Suggested actions
Actions suggested by the organization
Create your own action
Promote continuous improvement and learning within the organization and/or department by encouraging employees to seek methods for improving processes and/or increasing customer satisfaction. Recognize employees for their ideas by sharing the improvements that were implemented during team meetings through employee bulletins, departmental updates, etc.
Establish a formal and/or informal employee suggestion program. Decide on the key aspects that should be recognized, such as service timeliness, customer feedback, cooperation and teamwork, improvements in working practices, etc. Publicly recognize creative and innovative ideas.
Discuss and agree upon a set of behaviors to guide team member interactions, shared decision making, and shared goal achievement. Ensure that all team members have a clear understanding of what the behaviors mean in their day-to-day jobs. Set specific guidelines for resolving conflict.
Encourage and support individuals who you see attempting to demonstrate collaborative team behaviors, especially when their attempts are less than successful. Comment on their need to continue promoting collaborative working relationships for the benefit of the team.
Assess your openness to ideas. Try to remember situations where you were not open to employees’ suggestions. Analyze why you took that position. Evaluate the outcome of that decision. Project what might have happened had you concurred with team members’ suggestions. Determine whether your actions routinely encourage or discourage your employees to provide input. Determine how your actions could change.
Provide greater autonomy to employees by examining the way work is done. This will help to identify opportunities to redesign processes, change technologies, simplify procedures, eliminate repetitiveness, and change authority structures.
Identify groups that employees perceive as “hard to work with”, determine why this is the case and approach the leaders of these groups (if appropriate).
Establish formal cross-group teams with the responsibility of identifying ways to increase levels of collaboration and share best practices.
Make process/operation improvement a high-emphasis area in the performance management process.
Explore ways to encourage employee autonomy and innovation while retaining accountability for getting the job done.
Establish a formal and/or informal employee suggestion program. Publicly recognize creative and innovative ideas.
Meet with team leaders or employee representatives from other groups to discuss improving collaboration between groups, identify ways to work more efficiently, and share internal best practices.
Promote a more collegial atmosphere both within and across teams/groups. Meet offsite on occasion to establish a team identity. Do social activities outside of work. Involve employees in community activities.
Communicate your team’s goals and objectives to the teams that you provide support for and that those support you.
Develop an agenda to proactively seek team members’ ideas. Reserve time in meetings for brainstorming. Ask for feedback and comment on all ideas – including your own. Make sure your questions are open-ended to draw out full responses.