The world has become more challenging and competitive, especially in these times making it inevitable to build and maintain a high-performing workforce at different levels of an organization. In addition in order to maintain the best levels of competitiveness, effectiveness, and efficiency would require the ability to build this type of workforce. Apart from good, experienced, and motivational leadership, an organization will need to invest in other factors such as providing clear-cut roles for all members of the team, analyzing and understanding their individual skills, commitment, personalities, and style of working (James, G. Hunt, John, S. et al, 2008).
Creating this high-performance team is no easy task for any organization medium or large but when doing it, some guidelines can be used to lighten this quest. These would include defining a common purpose for the organization, creating an accommodating organizational structure, the leadership providing a clear mission and vision, and cultivating a positive work ethic in the organization. These can be achieved through improving interpersonal relations between the team members, evaluating the individual characteristics of each team member to know their strengths, practicing effective and efficient team leadership strategies, aligning skills, values, and dedications towards ordinary shared victory to balance the team performance, and moreover is understanding the key elements that a High-Performance Team in this era needs to succeed and stay together (Tosi & Mero, 2002).
Sharing a clear purpose and vision for the organization is essential to uphold a joint culture between employees. All the group members must know and understand that their roles fit together; in addition, they should know the extent of their roles and what they have to offer. Where there is no clear sense of shared purpose, there is absolutely no rationale to toil together. Poor exchange of information, doubt, and blaming often progress for the reason of lack of understanding of the group function and the roles that sustain it. On the other hand, vision provides inspiration. It helps define what the team expects to achieve be it in the short-term or long term. Where the vision is blurred, a unit working together may suffer motivation and inability to adapt to changes issues, on the other hand, clear vision provides a course to be followed and arouses a sense of responsibility.
Maintaining a positive work relationship is a good factor to consider in creating an encouraging work culture. When employees treat each other with respect, it makes each one of them feel empowered to find the job completed despite other conditions, making them feel that they helped make a difference at the end of the day. Good, constructive work relationships must be accompanied with utmost trust, appreciation of achievements and open communication both upwards, downwards, and between employees at the same level (Tosi & Mero, 2002). These can be achieved through creating team bonding opportunities such as workshops, seminars or/and team-building outings that enable the organization to quickly build constructive relationships and implementing a sense of shared corporate culture.
Building a high-performance team is not enough, maintaining it should be the long-term aim of an organization. Uphold high performance while encouraging means that the general structure of the organization must support teamwork. Heading towards this objective an organization should ensure that its teams share not only goals but the rewards for achieving and maintaining the organizational goals. Therefore an organization should avoid comparing team members against each other and making their goals compete, compensation varies, reporting unstructured and organizational structure and protocols unclear to promote the spirit of togetherness within the organization (James, G. Hunt, John, S. et al, 2008).
Given the above factors, teams are supposed to work together, to better help synchronize activities, information, and resources at their disposal, while at the same time ensuring and maintaining the high-performance that is needed. But all these would be useless without frequent evaluation of the team’s performance. This is relevant to both the business aspect and the staff of the organization. It would help evaluate whether the current system is reaping benefits for the organization by getting customer feedback. The staffing efficiency and effectiveness would be a perfect indicator of whether the team is performing.
An ideal team working together should be generally drawn from a diverse background to make everyone bring a different experience to the team. Other factors such as the office set-up should be that which encourages teamwork, for example, a team that works in one big room should perform better than one in which each member has an office (Tosi & Mero, 2002). Companies globally are not immune to the threats of business irregularities and ethical misconduct which constitute high risks in an organization. Teamwork ensures that everyone has the same information and no one can take advantage of the business resources or channel them to private ventures.
References
James, G. Hunt, John, S. et al (2008). Organization’s behavior. USA: Wiley and sons publishers.
Tosi, H. & Mero, N. (2002). Organizational fundamentals and behavior. USA: Wiley- Blackwell publishers.