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This evening my sister was working on a speech for a college class where she wanted to teach people how to improve teamwork in a business. Wow, a summary of how to improve teamwork in any business in only 5 minutes??? We’re going to have to narrow that down. So we decided on improving the productivity of a team that already exists. In other words, we’re not hiring new people, expanding a business, or firing unproductive people. So we talked it through for a few minutes and here are 5-minute’s worth of suggestions to having the best team around. 😉

1. The most important factor in determining an employee’s satisfaction is his relationship with his direct manager. That’s more important than salary, benefits, flex time, over time, company picnics and the like. We’re talking about his direct superior and not the CEO, CFO, or departmental VP. If his manager does not have solid rapport with him, he will not be happy. This is extremely important because almost every other tip, suggestion, or improvement MUST take this first factor into account. Don’t forget it!
2. One of the most common complaints you’ll hear from employees, if you bother to ask them, is, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Sure, she knows her title is “receptionist” or “salesperson” or “plumber”, but what does that mean she has to do every hour of every day. As her direct manager you need to define that. The best way to figure this out is to provide enough detail, goals, benchmarks, and Key Performance Indicators so that every single day your team member can easily answer whether they had a good and productive day. They should then be able to list exactly what they accomplished that made it successful and productive.
3. Tie compensation to the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). The number of businesses that do this HAS to be less than 1 in 10,000. Out of several hundred businesses I’ve worked with in some capacity only 1 comes to mind that does this extremely well with a few others doing this moderately well. Most don’t do this at all. If you determine someone needs to get 8 “jobs”, “services”, “deliveries”, or “sales” done every day but you pay them by the hour, what’s his incentive to do more than 4 or more than 8 once they get those target 8 done? As a general rule, salespeople are the only ones who have jobs strictly based on commissions. Why? If an engineer designs a brake system that doesn’t work, why should he get paid the same as an engineer who designs one that is flawless? A friend who is an engineer for Penn DOT told me he was welcomed to his engineering job with “Congratulations! You have a job for life. No matter how bad you screw up you basically can’t get fired.” You think that government agency is attracting “go-getters”? Even if it did, as I respect my friend’s engineering skill, how long do you think it will be before those employees are taught to accept less than the best in their own work? Figure out a way to provide an incentive for EVERY single person on your team even if its just tied to the overall company revenue targets. Software companies often do this by providing stock to employees. Public companies do it by offering 401k plans with discounts on the company stock. Depending on the size of the company, it can be very difficult for someone to gauge the effectiveness of his work when his only non-salaried incentive is the stock price.
4. Provide quarterly reviews with every team member. So you’ve defined for everyone on the team what makes up a productive day and you even related incentives to that productivity, now you need to review those with them at least every 90 days. Many sales managers and sales teams do this on a weekly basis. Again, why are salespeople given such strong incentives to produce and few others are? My recommendation is to get your hands on “First, Break All The Rules” by Marcus Buckingham IMMEDIATELY and use the 12 questions he’s developed from information gathered from over 80,000 managers over 20 years for your reviews. These reviews need to achieve a few key objectives:
   1. Determine the team member’s progress on meeting the goals from last session
   2. Determine whether you as a manager can do more to help them achieve those goals
   3. Set new goals for the next 90 days

   This is not a complaint session where you attack the individual and highlight all that they’ve done wrong. Numerous tests and studies have proven that mice and men both respond much better to positive affirmation than to critical attacks. Don’t say things like “Look, Bob, you did this wrong. It’s spelled out in detail in the manual so you don’t have any excuses.” You’ve immediately put Bob on the defensive, probably upset him, and didn’t score too many rapport-building points with him. Instead try, “Hey Bob I have a few copies of your TPS reports here. How can we work together to make these even better this time? Was the manual clear or should we improve it?” Now, if that team member thinks you’re a chump, then the second wording may only get you slightly farther which is why having a strong relationship and solid rapport with your team members (reference #1) is so important.

So there’s the 5 minute performance review for your team. The next step is reviewing your company Vision, Mission, and Culture to help fill in all the blanks that are not spelled out in the company manual or in the KPI’s.

To your success, Bryan