What is a Workplace Team?

For any company to succeed and scale today, their business requires much more than just attention and prioritization of their bottom line.

An employee’s experience in the workplace—from office design and daily benefits like free coffee, to formalized feedback and demands for transparency—is increasingly necessary to hire and retain top-talent.

This isn’t news: individuals expect more and employers understand the gravity of workplace experience. However, the most vital component to cultivating, budgeting for, and executing workplace experience remains underrepresented.

Who is responsible for such a massive, ever-evolving, multi-dimensional undertaking? 

The Workplace Team.

Who is on a Workplace Team?

A ‘Workplace Team’ refers to the person or people responsible for operating an office (or offices). The roles that comprise a Workplace Team vary from company to company: Office Manager, Administrative Assistant, Operations Officer, People & Culture Operator, IT Manager, etc., but the foundation of those roles are all to support the workplace.

If you’re a team of one, you should still use the term Workplace Team! It may seem silly or unnecessary, but in reality, if the company you work for wants to scale, the responsibilities you have will escalate, deepen, and become more complex. If you don’t already need another person on your team, you soon will! Using the term Workplace Team denotes that there is room (and more roles!) for other, new hires to fill and sets an expectation for your coworkers.

Formalizing your Workplace Team

Formalizing the term ‘Workplace Team’ is an important step to elevating your work and underscoring your integral role in creating and sustaining an effective business.

The most obvious way to formalize your Workplace Team is to rebrand! Start with proposing a formal name change to whoever you report to. Update your LinkedIn, email signature, and org chart with the new name.

The next, and possibly most difficult step, is updating your coworkers. Craft a message for either Slack or email (or both!). If you’re unsure of how to explain the importance of the change, take the rebrand a step further and include your team mission statement and/or goals for the next quarter or year.

Workplace Team Mission Statement

Including your Workplace Team mission statement will give your coworkers a deeper understanding of your work because you’re explicitly providing them with your purpose.

If you don’t have a mission statement, start by brainstorming every aspect of your work: from the physical workplace to the cultural and experiential. Answer the following questions:

What differentiates your office from other companies’ workplaces? 

How would the people in your office describe the employee experience/culture?

How do your employees feel in your office?

Ideal state: what would your office look like and feel like if you had unlimited resources?

Once you’ve answered these questions, start to prioritize the most important pieces and use them to write your mission statement. It’s a good practice to use an action verb to start, but feel free to write the sentence in whatever way feels right for your workplace! (e.g. Managed by Q’s Workplace Team mission statement is to provide a productive and inclusive environment…)

Try to be brief. A mission statement will never capture the nuance and variety of your work, but instead functions to help guide you in your role, help others understand your purpose, and make you or your team feel more fulfilled and impactful. 

Language is a powerful tool for helping your or your team focus and remind others that the work you do is important. As a member (or the only member) of your company’s Workplace Team, your success directly impacts every employee’s experience, their productivity, and ultimately the business’ health and sustainability. You deserve a title that truly represents your influence.