HOW TO CREATE A POSITIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT - TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES

Louise Ford is an Executive Director & CEO with more than 25 years of international experience in mobile payments and services, and 10 years of Executive Board experience in private owned technology companies. Recognised as a focused and driven leader who takes ownership of results, Louise employs expertise in balancing conflicting priorities, developing the right strategy, managing diverse stakeholders and implementing operations effectively. Louise is therefore the perfect person to talk about the area of how to build successful teams and foster an environment that delivers trust and great results. Louise was very clear from the outset that to be successful, one needs a successful team around you. To do that, a leader has to help each team member to be the best they can be, and as a collective be the best group that can be - the key surely to success! The path is not easy though. There will be situations where both in an individual context and from a corporate context that trust is broken. That is never good but you need to have an open perspective where the default is trust. Recommend taking the open perspective as the majority of the time being open will work. To create this freedom a leader has to be consultative, encourage questions, and have an environment where there is no fear of failure. It’s important that you try, try and try again! It’s not always possible to quantify results all the time but there has to be a nice mix between hard and soft objectives. Such as did your team feel good at the end of the day? Was it fun? A huge amount of time is spent in the work environment so it’s critical that the working time is happy and productive. Leaders need to be of an optimistic disposition and it’s important for teams to have events outside of the office to bring people together. That has been made difficult by all the lockdowns of course but there are so many different ways to get to know each other outside of the office. The event that really helped Louise bring the team together in the UK the most was actually the Bake Off, baking competitions. Simple things can be truly fun and bring people together the most!