Hot
Topics
The Value of Work
Teams
In today's business environment we continually hear about
companies restructuring more of their organization's employees
into work teams. This includes the use of teams in white-collar
jobs as well as traditional blue-collar manufacturing jobs. You
may be asking yourself what is a work team? Why is there a current
emphasis on this approach to business and what are the benefits?
Can I use it in my business? We will answer these questions in
this article.
First of all we should develop a common understanding of a work
team. I would define a work team as follows:
"A group of people that are self-directed in efforts,
jointly accountable for their outputs, and united in working towards
a common purpose."
Let's break this definition down more and expand on the definition.
I believe that using a football team as an analogy will be helpful
in better understanding the makeup of a work team. First lets
define the characteristics of the group. Similar to the makeup
of a football team, the group will be comprised of people with
different skillsets and defined duties relevant to those skills.
Each team member has special skills but can be called upon to
perform the skills of others in certain situations. The entire
team benefits if each person is skilled in the tasks of others
as well as their own and will improve the overall effectiveness
of the team.
With respect to being "self-directed in efforts" each
football team player, when prompted, must individually exhibit
their skills to properly execute a specific play. They also have
a leader on the field - a quarterback or defensive captain - that
is skilled in perceiving a change in the opponent's actions and
empowered to signal the team members to execute another play.
In both cases above, they are being self-directed in that the
team members are making the decisions on the field.
As for the team being "jointly accountable for their outputs"
each player knows their assignment and is accountable to execute
it upon demand. If mistakes are made by even one individual, the
probability of success for the team is minimal. However, if they
all execute their tasks correctly, the chances are very good that
the team will make yardage on that play.
The last part of the statement, being "united in working
towards a common purpose", is the most important. The football
team is united in the mission of scoring more points than the
opposing team and thereby winning the contest. In order to meet
this objective, they must execute each of their individual tasks
effectively, such as blocking, running, or catching a pass, and
make the proper adjustments as the game unfolds. The proper execution
of each individual task during each play will allow the team to
gain yardage and make touchdowns. If they can execute their plays
better than their opponent it can yield the completion of their
overall group task which is to win the football game. After reviewing
the above analogy to a football team one can see how it could
be extrapolated to many different business processes.
In business situations, why would you use work teams? There are
many reasons to use teams and they are listed below:
1. Improve communication.
For example if a customer order currently must go through
three departments to complete, why not create a team with all
three functions in order to complete the order in one group? All
communications pertinent to that order will now be focused within
that one group thereby eliminating confusion and improving response
time and accuracy.
2. Reduce response time.
In performing any operation with several steps, the largest
component of the task's lead-time is often queue time or time
that the product or service is waiting in line between processing
steps. Using the same example above one can see that performing
all the operations in one group or department would save response
time because the queue time between the departments would be eliminated.
3. Reduce floorspace and WIP inventory
needs. In a production situation, there is also
a direct correlation between lead-time and inventory. Where lead-time
is reduced work-in-process (WIP) inventory is reduced proportionately.
Because team environments require less WIP inventory and the team
members tend to work in closer proximity to each other we have
seen a significant reduction in the shopfloor space required after
the teams are operational.
4. Improve quality.
Another great advantage of work teams is increased accountability.
Often a product or process has multiple departments involved in
its processing. If not captured at its source a quality problem
can be passed on to subsequent departments and eventually to the
customer. When the problem is finally discovered there are many
departments that have been involved. Therefore it is hard to get
closure on where the problem originated and, if corrected, to
have confidence that it will not reoccur. If one team performs
all the work there can be no confusion on where the accountability
lies. For all these reasons quality problems are much easier to
identify and correct in a work team environment.
5. Improve productivity.
Accountability also plays a major role in this area. If a product
or process has value added to it in many departments it is often
hard to assign cause/effect relationships to productivity problems.
In a team environment, all the value-added processing has been
added in that one area. Therefore, it is easier to measure the
performance of that group and assist them in improving the output
of their efforts. In addition, because they are self-directed
by nature, the work teams will often initiate their own efforts
to improve productivity, including self-policing the performance
of their own members, without an outside prompt from management.
6. Improve training. Another
benefit to work teams is initial training and subsequent crosstraining.
Because the members of the team work in close proximity to each
other on-the-job training can occur all day long, either directly
or indirectly. In many business environments, this is the most
cost-effective means to train personnel. Work teams are also the
best environments to implement and support Pay-for-Skill programs
that can provide financial incentives for the employee to learn
and apply more skills.
7. Reduce turnover.
Over the last several years low unemployment numbers have been
the norm for the United States. A major problem for domestic companies
has been the turnover of their skilled employees and their inability
to rehire qualified people to refill the open slots. Assuming
pay scales are adequate a team environment fulfills the higher
level or psychological needs of employees and helps retain them
in the company. In addition, as new employees come into the company
they immediately have a personal association with the small group
and feel connected to the company.
8. Develop new leaders. To
effectively manage a work team there must be someone within the
team with authority and accountability over the tasks performed.
In most cases, they are a working peer of the group and are chosen
by management because they display leadership qualities. Over
time additional individuals are identified as potential leaders
and are given opportunities to develop their leadership skills.
In turn, they will become the leaders of new work teams.
You may now be asking if teams would be useful in your business.
Also, where has our consulting group had experience in using teams
effectively? In office and administrative support situations,
we have organized product development groups made up of marketing,
engineering, financial, and manufacturing representatives that
have substantially reduced the time it took to develop and manufacture
profitable new products. Also, we have created work teams dealing
with the order filling process starting at order entry and going
through shipping the product. In the materials management area,
we have created work teams that included production planning,
purchasing, and production supervision and they managed all materials
and production scheduling for departments or product lines. In
these listed indirect functions, improved communication was the
main objective in creating the work teams. In all cases, the team
environment substantially enhanced the task performance of each
group.
In the manufacturing setting, we have created a variety of work
teams that have integrated robotic welding cells, CNC machining
centers, and other highly automated production environments. We
have successfully launched countless work teams dealing with basic
assembly processes in a variety of industries and technologies.
In addition, in complex final assembly operations, such as in
heavy equipment manufacturing and truck equipment installation,
teams were used very effectively to generate significant improvements
in all areas of performance measurement. In almost all cases,
the benefits included all eight categories listed above which
ultimately led to reduced costs and cash needs, and higher profitability
for the company.
In closing, I have great confidence that work teams work well
in almost all office, distribution, and manufacturing environments.
The only constraint to using them effectively is our own creativity
and self-imposed limitations. The bottom line is that the benefits
to the organization are too great to ignore implementing these
concepts. Future Hot Topics articles
will provide more specific details about how these teams integrate
into the business environment.
