Build Stronger Workplace Relationships and Collaboration
Work slows down when people quietly avoid each other. Requests go unanswered, two departments stop cooperating, and a manager ends up carrying messages between colleagues who sit ten feet apart. This programme teaches employees how to build working relationships, ask for what they need and handle differences without it turning personal.
What is interpersonal skills?
Interpersonal skills are the behaviours people use to work with each other: building working relationships, cooperating across teams, earning trust, giving and receiving feedback, and handling disagreement without damage. GullyHR's interpersonal skills training is a customised workshop programme for employees, team leaders and managers in Indian startups and small and medium businesses whose work depends on other people's cooperation.
When businesses ask us for this
- Two departments have stopped talking to each other, and every request between them now comes to you to be passed on.
- A technically strong employee is quietly avoided by colleagues, and nobody has ever told the person why.
- Feedback in your business happens once a year in the appraisal, and it lands badly because the employee is hearing it for the first time.
- A small disagreement about scope or credit becomes a long WhatsApp trail and reaches you weeks later as a complaint.
- New joiners take months to become useful because they do not know who to ask, and nobody in the team offers.
- Three capable seniors put on the same project lose days to email confusion and rework that a ten-minute conversation would have prevented.
- Client-facing employees are polite but transactional, so the customer's real concern goes unheard until it arrives as an escalation.
- A team leader tells you everything is fine, and the exit interviews from that team talk about the people rather than the work.
What the work covers
GullyHR designs and runs the programme; your workplace supplies the material it works on. We hold a needs discussion with you and the managers concerned, gather real situations from your teams, write the exercises and role plays around them, facilitate the sessions and report back on what we observed. You nominate the cohort, release participants for the full session, allow candid input while situations are being gathered, and ask about the action plans afterwards. It runs as a training programme against an outline you approve before delivery, for a single cohort or across several.
Working relationships are built deliberately, not left to chemistry.
How to open a working relationship with a colleague you did not choose, what to invest in it early, how to keep it usable when you need each other only occasionally, and how to restart one that has gone cold.
Working across departments becomes a skill rather than a favour.
Making a request another team can actually act on, agreeing what finished looks like and by when, keeping the other side informed while the work is running, and handling the moment when your priority is not theirs.
Every team member knows what the team needs from them.
Contributing in a meeting without taking it over, raising a concern to the team instead of around it, covering for a colleague without keeping score, and owning a shared miss rather than locating the person responsible.
Trust is the result of small actions repeated.
Doing what you said by when you said, saying early when you cannot, keeping what was told to you in confidence, and being straight about your own mistakes. Participants also work on what rebuilding takes once trust has been broken.
Feedback is offered as an observation, not a verdict.
Describing behaviour and its effect instead of labelling the person, choosing the moment and the setting, and asking colleagues for feedback on your own work. Receiving is practised as hard as giving: hearing something uncomfortable without defending or going silent.
Differences get worked through before they harden.
Naming a difference plainly, separating what someone wants from why they want it, staying with the issue as the temperature rises, and knowing when a matter should go to a manager. Includes differences of working style, seniority, language and age in one team.
Understanding the other person changes the conversation.
Listening for what a colleague or a customer is actually asking for, checking your reading of it instead of assuming, responding to the concern sitting behind the request, and holding a boundary while still being decent about it.
Contacts inside and outside the company are maintained on purpose.
Introducing yourself and your work in a way people remember, staying in touch with useful contacts beyond your immediate team, asking a contact for help without awkwardness, and representing the company at a client meeting or an industry event.
How it runs
Needs discussion
A conversation with you and the managers concerned about which relationships are failing and where: between two departments, inside one team, or with customers. This decides what the programme works on and what it leaves out.
Situation gathering
Short conversations with a few managers and prospective participants to collect actual situations from your workplace — the request that never gets answered, the handover that gets argued about. These are de-identified and become the exercise material.
Behaviour self-check
Participants complete a short interpersonal behaviour self-assessment before the programme. Where you want it, the reporting manager rates the same behaviours, and the gap between the two views is used to weight the modules.
Programme design and your sign-off
Modules are chosen and sequenced, cohort size and mix are fixed, and the role plays are written against your situations. You approve the outline before anything is delivered.
Facilitated session
Each module opens with a short input and moves quickly into discussion and structured practice in pairs and small groups, using the situations gathered from your workplace rather than textbook cases.
Practice with observed feedback
Participants rehearse the harder behaviours — giving difficult feedback, raising a disagreement with a senior colleague — and receive feedback from the facilitator and their peers in the room, then run the same conversation again.
Individual action plan
Each participant writes down two or three named relationships or recurring situations they will handle differently, what they will do and by when. The plan leaves the room with them.
Manager briefing
Reporting managers receive a short brief on what the cohort practised and what to look for at work, so the new behaviour is noticed and asked about instead of fading in the first fortnight.
Reinforcement
After an interval you agree, a follow-up clinic where participants bring what happened when they tried it — what worked, where they went back to the old habit — and practise the situations that are still hard.
Review with management
A written summary for you: participation, movement on the self-assessment, participant feedback and the situations that kept recurring across the cohort, with a recommendation on what to do next.
What you receive
- A programme outline for your sign-off, listing the modules, their sequence, the cohort composition and the workplace situations each exercise is built on.
- A participant workbook covering relationships, collaboration requests, teamwork, trust, feedback, differences, empathy and networking, with the frameworks used in the session.
- Role play and case material written from your own workplace situations and de-identified before use.
- An interpersonal behaviour self-assessment, issued before the programme and again after it, with an optional manager view of the same behaviours.
- A feedback conversation format participants can keep at their desk: the observation, its effect, the request.
- A written individual action plan for each participant, with a copy for the reporting manager where you want that.
- A manager brief describing what the cohort practised and what to reinforce in the weeks that follow.
- A programme report for management covering attendance, participant feedback, self-assessment movement and the recurring situations observed, with a recommendation.
Who it is for
- Businesses past the stage where everyone sits in one room, where work now moves between departments, shifts or locations and depends on people cooperating without the founder in the middle.
- Teams assembled quickly during a growth phase, where colleagues were hired within months of each other and have no shared way of working yet.
- Employees promoted for technical strength who now depend on colleagues they cannot instruct, such as project leads, quality heads and senior engineers.
- Cross-functional and client-facing roles where one team's output is another team's input: sales and delivery, production and quality, accounts and operations.
- Mixed workplaces where seniority, region, language and generation sit in the same team, and a small misreading turns into avoidance.
- Companies where a specific event prompted the enquiry: a complaint between departments, an appraisal cycle where the same feedback appeared on several forms, or an exit that was about the team rather than the job.
Why GullyHR.
Interpersonal behaviour rarely fails on its own. People avoid each other because two roles overlap, because a handover was never defined, or because feedback has nowhere to happen. GullyHR trains the behaviour and can also repair what sits underneath it: role clarity, the handover, the review conversation. Where a workshop shows the real problem is structural, we say so rather than sell you another session.
What changes
- Employees ask other teams for what they need in a way that gets acted on, instead of routing every request through you.
- Feedback starts happening between colleagues during the year, so the appraisal is no longer the first time anything is said.
- Disagreements about priority, scope or credit get settled at the level where they began.
- A new joiner is brought into the team by the team, rather than left to work out who to approach.
- Managers see a common standard of working behaviour across departments, because the same people practised it in the same room.
- Customer conversations move past politeness to the concern the customer actually raised.
Who does what
| Activity | GullyHR | Your team |
|---|---|---|
| Deciding what the programme should fix | Runs the needs discussion with you and the managers concerned, and proposes which modules to include and how deeply to work each one. | Says plainly where cooperation is failing today, which teams are affected and what has already been tried. |
| Collecting workplace situations for the exercises | Holds short conversations with a few managers and participants, and rewrites what is said into de-identified role plays and cases. | Makes those people available and allows candid input, on the understanding that nothing said is reported back as a complaint. |
| Running the session | Facilitates the programme, sets up and observes the practice, and gives each participant feedback in the room. | Nominates the cohort, releases participants for the whole session and provides the room or the online arrangement. |
| Making the behaviour hold afterwards | Briefs the reporting managers, runs the reinforcement clinic and reports on what changed and what did not. | Asks about the action plans in normal one-to-ones and tells us what is actually being seen at work. |
Where the software fits
Where you use the GullyHR platform, the administrative side of the programme sits in the learning and development module: nominations and cohorts, attendance recorded against each employee record, the self-assessment issued and collected as a form, participant feedback held in one place, and the completed programme kept on the employee's learning history so it is visible at appraisal time. The facilitation itself is done by a person, in a room or online. If you run a different HR system, the same records are handed over in a format you can import.
Ways to engage us
- Interpersonal skills workshop
- One customised workshop for a single cohort, built on situations gathered from your workplace, with the self-assessment, the individual action plans and a manager brief.
- Multi-cohort programme
- The same programme run for several cohorts across departments, shifts or locations, so colleagues who have to work together are working from one shared standard rather than from different rooms.
- Learning journey with reinforcement
- The workshop followed by practice clinics at intervals you set, manager check-ins between them, and a closing review with management on what changed at work.
- Intact team intervention
- The programme run for one team that already has to work together, with the reporting manager in the room and the team's own live situations as the material, rather than a mixed nomination list.
Questions we are asked
Eight subject areas: building working relationships, collaborating across departments, teamwork, trust, giving and receiving feedback, managing differences, empathy and professional networking. Each is taught through short input and structured practice on situations gathered from your workplace, and each participant leaves with a written action plan.
Customisation is how it is built. Before delivery we speak to a few of your managers and participants and collect real situations, which are de-identified and rewritten as the role plays and cases. A factory supervisor, a hospital front desk and a software delivery team practise on different material.
Employees whose work depends on colleagues they do not control: cross-functional and client-facing staff, team leaders, and people promoted for technical strength who now have to influence rather than instruct. Mixed-department cohorts work well, because the people who must cooperate practise together.
Yes. It runs in a classroom at your premises, online, or as a mix with the practice work done face to face. Online delivery uses breakout groups for the role plays, which needs a smaller cohort and participants who can each join with a working camera.
Three ways, and you choose which apply. A short interpersonal behaviour self-assessment before and after the programme. Participant feedback on the session itself. Manager observation against the individual action plans in normal one-to-ones. The closing report brings these together with what we observed in the room.
The length follows the scope. A cohort working two or three modules needs far less time than one working all eight with reinforcement, and practice-heavy sessions cannot be compressed without becoming a lecture. We propose the length in writing after the needs discussion, so you can weigh it against how long you can release people.
Small enough that every participant gets observed practice and feedback in the room. Interpersonal skills are learned by doing them in front of someone, so a large batch turns into a talk. We recommend a cohort size at proposal stage based on your modules and the delivery format.
Communication skills training works on how a message is constructed and delivered — clarity, structure, listening, tone. Interpersonal skills training works on the relationship the message travels through: trust, cooperation, feedback and handling differences. Many businesses run communication first and interpersonal skills after it, and the two programmes can be sequenced.
It depends on what you want. A manager in the room makes the team's live situations harder to raise honestly, but it makes reinforcement afterwards far more likely. For an intact team we usually include the manager and design the exercises for that. For mixed nominations we keep reporting lines apart.
Participants receive a certificate of participation from GullyHR, and the programme is recorded against the employee's learning history where you use the GullyHR platform. It is a record of attendance and participation, not a licensed or accredited qualification, and we describe it that way.
Partly. Training helps when people have the responsibility to cooperate but not the behaviour for it. When two departments clash because roles overlap or no handover was ever agreed, that is a process and structure matter, and we will tell you if that is what we find during the needs discussion.
After the needs discussion and a short look at where cooperation is failing, GullyHR proposes in writing which modules are covered, the cohort size and number of cohorts, the delivery format, what is delivered and what your team has to do. The proposal is issued before any work begins.
Prefer to talk first? +91 80958 58589 · hello@gullyhr.com