Workplace Effectiveness Program Workplace Effectiveness Program

WORKING WELL, WORKING TOGETHER -
A WORKPLACE EFFECTIVENESS PROGRAM

How to get your people pulling together, no matter what the situation

Does your business run smoothly?
Do your people work effectively?
What about in a crisis situation?
And what exactly is a crisis in your organization?  

Organizations bring people together towards a common goal that cannot be accomplished by an individual. While many factors may hamper or hinder this process, the relationship between the individuals is a key factor.

In our experience, there are two things that bring people together:

  1. a common goal, and
  2. a clear understanding of what is expected of them and what they can expect from others.

Here at Virtual Team Builders, we have worked in several correctional institutions. Now they have crises. But their people behave effectively in a crisis: they work as a team, they have each other’s back, and they know what to do. That's because they have created a crisis plan. In fact, their challenges with teamwork sometimes involve more of the day-to-day routine interactions where there typically is no plan.

Contrast that with many businesses, where people work reasonably well together day-to-day, but things fall apart during an unexpected crisis.

In both everyday and crisis situations, the key to better results from your people is to identify situations, both routine and unplanned, and explicitly create a code of conduct for those situations so that people understand the goals and what is expected of them.

In routine situations, team performance is often less than optimal because people make assumptions about how others think and should behave. Communications, personal relationships, planning, and execution all suffer when inevitable misunderstandings occur. The problem is that everyone's set of "unwritten rules" is different. People think others know what they mean. Our simple exercises will demonstrate that we all interpret even simple words - such as "often" - differently. We use a process that works with the group to create an agreed upon set of written rules - a Team Operating Agreement - that prevents these and other misunderstandings.

In the case of crisis situations, the first step is to identify with the team (in a non-threatening setting) the possible problems that may lay ahead. In conjunction with your risk management program, a set of scenarios is created that anticipates what might happen. The goal is not prediction, but reasonable preparation for plausible scenarios that could derail your operations. Often crises are not prepared for because no one wants to face the reality of what could actually occur.

In both cases the key to increasing effectiveness is employees understanding others' and their own behaviours: why they act the way they do.

The process:

Typically our program comprises three one-day sessions, with a one to two week gap between sessions.

  • In the first session, a combination of concepts and experiential exercises helps people understand their own and others' thinking and how they make decisions.
  • The second session explores how people act based on individual styles; even if two people come to the same conclusion, they will likely take different actions.
  • The third session brings it all together in a facilitated session that culminates in creation of their own Team Operating Agreement - their agreed upon behaviours when interacting at work.

At the end of the session, the participants will be able to:

  • gain understanding between employees, leading to fewer mistakes and less conflict
  • identify agreed upon behaviours among the team
  • how team members will interact with each other
  • what team members will provide to each other
  • recognize systems that enhance day to day interactions, streamlining workflow procedures to guide employees in a crisis to get a jump on the competition