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Culture is fundamental to the recruitment and retention of real estate agents, and a culture is only as strong as the cohesion among its members. When agents and operational team members come to an organization with varied skilled levels, backgrounds, personality types, motivational styles and goals for the future, it’s important to create immediate synergy between them.
So what are the best ways to generate genuine connection among team members? Here are some ideas:
Get collective buy-in on the team’s vision
Team cohesion starts with knowing who you are, where you’re going and why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you haven’t developed your mission, vision and values yet (or they need revisiting), start here and have all stakeholders on the team contribute to the conversation. A common goal is the easiest way to encourage alignment.
Complete your user manuals
At Livian, we have team members complete a user manual on their first day as part of the team. What are your values, your expectations, your idiosyncrasies, and your processes? Also, write down and share your strengths and weaknesses.
If team members are encouraged to vulnerably state who they are and how they work best, it removes a lot of the guesswork of getting to know new team members. It also fosters an environment of openness, vulnerability, and direct communication.
Hate the phone? Need time to process feedback? Have a family obligation every day at 4pm? Those are important pieces of information to share proactively.
Create and share your future self
The Future Self is an exercise in vision-casting the next three years of your life as it relates to these areas of fulfillment and development: business, financial, physical, social, family, and spiritual. Sharing each others’ dreams and aspirations creates a culture of deep trust and understanding.
Understand each other’s love languages
Love languages aren’t just for romantic partners; they’re also vitally important for cohesion in the workplace. If acts of service (i.e., leverage) is the best way to make an agent feel fulfilled, tapping into additional ways your ops team can provide support is the key.
If an agent’s love language is words of affirmation, ensure you never miss the chance to celebrate the individual (or their birthday or work anniversary). Knowing how each other wins and what’s important to each other helps create cohesion.
Conduct a lane exercise
Are your team members stepping on each others’ toes? Do they not know who is responsible for what? Conduct a lane exercise.
Every team member brings to the conversation what their primary focuses and responsibilities are, along with what they have ownership and autonomy over. This is a good opportunity to see overlaps and gaps and shift responsibilities to ensure everyone is aligned with their superpowers, interests, and moving in the same direction toward the organization’s collective goals.
Learn together
Start a team book club. Attend a mastermind together. Get certified in transcendental meditation. Do a paint-and-sip class or a wine tasting as a culture-building activity. When we learn together, we grow together, and growth unites us.
Celebrate celebrations publicly and cheer one another on
Create a cadence of celebrating one another. Start team meetings by asking team members to shout out someone else on the team, share a compliment or a thank you. Fostering connection starts with true appreciation and gratitude for one another, which we can and should practice daily.
Have some fun
Ask the team what type of activities they may want to do outside of the office so it’s not all work and no play. Create a team bucket list of new experiences to collect together — ax-throwing, a volunteer day, a team hike, etc. Have team members run and plan the events, so there’s team buy-in from the bottom up.
Erin McCormick Torres serves as COO for Livian at KW. She is an author, business coach, Realtor and content creator who runs the popular blog Travel Like a Local: Vermont. Connect with her on Instagram and LinkedIn.
