Rapport Building - An Ice Breaker in Work Culture

chillibreeze writer — Julie Jeyarathi

The new catch phrase in organizations is “rapport building”. Despite substantial research suggesting the benefits of adopting rapport building, employers and management often abandon it because of the overwhelming resistance to collaboration. However, the encouraging factor is that enterprises that formerly decided to administer their employees with traditional management concepts, are now commissioning a strategic analysis of their current HR processes to maintain good rapport so they could break rigidity in their workforce. Rapport building is used as one of the ice breaking tools to ease the flow of work. So what exactly is rapport building?

According to Wikipedia, rapport building refers to techniques, practices, programs, and processes incorporated in an organization to develop a good rapport between individuals. There are a number of techniques that are supposed to be beneficial in building rapport such as: matching your body language (i.e., posture, gesture, and so forth); maintaining eye contact; and matching breathing rhythm.

In layman’s terms, “rapport” is the process of entering another person's model of the world. This establishes trust and unquestionable acceptance of suggestions. People in deep rapport usually tend to have matching body movements, breathing patterns, tonality, and key phrases. People who exhibit good rapport generally think and act alike.

This is exactly what organizations are targeting among colleagues and peers to augment the cumulative feat of the workforce. Tickle-Degnen and Rosenthal (1990) identified three components in the structure of rapport – mutual attentiveness [“feeling as one”], positivity [“mutual friendliness and caring”] and coordination [“predictability and equilibrium”]. These components imply that rapport building can achieve: regard for the dignity of the employee and the sensitivities of human beings, complete understanding of the realities of business, embracing optimization and improvement, keys to motivation and commitment and effective communication.

But to facilitate the above, a firm has to pursue the five basic ice breaking tips of rapport building:

1. Establish a common ground
2. Listen and show concern
3. Use humor
4. Keep a positive attitude
5. Treat colleagues like family

Quite often, organizations adopting “Rapport Building Approaches” focus their strategies on retention of staff, performance management, team coordination and integration via: induction procedures to assure fresher’s satisfaction, measures resolving and empathizing employee grievance, informal and formal meetings for a positive, progressive and high performance feats, social events/outings to build relationships among colleagues, and behavioural training programs to ensure discipline in work culture.

The common thought is that recruits of the same grade gel better than those belonging to different ranks. Nevertheless, a superior can sharpen rapport or break the ice by taking a genuine interest in getting to know what's important. To begin with, the boss can start to understand them rather than expecting them to understand him first. Checklist:

• Pick up on the key words, favourite phrases, jargons and lingos and build these subtly into conversations.
• Notice how they like to handle information. Do they like lots of details or just the big picture?
• Look out for their intention — their underlying aim — rather than what they do or say. They may not always get it right, but appreciate their initiative.
• Adopt a similar stance to them in terms of body language, gestures, voice tone and speed.
• Respect their time, energy, favourite people and money. They will be important resources for them.

To wrap up, a good rapport creates high employee morale and a positive organizational climate which in turn would not only promote better productivity but also pave way for higher levels of job satisfaction. This is of high importance in today’s competitive market place where attrition is one of the key issues. Rapport building aids in retaining the quality and quantity of labor. Indeed, a healthy relationship entails a healthy workforce!

 

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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in April, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

 

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Finding the Spirit at the Office

 

 

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—About our writer: Julie Sella Jeyarathi is an MA(Public Admin), MBA(HR) with 8 years of extensive work experience in managing, coordinating and motivating teams to evolve through constant innovation towards achieving organizational goals. Currently, she heads the admin wing at Eolas Consultancy Private Limited (Chennai), a global technology consultancy and solutions firm. She does ad hoc copy assistance for Insurance, Microfinance, Micro insurance consultants. Julie has flair in scripting web contents, social articles and children fables.

 

 

 

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