Team building is vital to productivity

In my current position one of my informal responsibilities is to try to maintain and increase employee morale. My organization believes that there is a correlation between between high employee morale and work productivity, especially in light of some of their challenging work situations. Most of our employees work individually as representatives of our company. They are matrixed as part of a project team normally comprised of many different companies brought together to work on a specific set of customer challenges. As employees working individually for long periods of time we like to ensure that they still feel a part of our organization. I make significant efforts to reach out and contact all the employees on a weekly basis, attempt group outings to professional sporting events, lunches, happy hours etc.. this is often more challenging than it sounds because we have employees from different backgrounds and experiences and finding a common activity that will build team cohesion is daunting. I still find myself meeting some employees one on one because they don't enjoy group setting's (developers are a tricky bunch). I'm soliciting input and attempting to find commonality amongst the group to see what the best types of team building activities are that will be more inclusive.

Part of ensuring that our employees are content with our organization has two purposes: one, to ensure that they remain productive and contributing members of their project team and two, to continue to maintain low employee turnover. It would probably be a poor idea to allow an unhappy employee to remain unhappy while working with teammates from several other companies. One of the hurdles in maintaining morale is that our company can only really impact our employees while the other matrixed teammates are left to hope that the Project Lead will spend time trying to build team cohesion - this often doesn't occur and we end up with the have and have-not's. Inevitably our employees are requested to remain humble and ensure that they continue to serve the clients while building inroads and collaborating with their teammates.

As much time as I spend attempting to build unity, communication and cohesion amongst our matrixed employees I have a serious challenge ahead of me with my own new team. There is disconnect between the client and the Project Team due to some avoidable confrontations in the last few months. As a new member I have the unenviable task of not only selling myself as a valuable, contributing teammate but to also try to repair this fractured relationship with the client and the team. Fortunately I came to the team with a previous rapport with both the client and members of the Project Team. I think that if I remain communicative with both sides and show my willingness to learn, listen and actively contribute to the development of the system I can hopefully ingratiate myself to both groups and repair the damage.