Every business is in business to earn a reasonable return on investment while providing its products and services. Creating high performance teams of engaged employees is an excellent way to ensure high productivity, strong financial results, and satisfied customers, all key ingredients to strong return on investment.
What are High Performance Teams?
Katzenbach and Smith ("The Wisdom of Teams," Harvard Business School Press, 1993) define a team as "...a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable." Intuitively, a team which performs well in relationship to its goals might be termed a high performance team (HPT), though some experts prefer to differentiate between ongoing strong performance and extraordinary performance.
Excellerate Performance Ltd (New Zealand) differentiates effective teams from high performing teams, declaring that true high performance teams "...are the teams that break boundaries, rescue organizations from the brink of disaster and deliver projects against seemingly impossible odds."
Excellerate suggests that HPT's have higher levels of camaraderie, increased levels of interdependence, greater collective learning and adaptive capabilities, and closer identification with team outcomes than other teams.
Most businesses aren't faced with the extraordinary challenges of Excellerate's definition of HPT's, though every business can benefit from a team of engaged employees working together toward common goals. In most situations, such a team can realistically be termed a high performance team. The question then is how to engage employees to reap the benefits of strong team performance?
What are Engaged Employees?
Wilmar Schaufeli, Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, defines employee engagement as "a positive motivational state characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption." Engaged employees display high levels of internal motivation, have high levels of attendance, and make positive contributions to business profitability.
Benjamin Schneider, Ph.D, attributes greater focus, persistence, proactivity, enthusiasm and adaptability to engaged employees over simply satisfied employees.
The Benefits of High Performing Teams and Engaged Employees
Schaufeli claims that businesses with engaged employees show greater customer loyalty, increased sales, increased profitability, lower employee turnover, less sickness absenteeism, and greater levels of employees going beyond their basic job requirements.
Schneider indicates that high employee engagement companies—those in the top twenty-five percentile of engagement—enjoy eleven-percent higher profitability and twelve-percent higher return on assets than bottom twenty-five percentile companies.
Kathryn Britton describes a UK study reflecting significant benefits for companies with engaged over disengaged employees: nearly one-third the sick days; a three-fold increase in understanding customer needs; twenty-fold greater advocacy of the company's products and services; half the reported work stress; and nearly ninety-percent less turnover.
How to Engage Employees
Schaufeli recommends several strategies for increasing employee engagement. These include redesigning jobs to create more challenge and effectively utilize employee's skills, providing leadership skilled at developing trust, displaying confidence and providing fairness in practices, providing training in self-efficacy, and advocating ongoing career development.
Motivating Employees with High Performance Teams
Anecdotal and factual data agree that employee attitude, satisfaction, and engagement are keys to creating high performance teams. High performance teams deliver strong performance results and positive impacts on business financial results as well as employee attitude surveys. Key factors in building engagement are trust, challenging jobs, utilizing employee's strengths, and ongoing skills training.
A related article of interest is Using Personal Strengths to Enhance Professional Career Development.
Sources:
"5th European Conference on Positive Psychology, Part 2," Bridget Grenville-Cleave, posted on Positive Psychology News, June 27, 2010
"Labor Day and a Case for Non-zero-sum Labor Relations," Kathryn Britton, posted on Positive Psychology News, September 7, 2009
Jerry Lopper - IPPA member, business and engineering degrees. Jerry's passion for personal development shows in 5 books, hundreds of articles & ...
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