Turn your workers into a team - management of mid-size businesses - includes related informative articles

Nation's Business, July, 1992 by Bradford McKee

In many companies striving to achieve total quality management, the formation of employee teams provides what Dennis Circo calls "motivational glue."

Circo is president of Precision Industries Inc., a distributor of industrial parts, in Omaha, Neb., which badly needed the glue--and the motivation--when it ran into a major problem that can accompany rapid growth. Sales soared from $34 million in 1987 to $61 million last year. Product quality fell as pressure to produce more intensified, Circo says.

The company turned to a total-quality approach. It organized the staff into quality groups" assigned to identify operational problems, to set higher production goals, and, most important, to meet customer expectations.

The quality group" is one of several kinds of employee teams being formed in small and mid-sized businesses. Employee teams are managing entire divisions in some companies; in smaller businesses, they are taking on responsibility for everything from housekeeping to product development, from employee discipline to compensation.

Managers who have been successful at team building say it gives workers more control over their jobs, encourages creativity, and gives employees a bigger stake in the company.

"Those of us who run a business realize the employees have the most power," says Mary M. Tjosvold, who heads Mary T Inc., a 600-employee company in Minneapolis. For that reason, she says, "I've never had a hierarchy. I've always managed with a team."

Tjosvold, who also has written a book about building teams, is chief executive officer of the company, which provides residential social services for people with disabilities.

Employees may have a good deal of sway within a company, Tjosvold says, but the greatest influence over a business should come from its customers, she adds. Mary T.'s organizational chart "puts the clients in the center," Tjosvold explains, and the company's teams revolve around them.

Here are some of the major types of teams that business owners and consultants say can lead to quality improvements within a firm, followed by specific suggestions for setting up teams in your company.

The Types Of Teams: Take Your Pick Employee teams are organized in any of several ways in companies, depending on each team's purpose.

Many firms, like Tjosvold's, have assembled a variety of types of teams for diverse challenges:

Task Forces. Most managers would recognize a task force, a temporary group of players responsible for bringing about particular changes. At Mary T, a task force was formed to implement a smoke-free policy in the workplace within 18 months.

At Master Industries Inc., a plastic-injection molding company in Ansonia, Ohio, a task group was given the temporary assignment of procuring the firm's brooms and dustpans and finding places to hang them in the work area.

Quality-assurance Teams. Like Dennis Circo's Precision Industries, Mary T regularly uses teams to guarantee quality of services and products.

Mary T's quality team consists of several staff members who visit the firm's clients and "make sure that the programs we run are up to the standards we set," says Tjosvold.

Cross-functional Teams. Cross-functional teams exchange expertise. Often, team members are trained in each other's jobs to speed production or to substitute for others during a crunch.

Another type of cross-functional team brings together the knowledge of various work areas to come up with solutions to operational problems.

Precision Industries put together a team of people from three departments to improve its computer invoicing. Employees from the collections, data-entry, and customer-service departments meet with the firm's software developers to iron out practical problems with the writing of the software.

"We would chart out how to solve those problems in fairly short meetings and come up with three or four solutions," says Mike Keim, chief financial officer for Precision Industries. All of it is not only working but we have state-of-the-art technology."

Product-development Teams. At Master Industries, new products--mostly molded plastic parts such as those for automobile interiors--are conceived by a team that, like the purchasing group, represents several areas of expertise, says Santino "Sunny" DiGirolamo, the firm's systems-improvement specialist. The team assigned to improve product development includes the manager of mold-building, the manager of quality control, the engineering manager, the production chief, and DiGirolamo himself as systems expert.

"Self-Directed" Teams. A self-directed team is appointed to manage itself because the team members are those employees most familiar with a particular aspect of the company

DePalma Hotel Corp., a hotel-management firm based in Dallas, uses self-directed teams of executives to improve operations at each of the 15 hotels it manages nationwide. The managers of sales, food service, customer service, and housekeeping all meet to trade ideas for improving service.

"No one is boss on that committee," says CEO Joseph DePalma. "It's a meeting where people come to look forward to participating, instead of coming just to listen to the general manager."