The Power of a Team

Many companies have employees scattered across departments, separate floors, or even the entire U.S.  Large companies may have employees on different continents in different time zones.  This separation can restrict the amount of camaraderie and trust that can be developed.  Bitterness can even develop between teams.  Your employees are separated into teams to improve operating efficiency, but some could be more efficient overall if they physically worked together or could communicate more easily.  How can businesses improve overall teamwork in the 21st century?

Businesses are realizing the power of employee engagement surveys.  Independent and professionally developed surveys allow employees to provide honest feedback and real insight into the work environment offering the opportunity to create many great initiatives for your business:

Camaraderie: When you deploy an employee engagement survey, your employees will present ideas that can improve overall office cohesiveness.  It could be something as simple as ordering a few extra coffee machines to keep up with demand.  Small and large companies alike have many minor annoyances that are easily overlooked.  A scientifically administered survey gives you the insight to these small, but aggravating, details so they can be remedied before they fester into bigger issues.

Team-Building Activities: Many companies encourage employees to present ideas for team building as part of an employee engagement survey.  All too often, an activity is the brain child of only one or two upper-level managers.  Their ideas of a fun activity may not be the same as those of their employees, and the activity that was supposed to be fun can turn into a chore.

Better Work Flow: One of advantages of employee engagement surveys is the insight they offer management.  Management can be viewed as sitting in the crow’s nest of a ship, able to see from horizon to horizon.  However, it is very difficult for management to see below the deck of the ship to know that a boiler is about to explode.  For example, the accounting department may be continually discouraged, because a department they work with closely doesn’t return documents back to them in a timely fashion.  Not all employees are eager to tell their superiors that someone else is dragging them down.  An anonymous survey allows them to do that “safely.”

Confidence in Management: The unfortunate truth is that some employees lack confidence in their management.  Management is especially under the microscope when their effectiveness can be gauged on a stock ticker.  An employee engagement survey tells employees that their thoughts are valuable to management.  But it takes more than a survey.  Simply obtaining employee feedback is only half the battle.  You must then act to implement the many ideas employees bring forward to improve the organization.

The power of your teams can make or break your business.  At NBRI, we recommend deploying an employee engagement survey to establish baseline scores, and then resurveying periodically to gauge the effectiveness of your improvement initiatives. Contact us today to start improving your bottom line.