How good team relationships lead to better staff satisfaction
Retaining staff is crucial for any workplace. Keeping employees engaged, supported, and motivated helps build a stronger, more productive team.
While staff retention has always been important for managers and companies, looking for effective ways to keep talent can be tricky.
While there are many factors to achieving worker satisfaction, one that is often overlooked – but is still incredibly important – is good workplace relationships.
Research for SEEK shows that 68% of workers consider it very or extremely important to feel connected to their colleagues and workmates.
Recognition from a manager or organisation is also worth a lot, with 75% of respondents saying it helps them feel more valued as an employee. When they receive this recognition, 74% said they felt more satisfied with their jobs and 66% said it drives them to stay longer at their jobs.
By nurturing strong, healthy and impactful workplace relationships – ensuring your employee understands their true value – you can achieve better retention rates as a manager or workplace leader.
The benefits of building strong working relationships
Fostering good relationships with your employees can yield tangible benefits for your workplace. This might include higher levels of employee engagement, increased productivity, better workplace collaboration and a generally positive view of your organisation.
As Tanya Bateman, a seasoned Human Resources leader, explains, good relationships are an integral base layer for building not only happy but also successful teams.
“Healthy relationships with staff are invaluable,” she says. “They’re a foundational baseline for trust, openness and engagement, and set the pathway for open dialogue, creativity, and going above and beyond.”
Michelle Pizer, Organisational Psychologist, explains that the reason strong relationships in the workplace are so impactful is because we, as humans, place great value on genuine connections.
“Strained relationships force you to spend energy on things that aren't the work at hand,” says Pizer. “You're calculating whether to speak up or stay quiet. Whether that comment in the meeting was pointed or you're being oversensitive. And this constant internal negotiation is exhausting.”
“That’s why having strong relationships around you is so impactful. They eliminate that calculation. When you trust the people around you, you can focus on the actual problems you're trying to solve rather than managing interpersonal dynamics.”
“Strong relationships meet fundamental psychological needs: to be seen as competent, to have your judgment respected, and to know someone will back you when things get difficult.”
These elements, Pizer says, are the backbone of a thriving peer relationship, which often counts just as much towards job satisfaction as salaries do.
How to build good working relationships with your employees
There’s no ‘quick-win’ approach to fostering strong relationships at work. Instead, it takes consistent effort coupled with a level of openness and vulnerability to forge strong – and long-lasting – relationships.
Pizer has a few key suggestions for creating fulfilling and satisfying workplace relationships:
“Strong relationships at work are built on trust. [Managers must] means what they say, and [employees need confidence] that they won’t be punished for telling the truth,” she says. When employees feel like a manager believes in them. They speak more freely and take initiative instead of waiting for approval.
“Trust also depends on fairness. Not every decision can be shared, but when a change directly affects someone’s work, it’s better to involve them. If not, you risk breeding resentment,” explains Pizer. “Explain the constraint, ask what they see, and take what they say seriously. People know the difference between being informed and being consulted.”
“Accountability fits here too. When there’s trust, you can talk about performance without it turning personal.”
Relationship building for modern workplaces
Many workplaces are still navigating the challenges of building relationships over computer screens. Whether your team is geographically diverse, entirely remote or working within a hybrid work structure, it can be difficult to connect with people you don’t physically see every day.
For Bateman, it’s imperative to create touchpoints that go outside the usual work-related ones to combat these barriers.
“Create opportunities to have casual conversations,” she advises. “It may feel a little awkward initially, but it’s well worth the investment.
Get to know people more. Find out what delights them, bugs them and makes them laugh. Listen to what they are saying, using both verbal and non-verbal cues. Going beyond just talking about work will help build and keep relationships strong. It takes effort, but it’s well worth it.”
As well as making time for non-work-related chat, it’s important to factor in the significant impact that the last few years have had, Read says. She explains that we can’t expect work relationships to be the same as they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We need to acknowledge that the last two years have changed the way many of us think, feel and behave, so returning to work does not mean a return to where employees were emotionally, psychologically, financially or relationally,” she says.
How to deal with difficult working relationships
Even with good intentions in mind, it can still be challenging to build and maintain strong working relationships with employees.
When difficult working relationships do crop up, Bateman says, it’s important to keep an empathetic outlook and understand why it may be occurring.
“A good starting point is to consider the underlying reasons for conflict,” she says.
“Sometimes it involves some reflection and unpacking of the issues. From there, starting a dialogue and really listening to understand and share perspectives and address the issues at hand can transform relationships. Furthermore, diversity of thought and openness to different viewpoints, some vulnerability and curiosity can cut through the noise to innovate and practical solutionsfor problem solving and decision making.”
As well as understanding the ‘why’ behind a conflict, tackling the issues that caused it head on – rather than allowing problems to get worse – is paramount, Pizer says.
“The first move is recognising what kind of conflict you're actually in. Some conflicts are negotiations... Other conflicts are failures of understanding.”
“A lot of workplace conflict is the second kind, but we treat it like the first... That approach hardens the conflict instead of resolving it.”
To resolve conflict, Pizer recommends naming the pressure without assigning blame to the other party, avoid making it about character and instead focus on the circumstances of the conflict, and assume good intent from the other party.
“When you can identify what's driving the behavior without making it personal, you create space for the other person to see it too,” says Pizer. If both “people are defending their version of who's right rather than addressing the actual problem”, then the conflict is unlikely to get solved.
Sometimes it's better to address difficult exchanges in a timely, respectful and direct manner.
Initiating a difficult conversation by expressing interest in wanting to better understand the other person's challenges or grievances, while also expressing a desire to share your own needs, is at the core of conflict resolution.
While establishing and maintaining work relationships takes time and effort – especially in this new work landscape – the benefits of doing so are well worth it, and can mean the difference between retaining top talent for years to come, or losing them to a competitive market.
Source: Independent research conducted by Nature of behalf of SEEK, interviewing 4,800 Australians annually. Published December 2025.