I Love Team Building

Increasing productivity, reducing absenteeism and increasing retention are all things that translate to a stronger bottom line. And there are no doubt many variables that affect these factors. I’ve heard of many, but here is a new one - sustainable offices:

“Employers are increasingly correlating their sustainable offices with increased work productivity, lower absenteeism and higher employee retention — significant advantages for businesses of all shapes and sizes.”

Unfortunately the article I read cites no source for this claim…I’d be interested to hear whether anyone can substantiate it. Here is the article.

Also…what do YOU think?

Great article in today’s Globe about continuing to motivate employees during hard times.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090206.CAMOTIVATE06/TPStory/Business

Wondering if team building is still important in today’s economy?  Here is a quick case for continuing your team building efforts:

Today’s business world requires employees to rely on each other more than ever before.  Organizations are more of an interdependent team environment than they ever have been in the past.  At the same time, it is more likely for these teams to be geographically dispersed.  Corporate teams need team building because when co-workers like, trust and communicate well with one another, they will operate more effectively.

There is already a labour shortage in certain industries, such as the oil&gas and the IT industries.  This shortage is forecast to increase dramatically because of a growing North American and global economy and the changing demographics of the workforce.  Employee attraction and retention is likely to be a major challenge for companies now and in the future. 

Employees’ expectations have changed.  Many people are no longer satisfied by getting a job to earn money.  Employees now interview companies to find out what the company brings to the table in areas such as training, benefits, work-life balance and quality of the work environment.  The new generation of workers has high expectations.  Employees want to know what skills and education they will gain to help them succeed in future careers.  This underscores the need for employee attraction and retention strategies.  Team building is one such strategy.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a phenomenon first identified by Garrett Hardin in the journal Science in 1969. He used the example of a communal pasture in which locals could freely graze their cattle. Provided that the number of cattle was kept under control, the pasture would sufficiently replenish itself, allowing for perpetual grazing. However, if each farmer acted out of self-interest and continuously increased the number of cows grazing the free pasture, the valuable shared community resource would eventually be depleted and destroyed. In this scenario, the pasture only serves its purpose if the farmers work collectively to use it in a sustainable manner.

How is your workplace like the commons in this example? Do people seek short-term gain at the expense of longer-term rewards? To what extent do you and your team compete for resources, ideas, jobs, promotions, salary increases, bonuses or more desireable offices? Or does everyone always work together for the benefit of the common good? We are trained from a young age to compete, yet most people would agree that working together toward the common good serves us all to a greater extent.

Think about The Tragedy of the Commons in upcoming interactions with your teammates. You can even tell them about The Tragedy of the Commons and work together to find ways to collaborate to a greater extent. Then consider how a higher level of collaboration would impact your work and/or your workplace. That is the essence of teamwork.

Another real-life workplace horror story to help illustrate what’s wrong with the corporate world and why we need to change.  Soon, I will be building a case for why organizational teams need to be enlightened.  Stay tuned for that.  In the meantime, read on and be glad this didn’t happen to you:

 “I worked in retail for several years for a national privately held company. I was a 23 year old regional customer service trainer, but I was based out of one store. The manager of the store had been transferred there from another state due to, in his words, “a dyke” being put in charge of his region who didn’t like men, especially him. Prior to that he had been transferred from yet another region, where a “dispute” with a “crazy” female employee had been the issue.

He began using the company delivery van to drive as his personal vehicle (his family only owned one car due to a recent bankruptcy), sometimes coming in so late in the morning that the delivery driver had to wait for him to arrive to begin work. He also began selling pot out of the store to college kids he met cruising the bars after work. He would take them around back to make the exchange where there were no security cameras, but he later would brag about it to some employees who were “cool”, so word spread quickly.

One day he called me into his office and told me a story about how he humiliated his former regional manager (the “dyke”) who he didn’t like. He also informed me that he had no qualms about humiliating any woman (or man) who “ratted” on him. He also began cracking jokes when I walked into management meetings like “wow, does anyone else smell fish?”. It was so absurd that at first I thought this couldn’t be happening. Another female coworker told me that he had approached her during a business trip and told her that she would have to sleep with him to keep her job and she had told him no. A few months after she told me, she was demoted and a male employee was promoted to take the position. She promptly quit. It was like something out of a textbook.

I quit too, mostly because I did not want to work for a company where this type of individual could go on seemingly unnoticed by management. Not long after, a long time employee wrote a detailed expose to the regional manager with specific incidents regarding abusive or harassing behaviour towards women, theft/abuse of company property and illegal drug use and distribution within the store and using the company van and requesting a full investigation by the corporate office.

The regional office transferred the manager to another region, again. No response was made to the letter, or any attempt to investigate the validity of the very specific claims. Later we heard that he quit to take another job, no doubt based on his long term experience as a manager at the store level. To me, this serves to demonstrate how the very first manager who failed to confront his bizarre behaviour in a constructive manner paved the way for the subsequent regional managers who were afraid that surfacing his issues would bring a lawsuit out of the woodwork for all of the previous oversights. This in time led to his becoming a liability passed on to another company through the fallacy of his long tenure with his employer.”