3 Steps For Unifying Your Business, Even If Your Colleagues Won't Play Ball

Unifying a company around a common cause the holy grail for managers and leaders. If you can get everyone on the same page, working towards the same goals, productivity shoots through the roof and things just get done. 
Reaching that hallowed ground, however, requires a lot of work and patience on your part. Most people won’t just work happily with their colleagues for the sake of it. Ultimately, everyone who interacts with your enterprise is trying to work out how they’re going to get the most out of it. 

Unification, however, is possible, and it’s something that a lot of brands achieve. The question for us is: how do they do it? 

Attitude

Incredible company cultures usually have humble beginnings. In many cases, it is the infectious personality of a founding member that forms the spark that brings the whole team together for a single purpose. 

But the best leaders are smart. They know that not everyone wants to play ball and there are a lot of fakers out there who will pretend they’re team players but are only in it for themselves. 

Ideally, hiring managers should be looking for people who promote the needs of the group above individual gain. The team should have a group mindset that lends itself to a single purpose, getting people to work together in a way that benefits everyone. 

Processes

The next step is to unify your processes so that everyone is on the same page. You don’t want a system where one department does things one way, and another does it using an alternative method. 

The cloud is perhaps the most powerful tool in this regard. Unlike practically any other technology, it allows you to harmonize how you work across people and locations, so nobody gets confused by your protocols. 

Using a trusted small business phone provider is a great way to standardize your communications. Any phone calls, voice messages, emails, and texts all become digital and available to everyone through a single channel. You no longer have to manually connect the dots. All customer communications are available on a single screen. 

You can adopt a similar approach for workflow (by using tracking software), report generation (using templates), and even chat apps that bring people together, including those working remotely. Once you centralize your processes and create a working framework, it makes errors and omissions far less likely. And it helps to foster a group culture that says, “this is the way we like to work at this firm.”

Goals

The final step for unifying a company is to set common goals for everyone to work towards.

These goals should break down at the organizational, team, and individual levels. Everyone should have an incentive to work hard, do their best, and drive performance at the company.

Clever managers will try to align both goals and attitudes. For instance, your company might be on a mission to make your industry more sustainable. You can create performance metrics that reflect these objectives (such as carbon emissions saved per employee, related to sales).