how often and what that cadence is.

So I think that that's really good. Now, when you get into the team meetings, and I'm going to skip down a couple of slides and come back, when you get down into team meetings, I think it's really, really important to start a lot of team meetings with what I call icebreakers. I know most of you are familiar with that,

And an icebreaker, obviously, is just an opportunity for people to share and get to know each other better. During the pandemic, we were doing icebreakers on a regular basis, and it really brought us closer together. And we would be really creative with the icebreaker. And then we would allow different team members to facilitate the icebreakers at the beginning of different meetings.

And what I mean by an icebreaker would be to come up with a topic. One topic was, let's talk about the best concert you've ever been to and why it was such a great experience. And we went around the room and everyone would share the best concert ever, and why they enjoyed it so much. And it gave people an opportunity to get to know each other better as human beings.

A lot of times, by getting to know what people's musical preferences are, it gives you some insight into who they are as a person. I know we all know that. So we would do something different along those lines on a more personal basis, on a regular basis. And we would rotate who would facilitate that.

I would facilitate some icebreakers. Individual team members would facilitate different icebreakers. And we did it pretty consistently for a while during the pandemic. And I think it really, really strengthened our bond and made us-- it really enhanced our identity as a team and our connectedness.

It was interesting. A lot of times during team meetings, people are so quick to get out and they want to be done and get on to the next thing. Our team meetings, when we went to this regular weekly session where we did icebreakers at the beginning and we created a stronger bond between all of us, they started to run late.

And it wasn't because I was keeping people late, it was because people were engaged and they were bonding together and they wanted to-- they weren't in a hurry to leave. They were enjoying their time together. So again, you want to create opportunities for bonding, which includes during your team meetings, use icebreakers or other ideas to just get people bonded together.

You can also do formal team building aside from your team meetings, where you do a little maybe team building at the beginning with an icebreaker or something like that or a game. You can take people out. As you all know, when you do something formal, you can go out for lunch as a team. You can go to an amusement park as a team. You go to a bowling alley as a team.

I hadn't bowled in like 30 years when me and the Dear Oaks team went bowling a few years ago. And I enjoyed the heck out of it. It was a nice memory from childhood. I just hadn't gotten around to doing it for a long time. So we a lot of fun like that. And so again, be thinking about what you can do with your team, either informally as part of your get togethers, like your regular team meetings, like something at the beginning, or bring in food or bring in donuts or doing something creative just to make people feel cared about and, and make it a really comfortable experience for everybody.

And then give opportunities for people to get to know each other better. They let their hair down when you have opportunities like that for icebreakers. I know a lot of you know what I'm talking about, but I think it's really helpful if you want to have a team building plan.

And I want to suggest that all of us, and one of the takeaways today, that all of us consider, especially if you're in a leadership role, that you consider having a team building plan. Do a calendar. And it doesn't have to be something that's onerous or that takes too much time, again, my team building plan really has always started with, at the beginning of my regularly scheduled team meeting, so I didn't have to do anything above and beyond.

And there's times I mentioned I've done biweekly meetings or times I've done weekly team meetings. We would start with an icebreaker and bond a little bit for 10 or 15 minutes, and that really set the tone for the business agenda that we would get into as a team.

But it really, really works really, really well. So do a calendar to say, OK, tell you what? If you're meeting every other week, you're meeting biweekly, say, the first team meeting of every month here in 2026, we're going to do a team building exercise at the beginning.

So that gives you 12 opportunities once a month in 2026 to get your team better bonded together. And that matters. Over time, people will get more comfortable with each other. If you've not done this before, you'll be really pleased with how connected people become and how much more comfortable they are when they're working together because of this bonding that happens.

So over the past several years, that had been the centerpiece or the foundation of my team building plan. But then we would try to do-- the other leaders at Dear Oaks, and I would try to do several times a year. We do bonding experiences. Where we do-- we would go out together for a meal. We'd do a, you know, a team meeting at a restaurant. We went and played top golf once, if you've ever played that, went to the bowling alley a couple times, like I mentioned.

We did some online games. We found a clue, the game Clue-- The Murder Mysteries that I know a lot of you are familiar with that game from childhood. We found an online version of that we played and had a lot of fun with as a team. We really have done a good job of on purpose, having consistent activities and games and fun together so that we can bond as people.

And I think that's made a huge difference in why our team has been together as long as it has. And a lot of my teammates have been around for our executive director. Our managing director has been around for 30 years, I believe now. I've been around 14. A lot of my other colleagues have been around for 18 and 17 and 13. And we have a lot of people have been there for a long time.

And I know a lot of it is because the leadership team and then the team themselves got really invested in bonding and making sure that we really got to know each other and had each other's back and enjoy being together. But you have to be intentional about it.

Teams that are all business, that only get together on an as needed basis, or everyone's doing their own thing and they don't do any proactive or intentional team building, those teams don't tend to get as comfortable with each other. They don't let their hair down as much. They don't get to know each other as well.

And then cliques can form. You'll always find individual team members bonding one on one based on commonalities. And cliques can form that way, right? Where you might have a team of 12 and 2 or 3 people, maybe all have small kids, and they bond together around the fact that all their kids are preschool, and they bonded around that.

But maybe because that's their special bond, they go to lunch together once a week, they're not doing that kind of stuff with other people on the team because they don't have that same commonality. That's an example of how if leadership and the team isn't invested in bringing the whole team together, you don't get that team bonding.

You get a few pockets of people connecting based on commonalities, but you miss the opportunity to have an environment where everyone loves being together. Right? And they really feel a part of something. And that's where you get that really comfortable place where people really enjoy their jobs and are much less likely to leave and are motivated to do their best work.

Now, here's a couple of other things that you can do during team meetings that can bring a team closer together. I'm going to give you some additional team building ideas here. Is to do a communications meeting. What I call a communications meeting is what's the best way to communicate with me. Everyone goes around the room. And everyone has an opportunity to say, OK. I like email.

So please send me an email. But please don't send me a data dump. Just send me an email with just the bullets. I don't like to ready a three-page email. I don't have time for that. But I like to just have the bullet highlights. If you can please be thoughtful of that when you send me an email.

That's the kind of stuff. Going around helping people learn how to communicate with each other. I had other teammates say, don't email me first thing in the morning. I need my second cup of coffee before. And it's interesting because I'm a morning person, and I did Wonder Years ago why a lot of my early morning emails weren't being answered until 10 or 11 o'clock. But I found out in that communications meeting that how to communicate with me meeting.

Oh, that's why these certain individuals are not communicating early in the morning. And that was very, very helpful. I actually found out another colleague didn't like to have people call her on the phone out of the blue. And I'm a I'm a later career guy. And so I like email and picking up the phone. And I would just call her out of the blue sometimes, and not thinking that I was being interrupting.

But she's someone that's a writer. And I did learn later on that when people are creative, they get into a creative space and a head space, and they don't like to be interrupted. And when I learned that, I asked her, I said, hey, when I call you out of the blue, does that interrupt you? And she said, yes. She was very polite about it.

She says, if you need me, you need me. But I apologized. I said, I'm so sorry. I never stopped to think that just because I needed to talk, that picking up the phone would be interrupting your workflow. I apologize. And then I learned to email her first before I would call her, and then she'd let me know when she'd be available.

So these are the kinds of things that, as you're trying to bring a team more closely together and get them functioning more comfortably together, getting people, talking about how they like to be communicated with is really, really helpful. There's another rules of engagement meeting that I think it's good to do every year or so.

What I mean by that is the subtitle of my rules of engagement conversations at team meetings is, how do I like to be treated? It gives everyone on the team an opportunity to say, this is what I look for from my colleagues at work, and the kind of things people will say during those meetings. I've done a bunch of them in my career, and they're very, very helpful in getting people treating each other more comfortably together interpersonally, right, and creating that positive work environment that's very respectful.

A lot of people say, be respectful or don't forget to say good morning. We have some people on our team-- these are things I heard in the past. We have some people on our team that come into the office and they go right to their cubicle, boot up their computer, and they don't say hi to anybody. We have a lot of people who walk out in the evening, never say, have a good night.

And some people are saying, that's important to me. We want to be in an environment where people greet each other, right? Where people say, have a good weekend on Friday when they leave. And so those are the kinds of conversations that you can have intentionally in team meetings, right, from time to time that can bring a team closer together.

Help people learn more about each other again, learn how to communicate more effectively together, learn what people's expectations are, and it brings everyone closer together and makes the environment more comfortable for everybody.

All right. A couple more things I want to mention, and then I'll open it up for questions here, folks. Now, much-- or excuse me. Much training in work environments, right, a lot of it. I'd say the majority of it. When I say majority, it's more than half. But the majority of training I think that's offered to people on the job typically is focused on technical skills.

What I mean by technical skills is job skills, right? Functional skills. If you're in accounting, you're getting advanced accounting principles skills. Those kinds of things. If you work in a maintenance organization, you're getting, how to stay safe out there in the field or working with heavy machinery or something like that.

But there's not a whole lot of what we call soft skills that's offered at times like this session today. This is about interpersonal skills and doing the kinds of things that can make people be more effective in interacting with each other. Folks, think about that if you want a comfortable team, the individual team members need to be respectful communicators.

They need to go to work every day, smile, be nice to each other, be kind, be helpful. That makes all the difference in the world. And teams that have great environments typically have at least some focus on helping the individual team members develop their interpersonal skills. Prioritize getting along well with others, being good communicators, being courteous.

Being easy to get along with. Teaching them how to resolve disagreements and conflict effectively. So let's not forget that, because, again, if you want to really helpful or warm and comfortable and motivating workplace environment where people look forward to coming to work every day, make sure that you're training and focusing your people on treating each other well interpersonally.

When that happens, the culture of an organization tends to be really, really comfortable for people again. In those environments, people get more motivated, they're less likely to go look to work somewhere else, and they're going to be more productive.

All right. Again, I want to review just very quickly. I want to recommend that all of you if you're in leadership, I want to recommend that you create a team building plan, either for the second part of this year, I know some of you are on fiscal years where you just started your FY26. So this would be a good time to do your FY26 team building plan.

Or if you want to do it on a calendar year, you could just get ready for this and start it on January 1. Whatever works for you. But create a team building plan, where you are intentional about this. There's so much benefit to creating a great workplace environment, where people really enjoy being together and treat each other really, really well and communicate effectively.

There's so many positive things about this, right? We've talked about increasing productivity, improving the comfort level of people in the environment. Retaining your people because again, folks aren't going to be quick to leave a really comfortable, respectful environment.

Improving customer service. When people on a team treat each other well, they tend to treat external customers better. The way the way people interact together is contagious. And so it is really important to have a team building plan. It's real easy to not do any formal team building. To once in a while have a team meeting, maybe once in a while, go off site and have a lunch.

And those are fine. Those are helpful marginally, right? But to have a regular team building plan where like at least once a month, you're doing an icebreaker team building exercise at the beginning of a meeting, where people are getting more comfortable with each other. Getting to know each other better.

That's key. And maybe once a quarter or twice a year, you're taking people off site for a meal to play a game together. Again, to bond. To get to know each other better and to get comfortable with each other. It's just so important to do that. So I truly believe that it's like anything else. If you have a plan, it'll be consistent.

And at the end of the year, you'll see that, wow. We had 12 team meetings where we did a team building exercise at the beginning, an icebreaker, and then we had three or four times when we went off site and had fun together. and we did a couple of interpersonal skills training sessions during the year. So to get people communicating more effectively together and treating each other well.

And what I've noticed now over the last year is the morale has improved, right? People seem to be in a better mood when they come to work. They laugh more. I'm seeing less conflict. I'm seeing less turnover, and I'm seeing people thriving. That's what I'm talking about.

And that's my hope for all of us. Is that we'll come away from today motivated to create a team building plan and get the kind of results that teams that are proactive about it really achieve. And so all right, folks, I know we talked a lot today in a short period of time. I want to open it up for questions. If you have any questions, if you can, please type them into the question box in the GoToWebinar software on your screen.

Someone's asking, "Will a PDF of the slides be provided?" If you hit Reply to your GoToWebinar invitation for today, ask our staff to send you a copy of the PowerPoint, they would be happy to. Good question. Folks, are there any other questions?

I appreciate everyone taking time out of your busy schedule to be here today. Folks are there any questions? We have plenty of time today. All right. Starting to get more questions. "Can you recommend a website for free team building games?" I don't have a website per se, but just Google "team building activities" or "team building games" or "icebreakers." Just Google that, you will get some wonderful, wonderful ideas.

I've done that and came up with some great ideas. I apologize that I don't know a specific website. Another one of our colleagues said, "I do have a question. How do you motivate--" Let me see. "--How do you motivate an employee to try to figure something on their own when it's the same issue every time?"

That's a really, really good question. One of the things I think it's important to do, I love to have coaching conversations with people. I know most of you practice some form of coaching with your employees.

And so what I'm talking about in terms of coaching is to have a conversation where instead of the supervisor giving direction to an employee, hey, I need you to do this more often, or I need to change this behavior to this, or I need you to do it this way instead of that way or where you're trying to really be prescriptive and telling people how to do something or what to do.

Is to have a conversation with an employee about, hey. How have you been handling this one situation here has not been going very well. Can we brainstorm together? Other possible approaches here that might work better. Because you and I have been talking about this now for a while, that what we're doing now is not working very well. And I really-- I mean, you've been here for a long time.

I would love to hear your ideas. Maybe the two of us can brainstorm and come up with some new ways to approach this situation. So those are the kinds of conversations that I think you want to give the employee an opportunity to think for themselves, right?

So rather than bringing them in and telling them, hey, don't do this, do that instead, where you're dictating it, bring them in and say, hey. The way we've been approaching this one situation has not been working really well. And you and I have been talking about that on and off.

Let's brainstorm. What are your thoughts? What have you been thinking about? Have you thought of any other creative approaches that we might take and try to solve this problem or so on and so forth. That's what I would suggest. Thank you. That was a good question.

Now, we're getting lots of questions, which I really appreciate. Some of you are putting your email address here for the slides. Folks, if I could please have you submit that by hitting Reply to your GoToWebinar software for today, you would have gotten a reminder from the GoToWebinar system that you had a seminar or webinar coming up today.

All you have to do is hit Reply to that and ask for the slides, and our staff will be happy to send that to you. Another one of our colleagues said. "Is there a training on coaching?" Yes, we do. Here at Dear Oaks and AllOne Health, we have several coaching trainings that we provide to our client organizations, and I know if you're here with us today, your organization has our EAP services.

And so yes, reach out to your human resources team or talk to your manager. And just say, hey, the folks at Dear Oaks and AllOne Health that did a webinar today said that they have some training on coaching. And that we could reach out and have someone reach out to us and see if we can schedule a time to provide a coaching training session. Yes, we do have several sessions on that. Get some really good stuff.

Here's another really good question. "Any tips for getting buy-in from staff who are hesitant to participate in team building activities?" Yes, absolutely. I would pull those individuals aside, not to put them on the spot, and just say, sometimes as someone's personality, they might be more of an introvert and not comfortable getting involved in a team session or in front of other people, that kind of stuff.

But pull them aside and just ask them and just say, hey. You're an important part of our team and I noticed you don't seem to get real involved during our icebreaker sessions or our team building activities. And ask that person, what kinds of team building activities would you be comfortable participating in?

You'll get some great ideas from people if you pull them aside. And people appreciate that. That you noticed and that you want them to be involved. Thank you. That, again, was a great question. Here's another really good question. Do you recommend creating a norms as a team for expected behavior during meetings?

I think that happens pretty effectively by modeling in terms of norms. But if you have individual employees that are not behaving in ways that are comfortable for others, I pull them aside and have a coaching conversation about hey. I've noticed you have a tendency to criticize other people's ideas in our team meetings.

And as you know, we've talked about trying to keep our team meetings as positive as possible. And I do appreciate that sometimes you may not agree with what something someone else is saying, but other than criticizing them in front of the rest of the team, there would there be another way that you could give them feedback that would maybe be more comfortable for them in a team session?

Because again, I don't want our team sessions to have people uncomfortable thinking they're going to be criticized in front of others. And so I just want to brainstorm with you. I don't want to shut you down. You have good observations and good insights. You've been here a long time. You know a lot.

But I just want to brainstorm with you how you might be able to give that feedback to your colleague either offline afterwards or maybe working with me to do it, or figure out a way that we can give that feedback to that employee without maybe it being a critique of them in front of the rest of their colleagues, which might be uncomfortable for them.

And those kinds of things. And have that person be thoughtful about how they might handle it different next time. All right. Got time for a couple more questions today. All right. Here's another question that I think most of you will resonate with. Is "what if there's only one employee that brings the team down or brings morale down? But people excuse this person by saying, well, that's just the way they are, and there's no accountability or no disciplinary action."

If you're their supervisor, I definitely think that we need to bring that person in-- you need to bring that person in one-on-one and talk to them and coach them around how their behavior may be having a negative impact on others on the team and hurting morale.

And again, I don't want to do it in a way that's going to be too negative. But I want to bring them in, and I want to make them understand that what we're trying to do here is to create a positive environment. And that when they get critical of others in meetings, like in the example I gave a few minutes ago or when they go on a negative vent in a meeting in front of everyone else for five minutes, we've had people complain to say that hurts the energy and makes people uncomfortable.

And again, not to bring them in. And the reason coaching is effective is it's a good two-way conversation with the employee to help them to figure out how to improve things or to work with them to create different ways of doing things. And to give them some input into that instead of you just dictating it.

For example, if you call that person in and say, hey, you're bringing the morale down in our meetings and you need to stop that, that person might get defensive. Even though it's true, that person might get defensive, they might get demotivated, and that could make their behavior even worse. But to bring them in and say, hey. You have a lot of knowledge. You're an important part of this team. And you do a lot right.

But I do want to bring to your attention that in team meetings lately, I've had a couple of complaints from some of your colleagues saying that when you go into a negative vent mode, that it pulls the team down, and I've had people complain saying, I want our team meetings to be more positive.

And honestly, I do too. So can we brainstorm? I don't want you to shut down. I want you to keep sharing because you're important and people need to learn from you. You've been here a long time. But I want you to please try to be a little bit more mindful of being a little bit more constructive and positive and how you share in team meetings, because I want to make sure our team meetings are as positive for everybody as possible.

And so let's brainstorm. How could you give feedback to the team or how could you express your opinion in a team meeting where it wouldn't be quite so negative, where people would see that you're trying to recommend improvements. And let's brainstorm.

And to give that employee an opportunity. Sometimes people don't know how they're coming off in a meeting, and they'll go on and on. And everyone else says, oh, that's just who they are. But I don't think we should leave that alone as a leader. I think we should confront it in a coaching way. Again, like in the example that I just gave, and give that employee an opportunity to think of different ways. More constructive and more positive ways to communicate during meetings.

And just make sure that they understand that some of that behavior is not effective. And give them input into how they're going to address it and improve it. All right, folks. We've got time for one more question today. We've had a lot of great questions so far today.

All right. Here's a really, really good question. This ties back to something I mentioned earlier. Folks, you'll probably remember about 15 minutes ago, I shared what I tended to call a rules of engagement meeting. And my subtitle of that was this is how we're going to treat each other as a team. These are the norms, right? How we're going to treat each other.

And the team creates that. I have input as the leader, but the team creates that. And so if you have a team member that tends to be critical of others, here's a question from our colleague, and is actually the one that doesn't say good morning or good evening, they just walk in and out.