THE TEAMWORK SURVEY
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
The Teamwork Survey – Powerful Diagnosis Is The Basis For Building Successful Teamwork By Bart Allen Berry
Work teams all face the human dynamics challenges of getting along with one another while trying to accomplish the organization’s goals and objectives. Everyone has experienced the conflict and stressors when team members don’t want to trust or cooperate with one another. Lack of teamwork hurts the bottom line when the human resources, talent and abilities of team members aren’t maximized. Human dynamics are complex, varied and difficult to manage without some guidelines and just trying any team building activity to fix them won’t necessarily work. Before investing in some kind of teamwork initiative it’s critical to find out what’s wrong and to measure the seriousness of teamwork issues according to the team members themselves. But how do you get them to talk? The Teamwork Survey, developed by veteran Team Trainer Bart Allen Berry, is an anonymous self assessment instrument that examines 50 specific teamwork factors in ten categories. When team members are given the opportunity to share their opinions with the assurance of confidentiality, teamwork issues can be identified and statistically measured. Team members follow a simple email link to the survey, identify their workgroup and proceed with the self assessment of teamwork in their company or department. The simple act of completing the survey creates curiosity and intrigue regarding what coworkers might be saying, and provides a true opportunity to be honest and forthcoming, particularly with sensitive issues they might not be comfortable talking about openly with the work group. The Teamwork Survey also has the advantage of minimizing the influence of particularly aggressive or dominant team members who often take it upon themselves to frame the attitudes and opinions of the group whether or not they agree. Leaders and managers can also have a strong influence that might stifle needed teamwork discussions, simply by the power of their position. The Teamwork Survey has some real benefits the way in which it is designed and scored. A 1 to 10 scale is used (1-lowest or worst to 10-highest or most) to give survey respondents the ability to make finer distinctions than normal 1-4 or 1-5 likert-type scales provide. All question scored are aggregated to provide an overall mean score (on a 1 – 10 scale) and additional mean scores are created for each
THE TEAMWORK SURVEY
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
Teamwork Survey Category Results TEAM MATURITY
7.73
TEAM GROWTH
8.04
TEAM EXCELLENCE
6.41
TEAM SYNERGY
6.62
TEAM COORDINATION
7.04
TEAM SKILLS
7.05
TEAM LEADERSHIP
7.7
TEAM INCLUSION
7.21
TEAM COMMITMENT
7.25
TEAM ATMOSPHERE
7.69
category and individual teamwork factor. In this respect teams can easily see how they are doing overall, which of the ten broad areas are the strongest or weakest, and which individual factors are having the most influence. As the responses of all team members are included, the influence of statistical outliers or very strong opinions are noted, but with appropriate understanding and heavier weighting given to the shared perspectives of what most team members are saying. It is hard to hide from the data when the team members have filled out The Teamwork Survey themselves. For perhaps the first time however, the team can see where they are in agreement about issues, strengths and weaknesses of their team. This shared acknowledgement of their ‘scores’ on The Teamwork Survey is the starting place for identifying the most serious issues facing the team, and how they can begin to think about how to fix them. The categories covered on The Teamwork Survey have been developed based upon more than 30 years experience delivering corporate team development programs for more than 200,000 employees and managers in a wide range of industries in six countries. Each category has a question set with five individual factors being measured. Quality survey question design discipline avoids the use of arbitrary semantic labels or double barrel questions. The one to ten scale previously mentioned lends itself to easy mathematical understanding and interpretation when sharing survey analysis and findings.
THE TEAMWORK SURVEY
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
The Teamwork Survey Categories Include: AtmosphereTeam Atmosphere can be thought of as the first impression someone would get when encountering this team. Do they look confident and self-assured ad comfortable with one another? How do they treat one another? Are they easy to be around or hard to work with? How they appear to others is indicative of what it must feel like to be one of them. Team members evaluate their own team atmosphere. CommitmentThis category describes the intention and clarity of the work group. The focused energy directed towards a clear set of goals and the individual commitments to achieving them. InclusionRespect and appreciation for others’ and their contributions are emphasized here as well as the extent to which the team is kept informed and up to date by their organization and leadership. Does this team make the effort to respect and include everyone and are they respected by their own organization? Team LeadershipHigh Performance Team Leadership is characterized by the leader of manager getting the necessary tasks and objectives accomplished through use of the team while maintaining the respect of team members. Team SkillsTeams can learn how to operate better by the application of specific skills known to help a group accomplish its tasks and support its processes for better results. Communication, problem solving, creativity, decision-making, and continuous improvement are skill sets which can be learned and mastered. Application of these and other group skills will result in increasingly better bottom line results from the efforts of the team. CoordinationThis category refers to the level of flexibility in approach and how well the different parts of the team work together and their ability to handle complexity, changing goals, and managing relationships with other departments, while delivering according to requirements. SynergySynergy, often thought to be synonymous with teamwork actually describes the tangible end state of good teamwork. Synergy is the hard evidence that teamwork is working and can be recognized by results such as: more ideas, better work climate, higher trust levels, less rigid adherence to job
THE TEAMWORK SURVEY
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
descriptions and more cross functional migration between workers, and the respect generated by a successful record. Synergy can be thought of as that particular harmonious vibration of the energies of everyone on the team, combined with the initiative to contribute what’s needed at just the right time to produce excellence and outstanding results. ExcellenceExcellence is ultimately defined by the customer. These areas are the main areas quoted as most desirable from the customer’s perspective. GrowthEvery team wants to be working on what’s important and feel that their contributions make a difference. Teams are growing who are entrusted with working in the area of the leading edge, most current and important areas, important customers, emerging technologies etc. Teams have collective skills, a collective relationship with technology, and collective learning goals for training and development. All these areas can be accelerated with a proactive commitment to growth, with many accompanying performance benefits. Finally, question 45. endeavors to ascertain how proactive a team is regarding its own growth. MaturityMaturity describes the highlights of a mature and well-developed team. Each of the questions in this category are earmarks of a team that has grown well together and operates in a positive and mature, professional fashion.
The comprehensive design of The Teamwork Survey assures that nearly every teamwork issue possible is examined. Additionally there is an open ended question where survey respondents are encouraged to share their own suggestions for improving teamwork. This additional step adds color to numeric responses and assures a thorough representation of the sentiments of team members. With the speed of the internet, work groups can administer the survey and get their report within 24 hours of completion. This rapid turnaround allows a team to take more decisive action in terms of teamwork improvement, minimizing the time between issue identification and teamwork intervention. With The Teamwork Survey report in hand, work groups are faced with their own strengths and weaknesses in unequivocal terms. Leading the discussion of survey findings and analysis can be a sensitive process and guidelines are included in the report for the average manager or facilitator. THE TEAMWORK SURVEY
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
The Teamwork Survey data is represented in statistical terms so it becomes the defacto baseline to measure increases in teamwork and effectiveness of team building training programs. The Teamwork Survey can also be utilized across an entire organization or as a way to compare and contrast various work groups, sales teams in different geographies and more. Individual team scores can be compared with the company overall mean and for each individual teamwork factor. This can be a powerful way to begin large scale teamwork culture change in any organization. Every work group can benefit from having better teamwork. Measuring the teamwork in your work group might serve no other purpose than to confirm that your team is already working very well. This comprehensive instrument will provide you with exact measurement and a clear path to go from simply surviving as a team to evolving into a truly high performance work group.
The Teamwork Survey is available from Bart Allen Berry Consulting Online at: http://bartberryconsultin.wixsite.com/bartallenberry Contact US Directly For Larger Or More Complex Projects 760-268-9615 Bart Allen Berry Consulting Offers a Range Of Team Building and Leadership Development Programs
See our other Teamwork Tools at the website: http://bartberryconsultin.wixsite.com/bartallenberry
THE TEAMWORK SURVEY
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential