Benefits Associated with Empowered Team
The key element to any successful organization is, first and foremost, its employees. There is no substitute for a knowledgeable and productive workforce. Carefully managing the workforce (i.e. creating empowered teams - people working with all the direct information, power, recognition, reward and training they need to satisfy their customers and meet the company's business goals) is one way of differentiating itself from the competitors. The most common benefits of empowered teams include creating a more customer-focused culture, enhancing communication within the organization, generating creative ideas, increasing organizational adaptability and flexibility and raising the level of employees' commitment and morale. Ultimately, all of these benefits are major forces behind every successful organization today.
Creating a More Customer-Focused Culture
There must first be a reason for teams to form. Teams must be built around a task with a purpose and a goal that requires employees to work together. Without a joint project, there will be no joint involvement. Objectives like better quality and greater customer satisfaction provide good starting points for teams. Forming empowered teams with clear objectives – one that aligns with organization’s vision – can provide better direction for employees. Often times, employees will find the objective much easier to relate to as compared with the company’s vision.
In 1996, the implementation of teams throughout General Electric's Aircraft Engine (GEAE) division's suppliers worldwide grew out of a corporate initiative that called for better product quality and service. In order to achieve these objectives, GE implemented a Six Sigma methodology, giving GE and its suppliers a quality goal to work toward. (The Six Sigma goal means that a product or service will have no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities for a defect to occur.) "We all have become more customer-focused and more data-driven,” says Sakurai. The results of teams using the Six Sigma methodologies have demonstrated signs of quality improvement and defect reduction.
Generally, effective team does bring different functions of the business together in meeting customers’ needs. The ability of cross-functional teams to better communicate across the board and with the customers greatly increases customer satisfaction. By eliminating the middleman and combining resources and ideas, cross-functional teams can better focus on a particular product to make it better.
Enhancing Communication throughout the Organization
As indicated above, the idea of forming cross-functional teams in organization links all areas of a business together. Linkage develops from the front to the back end of an organization, providing co-workers not only the chance to learn about other departments, but about each other as well. Providing the opportunities for employees to understand and work with people of various departments is crucial because it enable employees to break down some of the communication barriers. Forming cohesive relationship with internal and external customers can increase productivity as poor relationships at work can cause enormous amounts of unhappiness and wasted effort. Furthermore, this cross-functional element also creates more educated and knowledgeable employees with enhanced skill sets because of the broader exposure to all processes.
Generating Creative Ideas
Working in cross-functional teams makes problem solving quicker and easier, allowing employees to see things from new angles and perspectives. Decisions reached by a group tend to be superior, on average, to decisions made by individuals. Individual working is less efficient than the collaboration of several individuals' creativity. In situation that require a combination of multiple skills, experiences and judgements, a team would achieve better results than would individuals working within confined job roles and responsibilities.
According to Howard Berg, a senior consultant for Motorola University, "Cross-functional oftentimes means cross-educational. It is critical to have people from different skills/ backgrounds contributing in a group." With differing viewpoints, much more creativity is brought to the solution process. Having too many people thinking in similar ways makes it harder for the team to think 'out of the box'. "I truly believe I'd rather have 10 smart people tackle a problem. I could care less who comes up with a solution. I would rather have that than have 10 people staring at me hoping like hell I make the right decision,” reflects Scott Jessup, CEO of Marque Inc.
Tapping the collective brain power of all of your employees and empowering them to make decisions may be one of the best ways to help your company adapt to change. Moreover, executives report employee turnover is greatly reduced because the team culture improves the overall workplace environment and morale. An organization that truly benefited from this approach of work is Chrysler Corporation, one the most prominent car manufacturer of the century. A cross-functional team became a part of Chrysler's new auto design team. This team consisted of marketing, design, engineering and manufacturing personnel. With the creation of this new team, Chrysler was able to cut more than a year from design to manufacture time, yet produced what outside expert's rate as the highest quality vehicle Chrysler has produced.
Increasing Organizational Adaptability and Flexibility
Since employees are part of the process today, there is a greater need for them to contribute to the decision-making process. In most organizations, the days of autocratic management are over. To facilitate customer demands and fulfill corporate expectations, employees need to be more involved. Group decision-making enables these employees to have more input into the processes and greater access to needed information. Such actions are also consistent with work environments that require increased creativity and innovation. Majority of the times, empowered teams are more likely to provide better solutions for clients than management alone because they are formed with people of diverse background (i.e. front line employees). Actual solutions about how best to meet the challenges of the moment are delegated to the people closest to the action.
At McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., the need to create teams grew out of the company's situation - an increased workload without an increased work force. "Managers could not keep tight controls and still meet the deadlines," recalls Merrily Mazza, vice president of editing, design and production for McGraw-Hill. "It seemed only logical to turn over some of that control to those who actually did the work. Since they had more direct familiarity with the processes, they could control production between themselves better and quicker." The result of implementing empowered teams at McGraw-Hill increased productivity and reduced costs within the first two to three years. Teams have nearly doubled the number of textbooks produced each year. "For the customized production of our company's product, teams have been incredibly valuable and are a bottom line for companies no matter how you look at it," recalls Mazza.
Another organization that is successfully responding to the demands for flexibility and speed is 3M. 3M's team approach cut across existing highly divisionalized cultures to one characterized by participation, innovation, risk taking and empowerment. Bosses become leaders and decision-making was pushed down as far as possible. Since hierarchies are suspended, employees become an equal member of the team, motivated and able to share the vision with the group. Team chooses the degree of risk appropriate to the best chance of success. Team members felt greater ownership when they were in charge. This helped to keep interest focused.
Raising the level of Employee’s Commitments and Morale
Accountability is absolutely essential to teams and it is virtually inescapable. Employees must always be held accountable to someone for the quality of their work. The accountability process must be clearly defined so that, it is understood by everyone in the organization. Involving employees allows them an opportunity to focus on the job goals. By giving them more freedom, employees are in a better position to develop the means to achieve the desired ends. Jobs that possess autonomy give the employees a feeling of personal responsibility for the results. When an employee learn that they have performed well on a task that they care about, the greater will be the employees' motivation, performance, and satisfaction and the lower their absenteeism and likelihood of turnover.
Conclusion
The bureaucratic structure of yesterday is not appropriate for many of today's companies. Workers from different specialization in an organization are increasingly required to work together to successfully complete complex projects. Businesses are realizing that they can open up a vast array of previously untapped resources and countless creative options by fostering the efforts of employees working together and cooperatively in teams. Teams are the racing cars of the workplace - high performance, but requiring high maintenance, high attention and high resources.
Teamwork will only improves productivity and builds more flexibility when it is properly carried forward in organizations. As indicated in this report, real life organizations are benefiting from the implementation of empowered teams. Successful empowered teams drive performance improvement; often solving problems by making changes even before it's evident they're necessary. In today's work environment, teams help keep organizations one step ahead of the competition, with better products more tailored to fit their customers' needs.
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