You are likely pleased at the amount of work your employees accomplished over recent weeks during remote work. In a recent webinar with HR leaders, over 90% of those in the webinar said their people got more done than usual when working at home during March and April, and many employees worked longer hours! That is great news and says a lot for the people you hired and trained.
Even so, during this time of transition do you privately want to make some changes? Perhaps changes you had envisioned long ago? Even though your remote employees got more done, are you still hoping for more mutual accountability, process improvement, or innovation? If they are adjusting well to remote work, this may be the perfect time to allow that work group to become a high performing team whether they come back to the workplace or remain virtual.
In a recent article, I highlighted 5 things that may be keeping your work groups or teams from becoming high performing. The first obstacle I mentioned was related to structure. Most of the things we call “teams” in our organizations are actually departmental work groups. If your goal is process improvement or innovation, there are things you can do to develop a team, and the first is to look beyond the department. Most departments fall into a vertical hierarchy, with people who perform closely related functions grouped together in a work group. The challenge is that most processes flow horizontally through the vertical organization. This horizontal process flow through a vertical organization results in many voids, overlaps and redundancies. If you want improvement or innovation, you overcome this challenge by looking beyond your departmental group.
To make a departmental work group into a team, you want the direct input and participation from upstream and downstream departments—from other parts of the process. Have you ever experienced a “process improvement” made by a different department that actually made the process worse for your department? That is an excellent example of why teams need more cross-functional participation to make lasting improvement. You’ll want to make your teams more cross functional.
I’ve seen organizations do several things that work. One approach is to keep the departmental “membership,” but apply “next operation as customer” principles. In this structure, each department develops a very clear understanding of all its internal customers’ requirements and focuses on meeting or exceeding those requirements. This entails active participation of members from other departments, while still maintaining a predominantly departmental structure to the team membership. Can you imagine if every department in your organization acted as if the next operations were the customers? It can work well but can be complicated if you have large numbers of business processes.
More often, organizations create truly cross functional teams. These teams may be temporary or permanent. Some of these are cross-functional work teams whose former departmental work group members actually become part of a cross functional team. The team is formulated and members are assigned by looking at the true interdependencies in the process. Imagine you have a process of making cracker products. Departments may be receiving, blending, laminating, baking, packaging, and shipping. In the cross functional work team, you may take a process flow or a production line and form teams around that process with one or more teams per shift. This example was implemented at a location in North Carolina, and the teams were permanent cross functional improvement “work teams.”
Or perhaps you want more fluid, temporary improvement teams, each one focused on a particular improvement or innovation goal. You’d structure similarly but you’d give each a specific, focused purpose or “performance challenge.”
There is no one right way of doing this. One governmental agency I worked with had three different divisions. Each division formed its team structures very differently, but they all were successful through careful thought and planning. They planned and implemented their teams to allow for true, lasting improvement.
In a South Carolina manufacturing location, the leadership group’s plan kept their departmental work groups for daily tasks, but had a cross functional team of production associates over each shift, making daily decisions determining which work groups might “borrow” members from other work groups because of how the machines were going to need tending through the shift.
The point is, there are many ways of doing this, and your organization can create its best structures. For help or discussion, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or through LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/transformingorganizations/.
In my next article, I’ll talk more about performance challenges because the purpose you give each team can create an environment for teaming—or can undermine it.
Additional future articles will discuss:
• the need for “Team Basics” build team performance
• the kinds of meetings teams needed to build team excellence
• what teams need from leadership
Leave a Reply