Identify and analyse issues which affect team and individual performance

A group of people that work together to achieve common goals of an organization are referred as a team. Teams consist of defined members causing a large or a small team and work on a set of activities all together and all these members have same set of skills whereas, each member contributes responsibility yet whole success depends on team work as a whole. Organizations work with the contribution of many teams where one single person can individually be a part of different teams as some teams are supposed to represent the organization permanently while few teams are organized only with the need of time or for temporary purposes that makes them call a project team aimed at achieving certain goal with certain guidelines (Shonk, 2008).

The role of teams in organizations is basically to accomplish tasks provided by the authorities considering those tasks quite complex for a single person to complete individually. And the best part of forming teams is that different skill sets and expertise can be contributed by different members of team leading to variety of ideas especially for the development of new products or services that essentially requires innovative designs and ideas for customer appeal and to meet their needs so the team members required for such tasks should be involving different designers, customer care takers and processors for idea generations.

On the other hand, individuals themselves play an important role in the proper functioning of an organization. Different people of different backgrounds and expertise join an organization to make the best use of their knowledge and skills and that is when organizations induce, coerce and make those individuals to participate in key operations of the organization. The individuals of an organization make the organizations as their key identity and they totally forget their own motives and work for the goals of the organization as their key identification. This depends on the nature and motivation of work available for individuals in the organization making the individual’s identification with the company stronger as he will work harder and keeps his level of work up to the mark for his own as well as organization’s satisfaction. Hence, the individuals and their motives play a key role in the fulfillment of organizational goals (Lencioni, 2010).

Q2) Understand and analyse the role and purpose of teams including a definition of team roles.

A high performing team consists of a group of high talented and highly motivated people working all together for the common business goals and objectives. High performers assure greater productivity and performance levels by making the best use of their competencies. Businesses make achievements and excellence due to such high performing teams while only the name of the organization tops up with effective and strategical planning and execution of ideas (Gleeson, 2019).

Following are the prominent characteristics of high performing teams:

·         They have clearly defined missions and goals to work on projects – before opting a project, high performing teams analyze the goals and motives to achieve so they know what track they will be going on for success by making the use of interim strategies that makes their expectations clear and defined and they find a strong sense of purpose (Forbes Coaches Council, 2016).

·         They work with open communication – the high performing teams enjoy the freedom of speech and allow all of the team members to put in their ideas and share their views and information openly and transparently without any hesitation which also leads to productive feedback later.

·         They have mechanized efficient conflict resolution plans – all the team members are efficient and quick in understanding the various sources of conflicts and come up with solutions to manage their conflicts with mutual understanding and solidarity as they are already trained with highly effective programs of conflict management.

·         They entertain mutual trust among team members – all the members of highly efficient and high performing teams have undoubtedly great levels of mutual trust which works as a rock behind their unity and support for each other. They all work with respect, cooperation and strong sharing of bonds that allows them to have maximum opportunities for social interactions especially in a cross-functional setup (Parisi-Carew, 2015).  

Q3)

It is an organization’s duty to manage, inspire and develop the essential qualities for success in a group of people to make them a high performing team. There can be many factors that can help an organization to build an effective team and to lead them proactively with good communication and high motivation. Some of the key factors in transforming struggling teams into high performing teams are:

·         Injecting leadership qualities:

Make your employees a part of an effective team by making them understand the real leadership qualities by being an effective leader upon them and lead from the front to resolve their matters and to review their projects (Benson, 2017).

·         Clearly defining the team goals:

Know exactly what your goals are and make the struggling teams to know them even better to process their development ideas and to achieve them and underpinning the right outcomes makes them understand their roles towards achieving the required goals.

·         Contextualizing the team contribution:

Effective team members should always be aware of their roles so they know what are they supposed to work on within an organization and their contribution towards the overall goals of the company.

·         Communicating effectively:

The effective and high performing teams know the importance of effective communication as they know how to best use it for smooth elaboration of their ideas and for effective planning and incorporation of their contributions by listening properly and communication healthy knowledge among their other members which of-course removes all the barriers towards productive ideas and value of freedom of speech.

·         Making ground rules for team work:

Once the teams have been formed, various ground rules should be constructed for better efficiency and achievement of goals depending on their work roles and also focusing on their work styles and how they meet their deadlines as well as how they manage their networks with others for collaborative and communicative purposes.

·         Inspiring all the members of team individually:

Members of the team should not have an ‘I did this’ attitude rather should always proceed with ‘We did this’ behavior as this mantra lets the teams to cohort their strengths and weaknesses and also their ways of tackling the situations. This way, each member gets inspired individually and they manage to show their maximum efficacy towards work and they can also evaluate what specific skills they need for the fulfillment of their tasks (Musselwhite, 2017).

Q4)

Team and individual performance can be affected by several factors depending on the shortcomings a team or an individual might be facing. Some of the factors are:

·         Excessive absentees:

This issue is very common all around the globe that concerns the organizations and makes them vulnerable towards such situations. True emergencies have no avoidance but occasional leaves for no particular reason causes performance issues especially in team members where every member is required to contribute equally (BOAKYE, 2015 ).

·         Lack of communication:

Poor communication has always been a common issue affecting performance as it leads to misunderstandings and requires repetitions causing several other problems along such as lack of trust.

·         Ineffective leadership:

All the leaders needs to understand that among all other key roles, major role is to convey the roles of other subordinates to them clearly and effectively as it increases accountability and clarification of functions.

·         Ineffective conflict management:

Conflicts are a common issue that hinders the path towards high performance but being unable to manage those conflicts causes many more other issues leading to disputes. It is an obligation of an individual as well as a team member to have particular conflict management skills to resist potential issues that may arise in future and may block the way towards achieving goals (Sood, 2018).

·         Constantly missing deadlines:

If an individual or a team member is constantly missing deadlines then it means that he/she did not set the realistic deadline for the completion of their task that makes them inefficient towards their roles and work and can cause serious performance issues.

·         Poor quality work:

Submission of low or poor quality work is a sign of inefficiency and low performance and it’s because some teams or even individuals don’t have the original caliber of doing what they’ve been asked to do at first place which causes bugs and many errors in their work so in such cases, such individuals better be made off of the given tasks and be introduced to new ones (Davis, 2014).

CASE STUDY 2:

Q1)

Dev Geddes has observed several issues among his employees in the hospital after he arranged workers into different groups of teams thinking that it would solve the problems more efficiently but the hospital still faced issues such as:

·         No team identity – team members couldn’t feel connected and accountable mutually for team’s objectives.

·         Poor communication – consistent silence form few members allocated to different departments caused some employees to go silent with their issues.

·         Low participation level – team members who were employed at quite opposite of their skill set departments showed lack of participation.

·         Hurdles in decision-making – since few members were all new to some departments so they had difficulties in making decisions effectively for the hospital’s benefits.

·         Inability to resolve conflicts – due to heightened tensions and aggressive gestures among few team members, conflicts couldn’t be resolved.

·         Less creativity – the individuals who were appointed to different departments with different teams couldn’t generate fresh ideas as they had no knowledge about the approaches of that particular department.

·         Lack of group thinking – due to some individuals not being ready to consider alternate ideas and approaches to their own skills and expertise, the team becomes unwilling to pay attention to group thinking for unity and performance agreements.

Q2)

There can be several reasons for such change to happen in the hospital environment especially including financial concerns and accommodation of simple shifting within the hospital that too, turning individual workers to play the role into teams for hospital’s mutual benefits and to overcome the load of work, Dev Geddes had to make few shifts in the business model that lead to difficulty for employees and can cause wreaked havoc in a workplace and unnecessary stress on employees. Following can be the reasons behind such changes:

·         Mental stress:

When employees experience changes in their workplaces, they go through unintentional stress that might turn into chronic stress if they had been working individually previously and have been asked to work within a team in different organizational departments. The reason for such levels of stress can vary from organization to organization such as unfairness, injustice, less management, communication barriers and so on.

·         Increased turnover:

Since the hospital was facing major loss of loyalty and employees started shifting to other beneficial organizations, it had to go through certain changes to cut expenses and cost-saving benefits but this factor made the employees to leave and seek employment somewhere else so the remaining employees who either forcefully or voluntarily decided to stick to the organization had major issues resenting to their new groups where they were asked to work within a team.

·         Changes caused by restructuring:

The restricting caused sweeping life changes for the employees who had placed into different departments with different teams leading to negative impacts on the overall growth of the hospital system and increasing issues.

Q3)

To improve the finance team’s performance, the hospital needs an action plan to get its teams more towards efficiency and high performance as:

·         Creating a daily task or to do list and sticking to it:

The hospital needs to create a daily task list including the tasks to be accomplished on specified days asking the team members to incorporate their own goals and targets and take overall benefits from the accomplishment of the tasks and also putting a tracker on the consequences, this will enable smarter decisions and efficiency in work (Hansen, 2016).

·         Establishing plans among teams and holding them accountable:

Make the members of team understand that their success depends solely on their teamwork and make them achieve sales targets and manage finances for the proper functioning of hospital’s day-to-day needs and expenditures (Drucker, 2017).

·         Working on narrowing the revenue gap:

Team members should be made responsible for the uplifting of the hospital’s brand name and its value within the industry. The finance department should be working efficiently with their plans and service provisions for the success of the hospital as a whole.