Building on the basic elements
Ensuring your staff work as a team is vital for a business to succeed. But, as Julie Hayes discovers, more companies are finding that getting results involves a great deal more than the odd paintballing session.
All good businesses know the value of a good team. They appreciate the results achieved
through a common goal, people knowing what they need to do and the motivation among a good team to do things properly. But how is this achieved? There are any number of teambuilding sessions available, from paintballing to quad biking, and the notion of teambuilding is sometimes dismissed as a ‘jolly’ or misunderstood by a company that thinks it ought to engage in this practice, but isn’t sure why. It is important to make the most of sessions, which can be expensive, by working out what you want to achieve and how to get there.
Russell Evans, director at management consultancy Primeast, says it is important to get the team out of the office, but the activity should be carefully planned so the team can see how it relates to their work.
“The term ‘teambuilding’ has got bad press because people see it as “Rah! Rah!” when you’re saying: ‘Let’s go off and do paintballing’. Many people see a disconnection in doing that kind of activity and the workplace.”
Evans focuses on ‘teamworking’, which he says analyses processes, purposes and behaviours, including the teaching of some theories and models. He uses the Belbin model for team roles, which states that nine types of role are required in each team. Any member may hold more than one role but all are needed, and the best performing teams are made up of people who are confident in their roles.
Another way of understanding a team’s journey is Bruce Tuckerman’s ‘forming, storming, norming, performing’ stages, which shows the team’s progress and regression as rungs on a ladder. If something changes, the team gets set back a rung. For example, if Sue leaves and is replaced by Sarah, the team can’t continue to work as it always has. Sue may have held different roles from what Sarah does, and the team needs to step back and work out how it now works with Sarah instead of Sue.
Evans says where teambuilding may be going wrong is the emphasis of 60 per cent social and 40 per cent business. He says it should focus 30 per cent on the social side, 50 per cent on how the team works together and only 20 per cent on the task.
He says: “The social side is really important. Before anything else we’re human beings and creating those informal social networks in the workplace is important. The difficulty comes when the social aspect overtakes.”
Nor, says Evans, should the team focus on the task before it has worked out how it will deal with the challenges that may come up. While it is natural for team members to sit and start planning the task, Evans says they should not rush into this until they have decided how they will work together.
“When the wheel comes off the cart it doesn’t tend to come off because of the task,” he says. “The task going wrong is the symptom because people don’t know what they’re doing, they’re not listening to each other or there’s not a mechanism for differences of opinion.”
In Yorkshire there are numerous ways to combine these aspects and practice using them. Venues have taken the need to create flexible packages on board, depending on the company’s aims, and may bring in consultants for training. They also mix facilities with meeting and conference space, so teams can work on their own business or team theory in the morning and finish off putting that into practice.
Pole Position Indoor Karting (PPIK), based in Leeds, is one facility that caters for the social side as well as providing activities where teamwork is essential to complete. Ben Hyland, marketing manager, says there is a market for incentive and motivational sessions, but they also offer the chance to practice communication. One example is blind driving, where team members pair up and drive buggies around the track wearing blacked out glasses.
“It’s scary and you need clear concise instructions from your partner. You have ten minutes to decide how you’re going to communicate. A lot of people try to do it with just saying ‘left’ and ‘right’.”
Needless to say, this doesn’t get them safely from A to B, and Hyland says successful teams spend more time planning how to communicate well before they begin the task, more accurately describing the tightness of bends with a numerical system. This is also the focus of sessions at children’s museum Eureka, based in Halifax, says business development manager Chloé Oldman.
Its tasks have a time limit, making them impossible to do without planning a clear strategy first. Other aspects are added into the activities to ensure the teams are covering other bases, such as making sure each member of the team has filled things out correctly before rushing on with the task.
Oldman says the majority of teams that do sessions at Eureka are merging departments within an established company, where the company wants people to get to know each other better and how to work with each other, allowing individuals to show characteristics or skills that may not manifest themselves in the workplace.
Robert Ropner, founder of outdoor activities site Camp Hill, says companies often use their teambuilding days as a reward to get staff interacting more and incentivise them to ‘go for it’ when they get back to the office with the offer of such a reward again next year. Ropner says no reason is less valid and it all depends on why a company is doing it. But he adds that the company has noticed a shift of business since the credit crunch towards teamwork with reviewing and evaluation sessions, as opposed to incentive and reward.
“They’re going back to what they did in the 1990s,” he says, “where some teams are in complete mayhem and have convened in the past six months to work out what they’re going to do.”
Ropner says this trend is also reflected in the increase in business of Skill Build, the training and development arm of Camp Hill, which adds training and development theories to the work they do at Camp Hill and coaches and mentors teams in the workplace.
Such thinking is gaining ground outside the world of venues, too.
Research by KPMG highlighted nearly two thirds of acquiring companies failed to realise the synergies they had hoped for in signing the deal, because of culture clashes. Transaction services director Julian Watson, who heads the integration advisory practice, says 80 per cent of companies felt ‘inadequately prepared’ to handle issues created by cultural differences between the companies, and if given the chance, would spend more time on cultural assessment.
Steve Batson, managing director of Health Design Partnership, is joining two firms with cultural differences in a joint venture – architecture firms Robinson Design Group and Rance Booth Smith. Batson says the two parent companies are still competitors in all industries other than health, and his 17-strong team includes a core management team he has a long-standing relationship with, a lot of new people, and individuals from different cultural backgrounds.
Bradford-based business development consultancy First Position Performance Development has been coaching Batson as part of a government-backed programme for new managers. “I had in my mind where I wanted to go, what values were important to me and what the team and company values were,” says Batson. “I decided I would like to have a teambuilding event to have better communication and understanding.”
Rita Neligan-Medcalf, director of First Position, took the team to the National Media Museum in Bradford for a session to learn about their own ways of working and preferred communication styles such as audio, and visual.
Neligan-Medcalf says the course explains why staff might not understand each other, and fractious behaviour can be aired as part of the programme. “You get ‘aha’ moments where people realise why they get so irritated with their team members.”
The teams then use their newfound communication skills to put a film together and apply them to meeting the tight deadline as a team and to pitch the film at the right audience.
Keep it together
Recruitment agency Pareto Law holds teambuilding activities such as go-karting as part of an annual national get-together, the Launch. Director Ray Qudos says teamwork is important to the agency in terms of motivating the team and enhancing communication.
“By working together employees can share experiences and ideas, making them stronger, boosting confidence and encouraging development,” he says.
For Pareto Law, social and fun activities achieve these goals and the company monitors its results through feedback. “Because our teams are spread out it is vital that we develop inter-office communication and a support network,” he says. “The Launch events provide a platform for this while encouraging healthy competition, helping staff to see each other’s strengths and motivating them in terms of personal and team performance.
“Key to this is the enhanced communication that comes from teambuilding. Everyone can put a face to a name, but it allows the exchange of ideas, which can result in business opportunities.”
Hunters and Farmers
John Weir, managing partner of Drivers Jonas’ Leeds office, set up the Leeds team a year ago with people taken from the other offices. Before any teambuilding activities, Weir says getting the structure right was crucial and involved managing the team from within.
“As a manager your authority will always be called into question if you’re not a fee-earner and you’re managing people who are,” he says.
He says the people then need to be given clear guidelines on what the direction and goals are in the context of the new team. For this reason it is important to know what makes people tick.
“Problems happen when mistrust creates fear and suspicion,” he says. “Open communication ensures everyone is aware of what’s going to happen. Clear roles need to be defined. Don’t pit people against each other, and if you’re aware of any issues between personalities, don’t let them fester.”
The roles within a team form the basis of many theories. And although they differ, they needn’t conflict. Another description of different roles is that of hunters – those who aggressively find and close deals – and farmers, who pick up where they left off, process and build a relationship with the customer.
A balance of these personalities is needed. Weir says an ideal team is made up of one-third hunters to two-thirds farmers. “It’s easy to get excited by people who are great at bringing in business but you need the skills to service it. Hunters often have flair but lack the attention to detail farmers have. One fuels the team, while the other grows it by keeping the work ticking.”
But people develop and there are no strict rules, says Weir. “People have individual strengths and there’s no harm in them sticking to them, but sometimes elements of each are evident in the same person. It’s a fundamental error trying to make people adapt to a role they don’t suit, and roles can change as people develop. I’ve often found the best hunters start as successful farmers.”
