Performance Issues Among Teams

As the Human Resource Manager it is our responsibility to advise the teams members on how to deal with performance problems. Problems often arise when there is conflict among teams or one or more persons on team are "not pulling their weight" or performing poorly. Performance issues can be directly tied to the quality of leadership rather than the quality of people. (Ideabridge, 2002) It is the Team Leaders position to ensure he does what is best for the team and not the individual.

Communication will be key to keeping employees on track with their status and what they need to do to improve upon their performance. It will be the team leader and / or managers responsibility to ensure that each person of the team performs to his/her expectations. Since Ace Consulting is a global consulting company, you will be able to measure performance by their sales goals. However, when working with a global company, the Manager and/or CEO must take into consideration local economic conditions of the area they are selling to.

One of the best ways to improve poor performances is to have contests among the teams and role-play. One of the best ways to improve customer service and to ensure that all the customers' questions are being answered is though role-playing with other team members. The team members will get ideas on how to present the products better and to be able to answer customer's questions to their best ability.

Another good way to deal with poor performers is to create small scale teams 2 or 3 people on a team to work in groups. This way they can ensure the customer is being taken care of and that they all questions are being answered. Also if the sales force works in teams as I have described, even if someone is out on vacation, the customer will have a contact person.

The best way to measure performance in a Global environment as described in our scenario is though sales goals. However these same techniques can be applied to almost any position. For instance, an assembly line worker will have goals to meet and certain quality standard to meet. These can be measured.

It is the team leaders or managers job to monitor team member's progress and improvement. They should know when their sales are down and when they are on track or above standards. Weekly or monthly reports should be done to track this data so that every team member knows where they stand and what they have to do to meet or break benchmarks.

The most important thing to keep in mind is communication. Be sure that the team leader communicates to its team members what is expected of them and team members communicate any problems that may arise so that the team leaders can assist them.

References

Ideabridge, 1999-2002, The Ideabridge White Paper Series, "The Leadership Series: Dealing with Performance Issues", [Electronic Version] retrieved on March 15, 2006 from http://www.ideabridge.com/ideabridgecom/whitepapers/46.pdf