Team Building

As I blogged before, I think our group is a very tight group as a whole. Everyone in the group is willing to help out whenever possible. How did we build this team together is a little hard to say. But I believe there are two important factors in team building. One is to have a person who can show leadership and has the personality to bring everyone together. The second one is each team member must show willingness to participate in the team building activities. Without the person to bring everyone together, the team may get along, but it won't function what we consider as an idea team. On the other side, if a team member is unwilling to join team activities, then it is hard to be successful by forcing him/her into the team.

We have a supervisor who is very dynamic and has a very attractive personality. He constantly asks people out to lunch and organizes happy hours whenever he feels and hears team members complaining about being tired. Team members have many opportunities to know each other better through lunch and happy hours. Team building activities also establish bonding among the team members that makes team members much more willing to help each other. One example is the on-call scheduling. Since we are required to respond to pager 24x7, each person must take two weeks at a time. It is very common for the on-call person to ask other members to cover in short notice without any hesitation when he/she can not stay near home.

Current economic environment creates problems in employee morals. Many organizations are cutting jobs and outsourcing business operations to stay profitable and meet Wall Street expectations. Employees are hard pressed to stay focus on their jobs and motivated in this kind of environment. But it is more important than ever to motivated employees to take on more responsibilities. One way to motivate employees is to through team building. When the team functions well, each team members is willing to shoulder more responsibilities and works collaboratively. This is why team building should not be overlooked in hard time. Some expect employees to work harder because they are fear of losing their jobs. But such notion is misguided. Maybe employees will work in fear, but in the long term such tactics would not work well or employees lose their motivation and the workforce will be less productive in the future. So pay attention to your team and make sure they are well prepared to take on the next project.