Team Building is no longer a business – it’s a science! Here’s an article from Alex Pentland in the Harvard Business Review. It looks at studies carried out within the goldfish-bowl that is a call-centre (or center). It highlights the importance of communication (and coffee breaks!) although the statement that “little of the research in team building had focused on communication” seems, to me, to be rather wide of the mark. Meredith Belbin’s research into teams, why they succeed or fail, closely examined the communication behaviours of team members.
The article is useful in drawing attention to the manner of the communication taking place, as well as the content of that communication Why not take a look and see what you think…
If you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on.
Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science.
The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, we have identified the elusive Team Building group dynamics that characterize high-performing teams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them.
Looking for the “It Factor”
When we set out to document the behavior of teams that “click,” we noticed we could sense a buzz in a team even if we didn’t understand what the members were talking about. That suggested that the key to high performance lay not in the content of a team’s discussions but in the manner in which it was communicating. Yet little of the research on team building had focused on communication. Suspecting it might be crucial, we decided to examine it more deeply.
For our studies, we looked across a diverse set of industries to find workplaces that had similar teams with varying performance. Ultimately, our research included innovation teams, post-op wards in hospitals, customer-facing teams in banks, backroom operations teams, and call center teams, among others.
Team Building – the Beginning
We equipped all the members of those teams with electronic badges that collected data on their individual communication behavior—tone of voice, body language, whom they talked to and how much, and more. With remarkable consistency, the data confirmed that communication indeed plays a critical role in building successful teams. In fact, we’ve found patterns of communication to be the most important predictor of a team’s success. Not only that, but they are as significant as all the other factors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussions—combined.
Patterns of communication, for example, explained why performance varied so widely among the seemingly identical teams in that bank’s call center. Several teams there wore our badges for six weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues at Sociometric Solutions—Taemie Kim, Daniel Olguin, and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.
Drawing on that insight, we advised the center’s manager to revise the employees’ coffee break schedule so that everyone on a team took a break at the same time. That would allow people more time to socialize with their teammates, away from their workstations. Though the suggestion flew in the face of standard efficiency practices, the manager was baffled and desperate, so he tried it. And it worked: AHT fell by more than 20% among lower-performing teams and decreased by 8% overall at the call center. Now the manager is changing the break schedule at all 10 of the bank’s call centers (which employ a total of 25,000 people) and is forecasting $15 million a year in productivity increases. He has also seen employee satisfaction at call centers rise, sometimes by more than 10%.
Something as simple as team coffee breaks? Really? Well if that’s where team building starts – that’s where it starts.
But to work together more, to develop more, to ACHIEVE more, then this is certainly a good basis, but those extra steps need to be taken.
Teams, when given the opportunity to, will suprise you. It’s time to step outside the proverbial box and DO MORE! By doing more we can BE MORE. Teams and team building are what you make of it, however what you can TAKE from it will astound even the harshest critics. If you want a job done well, try doing it together and if you want to do it together, build a good team!
Here’s the link to the full article in Harvard Business Review
So…Team Building? A Science, or not? To focus on the communication within your team Eventus can help. Check out our “Communicating Effectively” team events.