Increasing teamwork and productivity
Are you having challenges with your Team?
Are you finding it difficult to get quality staff?
We are all trying to get more done in the current environment with fewer people, especially as we get efficiencies through technology and improved supply chains. However, many of our WLW clients are having challenges attracting talent and then on top of this, managing the team is getting more complex.
Our resident Business Coach, Russ Cummings, has been working with a small business client recently who has a team of 10-12 people delivering a range of services to clients. The business is growing rapidly, and profits are good. However, the biggest challenge is helping the team deal with the growth. The company has made a series of “bad hires” – they just took whoever was available, which has been both costly and disruptive.
To assist with the challenges, Russ sat down with the business owners and mapped out a simple Workforce Plan with them. This simple yet powerful process allowed them to restructure the team for better productivity, identified some recruiting needs and highlighted some deficiencies in the current team. They developed an organisational chart for their future business, compared this to the current org chart and then worked out “what” they needed to do to go from NOW to WHERE.
This involved getting key people in the team involved in developing Role Profiles for every position, developing Personal Development Plans for key employees so they can improve their skills to grow with the company and creating a Recruiting Plan so that they are proactively searching for new employees with plenty of lead time – enabling them to be far more selective in our hiring process.
Russ also introduced them to his “Circuit Breaker Meeting” process, which effectively replaces complex, adversarial, time-consuming Performance Review Processes. This improved communication and provided a regular avenue for 2-way feedback.
A key component of the strategy is using a powerful tool called a Harrison Behavioural Assessment. In essence, it assesses an individual’s behavioural profile by looking at 175 behavioural traits (No – it’s not a personality test – it is a very different process as it looks at individual behaviours). It's a powerful tool that we have started using internally at WLW.
We can then use this information to help with recruiting, fit with different job profiles, individual coaching, career planning, succession planning and personal development, and look at team dynamics and engagement.
For more information on Harrison Assessments – go to http://shifft.harrisonassessments.com.au/
The bottom line is that after 15 months, the team is more cohesive and productive; they have stopped making “bad hires” and have better team engagement because team members have clear paths for development, and we have established communication and effective feedback mechanisms.