Need to improve you team global effectiveness? Read on, as we share our experience regarding cool strategies on how to improve delivery quality and team motivation.
Every team leader, no matter the field of business, would love to have the best of the best element in its team. If you like football/soccer, who wouldn’t love to have their team filled with Cristiano Ronaldo’s and Lionel Messi’s?
Well, that’s not the real world for most of our organizations. Our teams are made of a mix of good, average and even mediocre elements, and we regularly have to deliver highly complex tasks or projects, on time and with exceptional quality. Can we achieve this all the time? Probably not, but we need to develop some strategies to pursue this goal.
So what are the real problems?
#1: Our teams are made of people with different ages and experience, different backgrounds, different attitudes, etc., so their level of knowledge on a given subject is disparate! I believe this is common in almost all organizations.
#2: Our teams are often geographically separated, whether doing projects or local support in our customer’s facilities.
#3: We have very different customers (ranging from agribusiness to aircraft manufacturing) but we work with the same software product (O2P), so there are common problems and you shouldn’t “reinvent the wheel”.
And how can we try level up our team’s expertise?
Well, there are a number of ways, and they are all important: producing internal documentation, guidance for online documentation, paid training, etc.
On top of all that, Processware tried a different approach, and we are very happy with the achieved results. We call them Technical Workshops.
How do Technical Workshops work?
- Short meetings (approximately 1 hour long);
- That take place the first thing in the morning;
- Regarding useful subject of our daily problems (usually technical);
- Gather everybody in the office (Skype used only if need)
But what about subjects that are too complex to be discussed in 1 hour? Usually we break them down in several sessions, so that these workshops have the least amount of impact on the daily routine.
Also, the reason behind scheduling these meetings in the early morning is that “emergencies” that occur during the day could prevent some of the team members to participate. As we are calling our teams to these morning events, after each session Processware provides a coffee-break, where people spend a few minutes exchanging their thoughts regarding the workshop subject. This is always a pleasant moment that motivates people to continue to participate in these sessions.
Wrapping it up
We have witnessed a major effect on the team’s motivation after we started to do the Technical Workshops. We have seen that, not only our consultants enjoy the short time spent by their teammates explaining how they solved a specific problem, but also people are more confident doing their jobs because they have more “tools on their belts”.
