Real Teamwork, Tremendous Results

We talk about teamwork all the time – we give it much lip service but we infrequently achieve any prolonged commitment to a team effort in our small businesses. We all have a basic understanding about how valuable teamwork is – employees working together to achieve a goal. Teamwork is a great concept that delivers better results, happier employees and a successful company, but it’s extremely difficult to achieve.

You need to know how to make it happen, the critical components. Understand that creating a successful team-run business that will achieve the best possible results requires a significant management effort to create and implement a team development and support plan.

The first objective is to create the teams. The teams should be built around similar activities, for example: machine shop, service department, sales, office pool or drivers, etc.  If possible, if there are enough employees having more than one team within a specific activity, allowing for competition is a tremendously successful strategy. You can expand the definition as broadly or as narrowly as you choose. The objective is to have at least three employees on a team and the team identified by a uniform activity that everyone on the team does.

The tougher part is to define measurable production and quality objectives that are profitable to the company but low enough to be easily achieved with a reasonable effort and commitment and possible to be exceeded with extra effort. The extra effort is, of course, rewarded with extra cash – meaningful rewards that are worth fighting for to achieve.

The magic is in rewarding the employees with incentives for achieving identified levels of team success with the potential for them to earn more the more they produce. Clearly, there are guidelines, company and operational rules and well-defined procedures used to deliver the product or service to the customer and these standards must be achieved or exceeded at all times. This is the basic requirement of the team system: To receive the incentive reward, one must maintain quality control and company standards. The team  must not ever sacrifice quality or standards for increased production.

Your employees will soon learn that they will do better, produce more, and thus earn more if they work together, train one another and generally upgrade everyone on the team as much as possible and work unselfishly together as a team. No one individual is ever rewarded, the entire team is rewarded as a result of the team achieving or exceeding stated goals.

Honor the team. Provide T-shirts, coffee mugs, caps or what have you. At least some item of clothing should be provided, custom printed with team names. Have occasional team activities, buy the team pizza for lunch, arrange for team seminars and training. Build team spirit, team pride and commitment between the team members and they will become family and emerge as a real team. They will care for each other and thus trust each other and be prepared to protect each other and will work together for a common goal – greater productivity and higher quality. It is attainable.

Honoring the team within the company is very important and brings great rewards to the individual, the team and the company. Find ways to demonstrate respect and honor the teams’ successes – it’s more important than money. If possible, honoring the team via occasional local press releases creates enormous pride and expands and deepens the relationship between the individuals, the team and the company.

Achieving more than what they think they can do is the dividend a successful team program delivers. It’s hard work but well worth the effort.