Team Building in the Workplace

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Team building in any organisation is all about the progression in improving the combined performance level of a group of people who work together towards a common purpose. The importance of team building and its place within the overall provision of a competitive quality service was recognised and generally accepted by many organisations towards the end of the 20th century.
Unfortunately though, it is still not fully understood by every company or organisation. It remains one of those vague concepts that people might consider worth having, if they could only understand what exactly it is first. The result is often that team building is encouraged and even implemented, even when it's not the correct strategy to undertake.
Team building needs to be approached in a methodical way. Perhaps the first step is to understand what a team is.
It is correct in one sense to say that a team is a group of people. The reverse is not necessarily the case though; a group of people is not always a team. However, when a group of people concentrate on achieving a common objective, the group of people then become a team.
Just concentrating on a common objective is not always enough either, and that's where team building plays its part. It takes the raw group of people, who are usually disorganised to a greater or lesser degree, and it shapes them into an efficient team that can work together in a proficient, competent and resourceful manner.
Team building can therefore be defined as a process that makes the accomplishment of a common objective possible for any given group of people. It is a facilitating process that allows them to focus and concentrate on the procedures that will allow them to achieve their goal in the fastest and most efficient way possible. It quite simply starts off with a group and ends up with a team.
There are four basic steps involved in team building. The first step is to define the common objective or objectives.
The second step should seek out any inhibiting or restricting factors that may be preventing or hampering the accomplishment of the common objective.
The third step should minimise the inhibiting or restricting factors identified in step two and introduce counteracting factors that assist and facilitate in the completion of the common objective.
The fourth step should be to monitor the progress made, constantly feeding back relevant information and using it to refine and improve the process.


Groups
If a team is a group of people working towards a common goal, 'team building' is the process of enabling that group of people to reach their goal. It is therefore a management issue, and the most effective form of team building is that undertaken as a form of management consultancy, rather than as pure training (though there is a role for training within an overall programme).
In its simplest terms, the stages involved in team building are:
• To clarify the collective goals
• To identify those inhibitors that prevent them from reaching their goals and remove them
• To put in place enablers that assist them
• To measure and monitor progress, to ensure the goals are achieved
Traditional techniques often address the inhibitors to collective performance: relationships, communication, etc.. However, if a group is only a group, then the benefits of such techniques may be limited. At best, there may be no need to resolve relationship problems; at worst it can be a waste of time and detract the people involved from achieving their individual goals.


Relationship problems
If there are problems between people working in a group, then this can have a negative impact on their individual performance. However, traditional techniques are not the solution.
The stress in a relationship between two people is governed by the formula:
(proximity of the two people) x (importance they succeed together)
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(compatibility of their personalities)
In a group, the 'importance' is low. However, traditional techniques implicitly try make the importance score higher than it need be. This makes the stress score worse, because you are forcing people to work well together when they don't need to.
Also, traditional techniques sometimes tries to address the incompatibilities of the personalities involved, eg: on a personality workshop. Whilst this can be done, it is hard work and needs both parties to be committed to it. In a working group, the motivation for such difficult work is unlikely to be there - though, if they are willing to do it for personal reasons, then a personality workshop can have some effect.
However, to reduce relationship stress in a group, it is better to focus on the factor that is easiest to change: proximity. If they are only a group, then putting some distance between them (physically or by managing the boundaries between their work) will achieve a satisfactory result, without having to invest a lot of time.