Energized teams

BUSINESS LEADERS HAVE talked about the importance of teamwork for years, but only recently have teams in many organizations actually been empowered to make decisions independently of management. Today’s teams are expected to decide what needs to be done and then find a way to do it. Participating in this process is more complicated than working alone since you cannot unilaterally decide what to do and how to do it. The work usually takes longer than expected, and obtaining the agreement of all team members can be painstaking and difficult. Add to that the amount of wasted time that often occurs within teams and it is little wonder that for many the team experience can be frustrating.

There are many steps companies can take to energize employees to overcome the obstacles of working on a team. If the team is successful in achieving its goals, the experience is typically a very satisfying one and leads to a strong identification with and pride in the team and its accomplishments.

A Clear Purpose and Well-Defined Goals. When teams are empowered, they are naturally energizing to employees because they allow them to have a measure of control and influence over their work. However, energized teams don’t just happen; they must be developed. To function effectively and efficiently—and to keep members at a high energy level—every team needs to have clear purpose as well as established goals and rules. Every member of the team needs to know the team’s goals, his or her place in the team, and the team’s operating principles.

At Nissan Motor Manufacturing in Smyrna, Tenn., Japanese methods of employee involvement and teamwork are an integral part of creating and maintaining employee energy. Involvement Through Teamwork (ITT) teams, consisting of technicians, engineers and managers, meet weekly to discuss and develop solutions for production problems on the assembly line. In the Involvement Circles program, groups of technicians pick a project to tackle from a list of suggestions. Involvement Circles developed 225 new ideas that have been implemented at the plant, including the installation of robots and other innovations.

Creating opportunities for young employees to interact directly with an organization’s top management can be very energizing for both the employees and the managers. German computer superpower Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems formed a team of 23 talented young employees—all age 40 or under—to advise the company’s management board on the breakthrough technologies, competitive forces, and demographic trends that likely will affect business in the year 2005. Team member Stacy Welsh says, “Our role is to challenge the board. They look to us for perspective.”

Team Spirit. It takes more to create a team than designating team members and giving them an assignment. Successful teams are infused with an energizing spirit that draws the participants together into a cohesive unit and has everyone pulling together to reach a common goal. There are many ways to instill a sense of teamwork in a team, including group challenges, teambuilding exercises, and the promotion of team spirit. The ultimate result is an organization where the whole truly adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

To help build teamwork among employees, management at Collins and Aikman Textile Group in Dalton, Ga., sent employees to a special empowerment training program. At this program employees undertook a series of outdoor exercises such as scaling a 42-foot-tall wall. Teammates on the ground held safety ropes for their counterparts on the wall and directed the climbers on where to place their hands and feet. Energized by programs such as this, employees submitted more than 1,800 suggestions over a two-year period, 75 percent of which were adopted by management.

Randy Dorr, a former supervisor at MCI, tells the story of how he energized a team of telemarketers: “Our group was the worst-performing sales group at the time. I nicknamed it the “F-Troop” and told my manager that I’d make them the best-performing group in three months. He thought I was crazy. On the spur of the moment I told the group that if they got to be No. 1 group I would call their mothers and tell them how great they were. And as individuals met their performance goals, I did just that. Each employee came back to work the next day feeling like a champion. And we reached our goals of becoming No. 1 in the company.”

Teams of energized workers, not managers, set the agenda at Xerox’s annual Teamwork Day. Attended by thousands of employees at several major Xerox facilities, including the company’s headquarters in Stamford, Conn., and broadcast to other Xerox offices worldwide via satellite, Teamwork Day is an opportunity for Xerox employee quality teams to get their stories out to their co-workers. Recent teams diverted 6,500 tons of waste from a landfill through their recycling program and introduced an exercise program that reduced on-the-job injuries by 71 percent.

Team Initiative. Just as new challenges can energize an individual employee, teams of employees can be motivated when they take the responsibility to initiate a new task or solve a long-standing problem. As the members of a team work together they develop relationships with one another and build an energized and cohesive unit that can pull together to meet almost any challenge. For the members of the team, going above and beyond the call of duty becomes routine, instead of an isolated event.

At electronics manufacturer Motorola all employees are expected to play key roles in the management of the firm. Says Motorola Vice President Rick Chandler, “My workers are my managers, whether they’re in purchasing or in production. So I have 1,000 managers. I have more managers than anybody else I ever met in my life. They determine when and how they should have a team, who goes in and who goes out.”

At the Tennant Company, a manufacturer of flow maintenance products and equipment, engineers devised a $100,000 system to streamline a particular welding operation. When management decided that the system was too expensive, a small group of welders tackled the problem and devised an overhead monorail system out of I-beams from a local junkyard for less than $2,000. The system saved more than $29,000 in production time and storage space, and the team of welders was energized by the initiative they had taken to solve the problem.

Team Suggestions. Although suggestions from individuals are very important to an organization, teams of employees can take on much larger problems than any one employee can. When Equitable Insurance CEO Dick Jenrette needed to reduce annual operating costs by $100 million, he called key employees into a room and asked them how to do it. Within a couple of days, the employees made suggestions that resulted in a reduction of $162 million.

GE Mobile Communications introduced the concept of Win Teams to its plant in Lynchburg, Va. The teams, made up of volunteer employees, were encouraged to make any suggestions for improvements that stayed within company safety and quality standards, and then to budget for them as they saw fit—all without management approval. The 36 Win Teams generated 1,164 new suggestions in the first year, resulting in $7.1 million in savings to the company.

At many firms, no-show and employees on sick leave cost the company dearly. At United Airlines a special team of employees chartered to consider the employee dependability problem recommended that the company be more flexible in allowing employees to swap assignments with one another. As a result, sick time was down 17 percent in 1995, resulting in a savings of $18.2 million. Workers’ compensation claims have also fallen 17 percent, and employee grievances have been dramatically reduced.

The problem with many suggestion programs is that employee enthusiasm drops quickly, and along with this drop comes a reduction in the number and quality of suggestions. Instead of being an ongoing program like those found in many organizations, the “Brainstorm” program at First Maryland Bancorp in Baltimore, Md., was specifically designed to last 12 weeks. The committees formed to review employee suggestions were encouraged to decide on them within seven days of their submission. By limiting the program to 12 weeks, the bank was able to maintain enthusiasm throughout and to ensure generation of high-quality programs.

Employees were encouraged to get together teams to come up with ideas for increasing revenues or decreasing expenses. Team members investigated the potential improvements and developed quantitative justifications for supporting their assessments. To be accepted by the Brainstorm program, each suggestion had to be accompanied by a detailed cost/benefit analysis showing how much money was likely to be saved if the idea was implemented.

Based on employee suggestions, First Maryland came up with more efficient ways to route telecommunications circuits, eliminate the distribution of large computer-generated reports to employees who no longer had use for them, and reduce maintenance costs on computer equipment at branch banks. Why was the program a success?

1. Top management agreed to support the program and the suggestions that came out of it. This is a key factor in any employee suggestion program, because if workers think management is indifferent, the program will quickly lose credibility and employee support.

2. The program had a big kickoff. First Maryland CEO Charles W. Cole recorded a personal video message communicating his commitment and participated in numerous meetings to introduce the effort. He also made it clear that no employee would be penalized as a result of suggestions he or she made.

3. Program coordinators, leaders of suggestions teams, and members of the suggestions evaluation committee were all given training before the program was rolled out.

4. Employees were given rewards for their suggestions.

With a payoff roughly eight times greater than the amount invested, the program was a tremendous success financially. However, according to First Maryland Vice President Brian King, the program would have been considered a success even if employees had not come up with any suggestions. Why? Because it taught employees the cost of doing business and they began to make better decisions about how to spend the company’s resources. In addition, employees became more entrepreneurial, more creative, and more aware of the company’s bottom line.

Self-Managed Work Teams. Imagine a workplace where all employees manage themselves. A place where employees take responsibility for carrying out their duties efficiently and on time, set their own schedules, hire and fire co-workers, and determine their own pay rate. A place where employees are energized by the freedom of working as though the business belonged to them. Sound like a dream? It shouldn’t. Self-managed teams at Published Image, a printing firm in Boston, Mass., halted chronically high employee turnover and increased the company’s profit margin from 3 percent to 20 percent by setting their own work schedules, preparing their own budgets, and setting up their own reward systems.

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Managers can energize team members—and teach them important self-management skills—when they avoid the temptation to solve their problems for them. When a work team at XEL, a telecommunications equipment manufacturer located near Denver, Colo., approached manager John Puckett to intervene in an employee dispute, it took a conscious effort on his part to resist doing what he had always done. Says Puckett, “I almost got sucked into solving their problem. Then I realized this wasn’t my problem. So, I went back to them and said, ‘Look, this is part of the team’s responsibility. You don’t have the option of not working it out.’“

At Penn Parking, a parking garage management firm in Baltimore, Md., employees are allowed to decide for themselves who works when. Management assigns two people for every shift (when only one is needed). It is entirely up to the pair to decide who takes which days. Absenteeism and turnover are down because employees set their own schedules and are willing to cover for their partners when they know that the favor will be returned.

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In many ways, self-managing work teams function as energized microbusinesses. At spice giant McCormick & Company, employee teams draw up their own budgets and make other decisions that directly affect their jobs. Team leader Gregg Black says, “All the responsibilities for the business are brought down to my level and even to the people who work for me. It’s like we’re entrepreneurs running our own business. It’s our own cookie shop and we can control the waste, or how much time we spend working on a certain project.”

When hierarchies are broken down, employees often become more productive. At design firm IDEO Product Development in Palo Alto, Calif., there are no bosses or job titles. All work is done by teams that form and disband—after weeks or months—when projects begin and end. As a result of the freedom employees enjoy and their creativity, IDEO has become one of the most respected firms in the industry.

ACCORDING TO A STUDY by management expert Bob Culver, empowered teams are teams that (1) make the most of decisions that influence team success, (2) choose their own leaders, (3) add or remove members when necessary, (4) set their own goals and commitment, (5) define and perform much of their own training, and (6) are rewarded as a team. As businesses use teams more and more, management must find ways to energize team members to put forth their best efforts and to be motivated to work as a cohesive unit. As the old saying goes, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Give employees what they need to be a good team member—empowerment, team spirit, well-defined goals, the opportunity to make suggestions—and you will create teams that are effective, efficient, and energized. ■

Bob Nelson is founder of Nelson Motivation Inc. in San Diego, Calif., and author of 1001 Ways to Energize Employees and 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, both by Workman Publishing, and co-author of Managing For Dummies and Consulting For Dummies, both by IDG Books Worldwide. He may be reached at 800/575-5521, via e-mail at [email protected], or through his Web site at www.nelson-motivation.com.