Teamwork. It’s what managers try to cultivate, bosses want to incentivise, and businesses need to function. There’s even an entire industry dedicated to team building activities currently worth over USD $3 billion.
Yet so many still do it so poorly.
This is more prevalent in the BPO and outsourcing space than anywhere else. After over 30 years in the industry, I’ve seen the worst examples of team building (or the lack thereof) and the impact it has on both staff and businesses—from underperformance to poor ROI to super high staff turnover.
I’ve also learnt that if businesses want to get more out of their teams (especially outsourced teams), a big mindset shift needs to occur. We need to start asking ourselves, how can we make the sum of the whole greater than the sum of the parts?
Teams that reward individuals aren’t teams
One of the biggest mistakes we can make when trying to build high-performance teams is incentivising individuals. Yet this is the way 95% of businesses do it.
By setting KPIs or financial bonuses based on individual roles or performance, the team ceases to exist. It is now a collection of individuals trying to get the best outcomes for themselves (and who can blame them?)
It’s no secret that people can be highly competitive. If five people doing a similar role are paid based on individual performance, what happens when a lower-performing team member asks a higher-performing team member for help?
“Can you help me?” translates to ” Can you teach me how to do what you do so I can take some of the money off you?”
Suddenly, without meaning to, we’re pitting team members against each other. And the only one that loses is the business (or the client) they’re working for.
Your people are thinking long-term – so you should, too
It’s impossible to get people to stop thinking about themselves and their own needs completely. Job security and financial security are big concerns for a lot of people – particularly post-pandemic and with the rising cost of living.
Employees may worry that if one of their colleagues becomes more valuable, they themselves immediately become less valuable. Performing well individually is seen as job protection.
That’s why team building isn’t a siloed operation.
If you both incentivise teams based on joint output and performance while also understanding and fostering individual goals (and providing career progression opportunities), you start to promote teamwork.
If we incentivise the entire team based on their performance and their output and then revisit the same scenario as above:
“Can you help me?” translates into “Can you make me more capable so I can make the team better, and we can all make more money?”
This is highly effective in a team with a consistent output. The next progression is a team of differing skills coming together to drive bigger and better client, project and business outcomes.
A champion team vs. a team of champions
If we look at areas where strong teamwork is absolutely essential – medicine, military, sports – we can learn a lot about how to build and nurture high-performance teams. And it’s nothing about only hiring the best of the best.
As they say, there’s a difference between a champion team and a team of champions.
Outsourced teams face the added complexity of being physically separated from the larger business. Often, they are not considered to be more than a cheap resource to complete a function. But good team building can change this significantly.
Well-built and high-performing outsourced teams can provide skilled employees who can drive long-term value for the business they’re serving. This includes both complimentary skilled teams and consistent skilled teams.
This is a key focus for us at Omada One and why we have spent so much time on how we build and incentivise our team members. In fact, we’ve made team centricity so integral to our work that we even let teams hire new members themselves. Who knows the role, the team, and what they need from a new member better than the team? This enables them to not only be part of a team but help build it themselves.
By focusing on teamwork but also considering individual team progression, we’ve achieved:
- stronger, better-performing teams
- better teamwork and support within teams
- higher retention of staff
- improved outcomes for clients
To learn more about how you can improve the performance of your teams and maximise outsourcing to drive affordable but effective long-term value, get in touch.
