Making teamwork work.

• Author: Nelson, Bob
• Position: Rewarding Employes - Brief Article

While business leaders have talked about the importance of teamwork for years, teams, in many organizations, have only recently 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. The work usually takes longer than expected, and obtaining agreement of all team members can be painstaking and difficult.

But, often the positives outweigh the negatives. Employees who participate on teams may become motivated by the experience to find ways to improve company systems and processes, solve problems or plan for opportunities.

There are a variety of ways to energize employees through the use of teams and the team process:

Fostering 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 help instill a sense of teamwork in a team, including group challenges, team-building exercises and the promotion of team culture.

Managers can enhance team spirit by communicating their personal vision of what teamwork means to them. Nancy Singer, president and CEO of the Retail Credit Services Division of First of America Bank Corp. based in Kalamazoo, Mich., took the step of developing a teamwork acronym, which appears on all memos and other internal correspondence: Together Everyone Achieves More With Organization Recognition and Knowledge.

Encouraging team suggestions: Although suggestions from individuals are important to an organization, teams of employees have the potential to take on much larger problems. At First Tennessee National, a bank holding company located in Memphis, a group of seven employees responsible for producing 1,400 monthly customer statements said they needed an occasional day off to take care of errands and other personal business, Knowing that they were more effective earlier in the month, the employees proposed a work schedule that exchanged a few 11-hour days in the beginning of each month for one day off later in the month. Management agreed and the plan was implemented. As a result, the time needed to issue monthly statements was reduced from eight days to four, and...