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Team Cultural Fit…vital for team and individual success PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 13 July 2009 18:09
The recession has forced companies to be more competitive than ever, employees and managers have to be extremely customer-oriented and at the top of their game.
 
What this means is that all new employees have to be star players.  The have to be able to hit the ground running and get up-to-speed almost immediately, because the company doesn't have the luxury of waiting. 
 
They have to be ready, willing and able to play their position well and know how to play on an All Star Team...putting in the extra effort required in practicing their intercommunication skills to allow the team to win.  And they need to be employees and managers who appreciate and apply the team training and personal coaching the company invests in them.
 
Because new employees are unlikely to go far if there's a dis-connect with the company culture, many job interviews and self assessments ask questions to see whether there will be a good match. 
  • Does the job candidate prefer to work on teams, or alone? 
  • Would he or she feel comfortable being empowered to make decisions?
  • Is the person rule-oriented, or does he or she work better with looser boundaries?
Cultural fit is a key element of overall employee engagement, says Julie Gebauer, co-author of ‘Closing the Engagement Gap’. Some elements of engagement, she says, come from the employee - such as a person's openness to challenge, optimism and inclination to set high personal and professional standards.
 
At many companies, cutbacks have led to fewer people doing the same amount of work - so employees are increasingly working in teams to collaborate and share resources.  In the US, Gallup, a Washington-based polling and consulting firm, recently studied thousands of teams at 10 companies and found that certain job applicants, once employed, can raise the engagement levels of their team members.
 
According to Jim Harter, Gallup's chief scientist for workplace management, those job applicants had these four traits:
 
1. "Mobilisation:" The ability to mobilise people with decisiveness and genuine inclusiveness.  "They're forceful but not pushy," says Harter.  "Their approach is, 'Let's do this together.'"
2. "Clarity:" They reduce team members' uncertainty by helping make clear the goal of the team and of each team member. Both managers and co-workers can achieve this on a team.
3. "Relationship:" They are more likely to help team members get things done, because their relationship with them is important. "When people feel they won't be let down, and other people have their back, they are more likely to become engaged," says Harter.
4. "Affirmation:" These are people who have an optimism and enthusiasm that give others a positive attitude.
 
Gallup identified these traits by first examining the individual employee-engagement scores of each team member and figuring the average for each team.  The next step was to see how that average went up or down when various team members were removed from the equation. 

Finally, Gallup looked at the pre-employment assessments of those who had the most positive impact on their teams, to see what they had in common. The four abilities listed above were embedded in the assessment questions, and the Gallup study was able to pull them out, says Harter.
 
Reference: Human Resource Executive, June 16, 2009
 

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