Strong, successful team effort in a business creates these positive results:

• Increased productivity: efficiency + effectiveness.
• Enhanced employee satisfaction and motivation.
• Expanded margins: reduced expenses and increased revenues.
• Improved recruitment and retention of talent.

No argument that each of those is good for the business.

Let’s take yesterday’s posting about NetApp’s strong “culture of engagement” a step further. Let’s look at specific approaches to team enhancement…thanks to team engagement…productively followed by unique businesses.

The source is Jody Heymann’s report “Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder” (Harvard Business Press). It’s a good read!

To increase workers’ sense of engagement, Isola, a roofing supplies company in Norway, adopted a teamwork system in which workers functioned as a team, and the team leader reported directly to the plant manager. This fostered greater responsibility and led to a 33 percent drop in absenteeism over a six-month period.

American Apparel almost tripled their productivity when they began to pay workers on the basis of team output. Emphasizing–and rewarding–engagement in team efforts, American Apparel saw output jump from 30k to 90k pieces per day.

To enhance communication among team members, the Dancing Deer Baking Company in Boston offered free classes in English as a second language to its bakery workers. Efficiency jumped as employees could communicate better with one another.

You’ve read here about providing specific resources that enable employees to initiate engagement on their own. Heymann’s report found that “offering training and career tracks to line workers led to lower turnover and easier recruitment, and served to make employees more efficient while they were with the company.” Xerox Europe, the report said, “emphasized career opportunities to decrease the high turnover rates that were characteristic of the call center industry.”

It’s valuable to pay attention to having and using teams. It is even more valuable to apply specific tactics that heighten the morale, motivation, and engagement by team members.

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Tags: Employee Engagement, Management, team, team building