Franziska: Hi there and welcome back to Basic Bananas TV. Today I’d like to share three quick tips with you on how you can create a happy work environment and really enhance your team culture. Our teams and our team members are really one of the most important things, probably the most important thing in our business. We as leaders have to make an effort to make sure that they’re happy and make sure that they’re engaged and they love what they do and they come into our work or even if they’re working form their own home, that they feel like they’re looked after. I have three quick tips for you.

The first one is that I believe that we can get rid of titles. Titles such as manager, junior manager, coordinator, director, and senior and something. I don’t think it’s necessary. In our business because it categorize people and everyone is important. Crystal always says that here every single person in the business including the cleaner, our interns, is crucial to this business being successful. Titles just put people into boxes. What we do here at Basic Bananas rather than having the conventional titles, people can pick whatever they want to be. We have team happiness rock-star. We have a sales … Pat is the flamenco dude. We have legends, so browning legends. We just let the team pick when we have a new team member join. We usually say, “What do you want to be called? WHat’s your title? What would you like to be?” That’s the first, it’s quite an interesting tip. You might want to see if you can do that in your own business.

The next one is getting together. Again, there have been countless studies in research where they show that in companies where team gets together and collaborates it creates a more successful team environment. There are even companies that, on purpose, build their facilities so that people have to bump into each other. For example, the water cooler or in the kitchen or making a tea. People just have to bump into each other to show that they have conversation. I think that’s a really cool concept. What we do here at Basic Bananas is we have a lot of gatherings. We usually do one yearly team retreat where we go away somewhere together. Today for example, today’s Friday, we have a pie party. At 4:00 everyone comes together, we go to the backyard in our offices here next door and we have a bit of a Spanish pie gathering with eating and probably some margaritas. Gathering and getting the team together as much as you can, excursions. We have a field trip planned for in a few weeks where we go into other companies to see how they do things and to get inspired. That’s something that can easily facilitated.

The third one is upskilling and developing your team members. I’m a huge believer that the smarter your team members get the more you invest in them getting upskilled and the more your company will grow because the company very much depends on the people in it. If you have people in your company that are growing, your company can’t help but grow. I believe in upskilling and letting people learn new things, whatever that is. One thing that we do here … Upskilling means that they get to go to courses that are relevant to their position in your business, but even I believe in just learning anything. One thing we do here sometimes is if somebody goes out and learns something … Steph, sh just came back a minute ago from a course where she was learning something about food. Some raw cooking or something, not sure if you can call that cooking, but Raw eating. I asked her if you could maybe share some of the knowledge that you learn today with our team next week so we can learn about it.

We’ve learned things … Someone told us about breathing, how to use our breath. Just sharing people’s passions with the whole team because we always learn. Another thing you can do in terms of upskilling which is something that we are about to launch, is a book club. Making it fun, having an internal book club your company … The way that we’re going to do it and I can report back to you in a few weeks is we’re going … Each team member can read any book that they want. Then once a month they get together in our book club and one of the team members will present a book that they have just read. Not everyone has to read the same book because we don’t want to make this painful. You just read whatever book you want to read on sales or marketing or operations or teamwork, whatever it is and then you do a little presentation and we all learn from each other.

Those are the three tips getting rid of titles, getting together, and upskilling and developing. Now if you know someone who has a team that you think would benefit from this tip, maybe you can share it with them. Thanks for watching.