Shaping High Performance Teams in SMEs

Business Excellence Series Title - 4

High-Performance work teams are attempted by most progressive organizations for sustained and superior outcomes. As we know, high-performance teams predictably create synergies, effectively execute strategy, and achieve ambitious outcomes with much lesser management supervision. They possess complementary skills, exercise empowerment, and own responsibility for their functional activity as well as accountability for the performance outcomes.

The challenge with shaping high-performance teams is threefold – building, retaining, and making them perform. It is, therefore, necessary to take adequate CARE(S) to nurture these teams, by effectively implementing certain initiatives, which provide the right environment for them to stay and perform. I will like to share a simple model CARES to highlight certain critical interventions, which will go a long way in creating a conducive organizational environment for flourishing high-performance teams.

C – Communication

In today’s highly connected world, everyone experiences information overload from the continuous flow of info from various sources. The bad news is that all this information is not authenticated and is often spread by various interest groups. It is also a known fact that negative information flows faster and sticks more, as compared to a positive one.

In such a scenario, it becomes critical for the organizations to share the right perspective for real happenings with their employees on an almost real-time basis. For this, progressive organizations use multiple communication channels to keep their team well-informed about the success as well as failures of the organization, before it reaches them from some other source, possibly in a distorted fashion. Daily/weekly newsletters, daily morning briefings by managers, fortnightly small group meetings, monthly town halls, CXO mailers, and senior leadership connect programs are some very effective interventions.

A – Appreciation

Employees feel more connected when companies make them feel that they are a valuable part of the organization. Studies by Towers Watson, a leading HR consulting firm, have shown that employees who receive recognition in the workplace feel more valued and more committed. Also, they are likely to put 57% more effort than those who feel under-appreciated and are more likely to stay long term.

While most employees do more than 85% to 95% of things right all the time, they are more often hear criticism for things not done well than praise for things done well. Some organizations are reluctant to recognize people and believe that they are being paid for their work; thinking that recognizing them regularly will make them complacent or seek monetary benefits. This is an avoidable misconception.

To communicate effectively, appreciation needs to be timely, specific, public, and fair. Timely appreciation, no matter how small — even a simple “thank you” or “good job” — works wonders at motivating people. Appreciation can be structured both formally and informally. However, what is more effective is informal appreciation, which is more personal.

Imagine you are working on a project with a very tight deadline. You are putting in late hours and are extremely stressed out. The next morning your manager comes to your desk, appreciates all your hard work, thank you for taking up the challenging project, and thanks to your family for allowing work to encroach into your family time. You suddenly feel refreshed, energized and all set to perform at your best.

"You need to be aware of what others are doing, applaud their efforts, acknowledge their successes, and encourage them in their pursuits. When we all help one another, everybody wins." – Jim Stovall

R – Rewards

Productivity enhancement, performance management, and variable pay mechanisms are a few of the levers that can be used to drive performance in organizations. In start-ups, ‘hyper differentiation’ of pay and significantly higher bonuses for top performers are a couple of potent approaches. A similar principle of paying for ‘hot jobs’ also can be adopted in consultation with talent acquisition and management teams.

Mercer research has learned that workers in China, Brazil, and India value career advancement over base pay, recognizing that they won’t get paid more without being promoted. Those in the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany prefer base pay over any other factors. These aspects in terms of employee preferences should also be kept in view while deciding on rewards for them.

There is no denying the fact that financial rewards are the top priority expectation of the talent joining start-ups. Unless they see this as a significant part of the Employee Value Proposition, it will be difficult to retain the talent or motivate them to deliver high performance.

E – Employee Development

One of the key aspirations of the person joining a start-up or SME is to get quick learning on various aspects of business related to his/her specialization. Most bright students have realized limited exposure as one of the limitations of joining large organizations, as they are assigned a specific role, which is a very small piece of the complete delivery segment. On the contrary, the expectation when joining a smaller organization is that they will get quick exposure to a larger segment and will be able to learn much more, much faster.

It, therefore, becomes important for SMEs that they keep a focus on the learning potential related to each role and ensure that employees get ample opportunity to exploit the same. As soon as the employee starts feeling stagnated in terms of learning in a role, it may be a good idea to assign him a larger role or additional assignments.

For employee development purposes, it is not necessary to assign big budgets, which may not be feasible for the organization at this stage. The need is to keep a close watch on employees, obtain regular feedback on their role engagement, and take necessary actions to ensure continuity of their on-the-job learning.

In fact, this is a win-win situation for the employee as well as the organization. While the employee maximizes his learning in a short span of time, the organization is able to keep them motivated and extract his best contribution towards organizational objectives.

S – Stretched Targets

If you have a highly talented team working for you, they expect a clear direction in terms of their roles and responsibilities, along with the objective expectations in terms of targets to be achieved in the defined time frame.

It is always better to have SMART goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time bound. I would prefer to replace Specific with Stretched and Achievable with Ambitious. The targets that can be achieved by putting in normal effort are not exciting enough for most teams, at the same time targets which seem unachievable may disengage the team. Therefore, it is critical to maintain the right balance and provide just enough stretch, which provides sufficient challenge to their imagination and helps in unleashing the team’s potential much better.

"High expectations and belief in people leads to high performance, so very often beliefs creates facts." – Paul Hersey

For shaping high-performance teams, the organizations need to efficiently implement these actions in a systematic and sustainable manner, so that it becomes clearly visible to the team that the organization CARES.

In case these initiatives are not carried out in an authentic and transparent manner, the organizational environment may create a SCARE causing team dysfunction, and leading to demotivation, disengagement, and attrition.

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