Introduction
According to the journal, they define teams as semi-autonomous rather than autonomous, since they do not believe that teams in a production setting, which have to meet pre-defined company goals, could or should be expected to reach full autonomy. Such teams work in a wider organizational framework, and they are responsible for their own part in reaching common business goals. This framework, of course, should be adjusted to the team’s needs to develop and improve its performance, but it will always be restricted and in line with the organization’s mission and goals.
The journals defined a semi-autonomous team as: A permanent group of people with a defined number of members. These members are committed, and they hold joint responsibility for a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach. These goals are based on ‘customers’ demands. The team performs in all areas with a high degree of independence and with continuous focus on improvement. The extra demand we place on continuous improvement implies that the team should constantly develop its responsibility, performance goals and approach in order to remain competitive in respect to changing customer and social demands. This continuous improvement can be characterized as a process of team development, which results in improving team performance.
This journal discuss about how the literature define teamwork, team development and team performance into three identified categories.
A theory proposed by Van Amelsvoort and Scholtes (1994). They describe how teams develop and what can be done to support teams to develop in steps. It is to adjust leadership style into the current stage of the team. The team will than develop into a completely self-managing unit that will improve base on their own initiative. However, the expected team performance at this stage is not based on empirical study.
Later in 1997, De Leede carried out an empirical study which did not emphasize actual teamperformance but rather closely examined the contribution of autonomous teams. The study suggested that the teams made a clear contribution to the continuous improvement of the organization in terms of observations, ideas and suggestions towards improving production, quality and quality of work life. However, concrete improvement in production, quality and quality of work life was not studied.
Two examples of studies which focus on the relationship between teamwork and subjectively measured performance.
1) Cohen and Ledford (1994). It carried out an extensive study on the effects of self-managing teams at an American telecommunications company. This study showed that the self-managed teams had significant better outcomes on quality of work life, particularly concerning different types of satisfaction. Perceived group functioning and performance were also much higher for the self-managed teams compared to the traditional groups. The journal also discuss about the self-managed work teams. They are given the authority, as a team, to make decisions about the work and to handle internal processes as they think which suits the best to generate productivity. This basically replaces the traditional work unit. They could make their own decisions about scheduling work, allocating tasks, controlling the quality of work and etc. A self-manage team consists of 5 to 15 members are large enough to provide a mix of skills and resources and function effectively.
Therefore, multitasking is also very important in a team. It means that team members are able to perform many different jobs. A study on the relationship between teamwork and business performance was carried out by the Social Economic Advice Council for the Dutch government. The study revealed that organizations working with a ‘stream-designed’ production system have a better quality of work life compared to organizations with a more traditional production system. A stream-design production system is defined as a team is responsible to produce a finish product or a complete past of the product. It indicated that these organizations have good opportunities to improve flexibility and controllability with this system. This explains the benefits of self-managing teams includes the improvement of work attitude and quality if work life, then productivity and quality improvement. Lower illness and absenteeism rates were also reported within the organizations.
2) Another study carried out by Vink in the Dutch postal service. This study compared the teamwork approach to traditional working methods. It appears that teamwork had a positive impact on the quality of work life. Moreover, the team performance was influence by teamwork when compared to traditional working methods.
Teams in all form and types, just like individual, are also accountable for their performance. Once a team achieves high levels of task performance, member satisfaction and team viability, they are considered as a highly effective team. It will really benefit an organization, because the teams served as a whole for the organization.
This is why, the practice of teams in organizations is very important, especially in today’s organizations. Teams are set up to study a specific problem and recommend solutions for organizations. Furthermore, they can even lead the organizations. Different individual have different point of views. They could share it among each other, to generate new ideas and solution for their organization, to have better judgments. This could really save up the cost and time for an organization .Besides that, opportunities for social interaction among members could also generate a better quality of work life. A team can provide individuals with a sense of security through work assistance and technical advice. Therefore, an individual could accomplish important tasks and help others to achieve satisfaction in their work. This help a organizations a benefit to always stay competitive and ahead of their competitors.
Team Development
For the de’nition of team development, we monitor Hut and Molleman (1998), wherein team development is defined as ’empowerment’ of a team ‘in several stages’ over time.
Hut and Molleman developed a method to create an additional dynamic and realistic form of the team development model of Van Amelsvoort and Scholtes (1994) by merging it with the work group characteristics theory presented by Campion et al. (1993). According to Hut and Molleman, we believe that ‘there are numerous ways to empower teams, that their stages might be mixed, and that their sequences may change’. Furthermore, we also imagine that team development is not ‘an ending story’, as a stage model might suggest. Somewhat, ‘in a dynamic environment, it is better to regard it in a perspective of continuous improvement’. Hut and Molleman mention about when developing teams it is not achievable to pay attention to all aspects at the same time as well. Henceforward, they de’ne four stages of team development as ‘issues rising in complexity, changing attention from routine to non-routine tasks, from individual to group, and from inwards oriented to outwards directed’. They still use the term ‘stages’ to express the fact that it is not possible to focus on all aspects simultaneously while they propose a possible overlap, as can be seen in their model.
Stage 1: Job Enlargement
Hut and Molleman (1998) specified that ‘the team concentrates on the redundancy of functions’, and ‘multi-functionality’ is their motto in stage 1. All members of the team must be able to perform the primary tasks of the team. In an organization, it develops qualified environment and generates cross-training programs to create multi-functionality. This could support the job enlargement when facing the variety of demand for production capabilities and the supply of work abilities.
Van Amelsvoort and Van Amelsvoort (2000) classified this phase as ‘technical pro’ciency’.
Stage 2: Job Enrichment
Hut and Molleman (1998) acknowledged that the primary characteristic of this stage is ‘minimal critical speci’cation and the redesign of the control structure’. The maximum degree of delegation of control tasks is used over here. The team takes over control tasks from their supervisor, as well as from supporting departments, such as quality and planning activities with as few restrictions as possible.
Van Amelsvoort and Van Amelsvoort (2000) identi’ed this phase as ‘managerial autonomy’.
In other words, the group takes over some managerial functions, e.g. the establishment of group objectives, the internal distribution of tasks, and the way operations are achieved. Upper management only ensure the tasks is performed correctly whereas allowing the employees’ personal contributions (Cherns, A., 1987). This is important to an organization because once these functions could implemented successfully, the self-reliance of the team, teamwork, and effective communication will be built. Members will feel a sense of ownership towards their role in the team for the reason that they committed themselves to the areas they helped to produce. This helped to improve high performance.
Stage 3: Co-Operation
Hut and Molleman (1998) described this stage as the ‘self-reliance of the team’. The team has to function as a team, and this required teambuilding, working on communication and joint decision-making. The team must become self-sufficient and independent of its supervisor. As a result, the team will be more independent.
Van Amelsvoort and Van Amelsvoort (2000) isolated this phase as ‘social maturity’.
Stage 4: High Performance
According to Hut and Molleman (1998), the majors of this stage are ‘double-loop learning’ ‘ the capacity to solve most non-routine problems, or, as van Amelsvoort and Scholtes (1994) put it, improving one’s own initiative ‘ and ‘management of team-boundaries’. This type of learning is useful to nowadays’ organizations because it refers to redefining ineffective norms and setting new priorities (Argyris, C. & Schon, D, A., 1996). ‘double-loop learning’ makes demands on the team’s learning and problem solving ability. To ensure that employees are able to solve unique problems successfully in these day, it is necessary to apply this type of learning into their working environment. Therefore, they will be able to develop good problem-solving skills.
This last aspect is based on Katz and Kahn (1978) and is about the management of relationships with other teams but also concerns customers and suppliers.
Van Amelsvoort and Van Amelsvoort (2000) identified this the phase ‘performance focuses’.
Open System Model of Teams
Team effectiveness = Quality if inputs x (process gains ‘ process losses)
This equation starts with the inputs because they set the essential foundations of team performance. And the fact shows that the stronger the input foundations of the teams, the better the chances of long team effectiveness. This journal discusses few inputs include team setting, nature of task, team capacity, and team composition.
Team Setting
Where tasks are delegated to the team, these responsibilities together form the basis for the autonomy of the team. The teams therefore formulate their own goals and plans, based on the plant’s goals. The results and achievements of the goals are formally followed up once a week. The results are discussed more thoroughly after a period of time, and goals and plans are also updated. Team performance can suffer when goals are fuzzy, insufficiently challenging or randomly imposed. Team setting or team goals are very important because the members in the team will work interdependently to achieve the team goals. Furthermore, they understand that these goals and objectives are accomplished best by mutual support.
Nature of Task
Another important team input is the nature of task. Different tasks place different demand from the teams. When the tasks that delegated to the team are cell and well-defined, it is easier for the member to both know what they are trying to accomplish and to work together with the same goal while doing it.
Team Capacity
An increasing capacity for improving initiative within the teams enabled the teams to reduce the number of defects in the works. Having improved control capacity within the team, which means having more responsibility to make decisions, led to an improved response regarding quality defects.
Team Composition, Diversity and Team Performance
The team is also involved in the recruitment process for new members. Through Kuipers and de Witte’s research, the diversity in a team composition is an important team input. A variety of skills, experiences, personalities and cultures can substitute for colleagues. Therefore, the production process is less dependent on a small group of workers sharing specialized skills. However, multi- functionality is not sufficient; collaboration is also needed for smooth progressions, and good collaboration within the group is required in order to develop the multi-functionality of all operators in solving delivery problems. Improved co-operation was required to gain higher productivity. The sectors that need to be improved in today’s organizations are the communication within the team, joint decision-making and the team building.
Through cross-training, workers become capable of performing a wide range of team tasks.
This practice is very important and it should be implemented in today’s organization. This system shapes to job enlargement. It generates a shield of capacity so that shifts in demand be able to allocate with more efficiently and effectively. Consequently, it will grow the flexibility of current organizations. Moreover, this practice makes the team less vulnerable to changes in the supply of resources caused by illness or turnover in today’s organization.
In analyses, job enlargement was demonstrated to be related to satisfaction. This result is consistent with the socio-technical theory, in which the higher multi-functionality of workers and more variety in the work tasks increase work satisfaction. Concerning the relationship between job enlargement and co-operation compared to delivery precision, the multi-functionality of the operators appeared to create greater ‘exibility in dealing with disturbances. In other words, since the operators possess.
Team Performance
As discussed in the journal, there are few approaches which are related to the team performance concept. Team performance is judged based on the quality of working life (QWL) and business performance (BP), these also the indicators of the subjective and objective of the performances.
There is a concept implied by Suzaki in the year 1993, he said that an organization’s performance is based on customer satisfaction. He also viewed the employees as their internal customers. There are 3 criteria which known as QCD to check on customer satisfactions which are high-quality of products and service (Q), at less costs (C) and shorter delivery periods (D). By following this three sectors, the team able to perform effectively. In addition, Suzaki also stated that if the sectors of safety (S) and morale (M) are added to the employees’ concern, QCDSM will become the major criteria for an organization to be success. Therefore, these 5 items should be concern the most as it decided the organization’s success or failure.
Besides, there are 2 subjective measurements of criteria on the quality of working life (QWL) which will bring effects on team performance; these are the individual satisfaction and the involvement. These are the areas to test on the commitment and the overall performance of the employees. With a good satisfaction on the team work, the employees will definitely perform better in their job, whereas it will goes the other way. Moreover, for the business performance, the unit of measurements will be on the quality and delivery precision. For the quality, they will be check on the percentage of the quality of the finish goods without any defects whereas for the delivery precision, they will be check on the percentage of the production according to the schedule. Thus, with these measurements, it came up with a conclusion where with a greater effectiveness and efficiency in team performance, there will be a higher productivity with a lower costs will be indicated.
High-Performance Team
With a good team performance, it actually created a high performance team. High performance team is located at the stage 4 in the level of empowerment. There are few theories implied in high performance team. According to Hut and Molleman’s theory in the year of 1998, they stated that the high performance team is following the principle of ‘double-loop learning’, which saying that this team has the capable to solve most non-routine problems. Besides, in year 1994, Van Amelsvoort and Scholtes stated that high performance team actually helps in improving one’s own initiative and also the management of team boundaries as the team will be learning for each other. In year 1978, Katz and Kahn not only view this aspect as the management of the relationships with other teams, they also strengthen on the relationships with the customers and suppliers as all of them play an important roles to result a high performance in team.
There are few characteristics which implicated high-performance team. The main characteristic is the team leadership skills. The team performances are actually based on the leader on how they lead and divided the job in order to get the highest achievement. To be a high-performance team, the team has to set a clear and challenging direction to ensure that they are on the right track and doing the right things. Besides, they have to keep the goals and expectations clear. Without clear goals and expectation, the team will not able to perform well as they do not know what is their target and what they want to achieve in the future. Thirdly, their communication also has to be on a higher standard to show their customers that they are professional and hence build the mutual trust and the confidence among the customers. Moreover, a high performance team also has to create a sense of urgency all the times to ensure that they are always ready to face the feedbacks or the problems from the customers and also be prepared with solutions to solve the problems. Furthermore, a high performance team must make sure that their members are taught with the right skills. Not only that, they have to keep the positive mindset and behaviors all the time. They also should create an early performance on ‘successes’. A high performance team also has to be introduced with useful information and help the members with the useful information. Lastly, they have to give positive feedback to get to learn and improve from the past experiences.
Improving Team Processes
In order to get a high performance team in an organization, team processes have to be improved. To improve the team processes, there are few sectors that have to be concern on such as when there is the entry of new members, task and maintenance leadership, roles and role of dynamics, team norms, and team cohesiveness and also the inter-team dynamics. These are the sectors where will affect the team processes, in order to improve the team processes, a good handling in these sectors is a must. For example, individual entry problems are very common whenever a new team is formed and when a new member is join into an existing team. If the organization does not concern on this new entry problem, the team processes will definitely be affected as there is some outlier who cannot mix and work in as a team whereas, if there is a specific guidance for a new comer to follow, the problems faced will be minimize and hence the team processes will not be affected or even zero effect. Besides, role difficulties also will affect the team processes as the team members are unclear about what are they doing, they will be overwhelming, underwhelming or even involve in a conflict, these will affected the team processes seriously. In order to solve this issue, before the team processes start on, the team members should be clear on their vision, goal and mission to minimize the chances on wrong doing.
Thus, improving team processes is really one of the important criteria to work on. This is due to it will affect the organization productivity and profitability. In order to improve the team processes, the organization should examine on the team development and the performance development at first. As what the studies shown, team development and performance development are interrelated as both of them will bring effects to each other. There are a lot of statistics shown in the journal like the average performance scores and development for the working life criteria, overview of significant relationships between team development and performance with step-wise multiple regression and etc. to show their co-relation. Without a good team development, it will affect an organization’s team process as in their performance will declined and hence lead to a decrease in their productivity. However, with a good team development, it will directly bring the positive effect on the performance development which resulted in high performance team occur and also increase the productivity.
Improving Team Communication and Improving Team Decisions
A team is a group of people working out together to finish a task or to archive common goals. In an organization, team work is really important. It occurs when the team members live it up to their own collective accountability for target accomplishment. While in a team, they are several types of characteristic and they may not compromise to each other so easily. Some of the members are ego, with high leadership quality and it is hard to communicate with them because they got their own way of thinking and they don’t really listen to the others advise, especially when the team is pinned in a destructive competition. To avoid any conflicts while working out in the work force, it’s always better to plan a group-team building program that embolden positive interactions and helps members of different teams learn how to cope and work with each other more cooperatively.
Improving Team Communication
There are three patterns that we can see when team members interact with each other while working on the task. These specialize usually called them the interacting team, the co-acting team and the counteracting team. Interacting team have a high interdependency around a common task, and they are best at complex task, they are the decentralized communication network, they communicate directly with one another, sharing information with everyone else. Secondly, the co-acting team they centralized their network, only best at the simple task. Last but not least, the counteracting team, a restricted communication network, team members’ disagreement with one another and it is a slow task accomplishment. Poor communications often creates problems, especially while working in teams. Based on the article, communications in team work are the co-acting team. In the co-acting team, it gives more independent to the members to work it out on their own and then combine all their ideas together. Basically, this pattern of network only can do simple task, and the work are easily subdivided.
Improving Team Decisions
Decisions making is the most important activities in a team. It is a process of choosing the best out of all the alternatives which will bring the best benefits back to the company. There are few ways that a team can be improved in making their decisions. The team decisions can be improved as they had overcome the six main problems which are the lack of response, authority rule, minority rule, majority rule, consensus and also unanimity. Team decisions usually given more variety choices of information as problem solutions and also generates more understanding and commitment from the team, however, there are also some effects such as team decisions have the potential liabilities like the social pressure had to be conformed and also required a greater time in making a decision. Furthermore, groupthink is also one of the effects which will affect the team decisions as in both positive and negative ways. To improve the team decisions, the organization must have the tendency in maintaining their capabilities on critical evaluative to ensure that there is no poor decisions made. Lastly, improving team decisions can be done by implemented special techniques in it such as brainstorming, the nominal group technique and also the Delphi technique. These are the ways to gather all the effective information to determine the decision making.
Team development: How does team development?
In this paper, there are 37 teams involved in this analysis in order to get the result on how do the team developed, each of the teams are actually varies in their development. According to the Hut and Molleman (1998), they stated that the development of the dimensions in an organization is slightly linear. Every single member in the team has a completely different characteristic, there only a few teams of people who are actually exposed to the linear pattern of the development. However, Van Amelsvoort and Scholtes (1994) and Van Amelsvoort and Van Amelsvoort (2000)’s hypothesis on the strict theory of team development in subsequent phases had been opposed. Moreover, there is a question to be asked in Hut and Molleman (1998) in which the employment during the stage approaches. Hut and Molleman had also discovered a step of pattern in a team when they did the study in Philips.
Team development and performance: ‘what is the impact of team development on team performance’?
In order to make an effective team in work, there is a balance relationship between the team development and team performance. Generally, people tend to misinterpret that team development is the goal of itself; however, it is not true. To make teamwork become more effective, we have to identify the relationship between the team development and team performance. For example, teamwork can be performed better when they are given by the ‘hard evidence’ rather than the theoretical assumption. This is due to hard evidence able to give the team more confidence compared to the others. Besides, we also have to interpret the relationships between each of the team development dimensions. As what we seen in an organization, an organization will actually divided into different department and handling different tasks, hence, to ensure that every department are effective in work, a different style of team development should be performed in return with a good team performance.
Next, this journal also studied on the relationship between the development of job enrichment and high performance with the development in quality. With the statistic they had been researched on, it shows the increases in the delegation of control tasks and also the capacity. These increases are able to improve the initiative within the teams which enable the team to reduce the number of defeat. This is due to by having improved control capacity within the team, the team will have more responsibility in making decision which will finally led to an improved response regarding to the quality of defeat. On the other hand, a higher level of double ‘loop learning enable to improve the insight of according to the ability on solving the non-routine problems within the product quality’s area.
However, there are certain sectors which will be affected the team development and resulted in the team performance get affected. For instance, the sectors that affect the team work including the development of multi-functional organization, the processes of the co-operation among the team, the co-ordination within the team and etc. To get rid of this issues, there are few improvements had to be done. Firstly, the organization has to improve the co-operation as in the criteria of team processes, communication, decision-making within the team, team building and so on. These are the criteria which will bring significant effects on the performance and the productivity of the team.
As a conclusion, teamwork plays an important role in an organization. Every single sectors or criteria might cause significant effects on the team performance regarding to the team development. Therefore, the organization should figure out the balance relationship between all the sectors in order to maintain the good performance in it.
CASE STUDY
This case study shows that how a company gets success after applying the team approach into their company. The company that our group found is Blue Circle Cement. Blue Circle Cement is the UK’s largest cement producer, supplying about half of the country’s needs from ten cement works. Cement has been manufactured there since 1957. The company’s Cauldon Cement Works is situated at the southern tip of the Pennine Chain near Stoke-on-Trent. The factory supplies the West Midlands area and is the third largest belonging to Blue Circle Cement. In the early 1980s, it was decided to make a major investment of ??40 million at Cauldon to build a new highly automated computer controlled plant capable of producing over 3,000 tons of cement per day.
In recent times Blue Circle Cement has won a number of awards for its Quality Improvement Cycle and Human Resources initiatives. What the company has done is to create an empowered workforce which has become the driving force for superior performance coupled with the utilization of advanced technologies. Blue Circle Cement took ten years to achieve this huge change in culture and this could not have taken place quickly. It has needed time but the achievement in winning Quality Awards is recognition from external experts that Blue Circle Cement is getting it right.
Nowadays, Blue Circle Cement emphasizes on creating a teamwork approach, where groups of employees are given far more responsibility for making decisions for themselves. Two new terms have come to be widely used:
Empowerment – This means the increased participation by employees in their workplace with a view to encouraging initiative and a spirit of internal entrepreneurialism among employees.
Work Teams – The idea is that business is really a series of projects carried out by small groups of people with complementary skills. This is a move away from dividing businesses into clearly-defined functions such as production and marketing.
This does not mean that the individual employee is no longer important; conversely, it means that the effectual and efficient teamwork goes beyond individual achievement. We believe that the most effective teamwork and the higher work performance is produced when the employees contribute together and work towards the shared goals and objectives.
The company decided to develop cultures in these business units that would be at the leading edge of best work practices, labor relations and productivity which would then be further employed throughout all other business units in the country. Blue Circle cement realized that team approach is very important as a team with multiple skills is needed to increase the sufficiency of productivity and create a better workforce.
This program of change involved a radical overhaul of working practices, reward systems and, not least, company culture. The results included gaining a flexible, multi-skilled workforce working on annualized hours contracts which eliminated overtime. Higher productivity and lower unit costs have been reflected in the bottom-line. The program enabled management- employee relations at the works to move from a ‘them and us’ adversarial culture to one of greater employee involvement and shared goals: a ‘win/win’ situation.
From the case study, we realized that the UK cement industry in the early 1980s was characterized by high manning levels of both staff and hourly paid workers; relatively low wages and high overtime levels. A working week in excess of 60 hours was common. Restrictive working practices were the norm in the company, with strict differentiation between crafts and between process and craft workers. Additional payments were made for overtime and also for work in unfavorable conditions. It showed that there were more breakdown happened under these system. The employees earned more when they worked for more overtime. Not surprisingly, the company will have low productivity. Without the proper system, members worked independently as they were differentiated with their department. Employees were lack of mutual support because they were often not working towards the same goals. The employees focused mostly on themselves. In order to earn more, they will try to work overtime. They did not concern about the productivity since they were not engage in the planning.
Morale was poor and conflict was common in the company. We have been informed that the management and employee relationships were characterized by low levels of trust and an adversarial ‘them and us’, ‘win/lose’ culture. Our group believe that result of lack of trust between the management and employees is due to they not fully understand the role of each member. The employees were given their tasks or told their duty by the higher level management. The case study mentioned about restrictions working practices was the norm. We assumed that suggestions from employees were infrequently welcomed. This condition was bad because it will trigger the employees to hold back their talent, opinions or suggestions although they had plenty to contribute.
With the intention of improving the company, they could not continue in this way. Radical changes needed to be made in this deeply rooted culture. A new vision for the future was required. The shared vision for the future was to have a highly skilled and flexible workforce, working as an integrated team which, together with the new technology, would be able to compete with the best in the world.
Key elements of this new vision were:
‘ Enhanced skills for individuals with a reduction in the number of job grades, leading to greater flexibility.
‘ Introduction of a simple pay structure with the elimination of paid overtime and bonuses and increased basic wage levels.
‘ Significantly reduced manning levels and a reduction in total labor cost.
It was decided that the new working practices would be developed into an employment package called Integrated Working and the Stable Income Plan – or in brief Integrated Working.
The features of Integrated Working include:
‘ An annual hour contract.
‘ The reduction in job categories from 14 to 3. Jobs are now defined far more broadly than in the past. The three broad categories are process operator, senior process operator and craft worker. This has meant that each employee has been expected to learn and develop new skills through a training program.
‘ A new team working approach. The ability of everyone to work together and have mutual respect was considered essential to the development of the new culture. This has involved a considerable resource implication in terms of developing teamwork skills through training, including the training of team leaders.
‘ A joint review of the system between the management and the union on a regular basis in order to seek continuous improvements.
This package called Integrated Working can implemented into today’s organization as it is effective to improve the productivity and encourage high performance. These features brings a lot of advantages. Employees work interdependently and work towards both personal and tem goals. They might understand these goals are accomplished best through mutual support and encourage better team communication. They will feel a sense of job enrichment towards their role in the group because they dedicated themselves into the works. Throughout the training provided by company, employees could learn more and it will encourage them to offer their skills and knowledge into the team. This will indirectly contribute to higher job performance and better decision-making. Integrated working also provide team leaders training. For information, a team must have principled leadership to ensure everything in the team goes well. Regularly, a team needs a team leader to lead and this leader needs to have good leadership skills. Team leadership training could make sure that the team leader has the skills to be in this position and he or she will work hard for the good of the team.
The Stable Income Plan
In order to create a new environment based on trust it was important to give employees a new package based on a secure income. This system is based on a Fixed Constant Salary. This system can be applied or referred by the other organizations. This system reassure employees to be interested on work during working time and go home after their shift was accomplished. It prevent them to boost overtime earnings. Hence, employees will take responsibility and accountability for work done during that shift.
Team training
From the case study, we know that in order to facilitate the changes team training was at a premium. Team training involved everyone in the workplace. The training covered senior managers, staff team training, team leader briefings, and team building workshop. Our group believe this an appropriate training for this company itself and also other companies. This workshop looked at all aspects of team building, leadership and teamwork while ensuring that suitable resources were provided for team building. They assure that the management team understand the training system in depth. Team training helps the staff to involving team building into daily operation and encouraging cooperative learning. The role of the team leader was seen as crucial. Therefore, they introduced the team leader briefings in order to ensure that they assumed a leadership role in Team Building. Lastly, the team building workshop was the key element of the whole changing process. It was compulsory for the leader to encourage communication and develop participatory and co-operative approaches because most if the employees were new to the processes of teamwork. Feedback regarding to Integrated Working System was collected from the team members. Team member base on their success on trust could encourage them to express their questions, opinions and views. During this session, members will make effort to listen and accept others’ point of view and discuss about the questions. This will contribute to effective team communication.
Skills Training Program
In addition to the team training, employees were expected to carry out a skills training program. Everyone had to learn at least four new skills and craft workers had to learn at least one other new craft. Initial training involved between four and six weeks for each employee. Skills training program is beneficial for the company because it could support job enlargement when facing a variety of demand for production capabilities and the work capabilities. Plus, this program can also be implemented in today’s organization. Production process is less dependent on a small group of workers sharing specialized skills. Through training, workers become capable of performing a wide range of team tasks. It generates a shield of capacity so that shifts in demand be able to allocate with more efficiently and effectively. Consequently, it will grow the flexibility of current organizations.
Cement production had increased and the workforce had fallen. Continuous improvements since have resulted in the. The new working practices were self-financing with reduced staffing levels, reduced unit labor costs and increased output per employee. Employees had gained higher wages whilst each worked on average eight hours less per week. The increased skills and flexibility of employees, plus the end of demarcations, produced a more efficient workforce able to complete jobs more quickly. Employees found the increased variety and challenge in their jobs stimulating and the development of team working increased employee involvement and sense of pride in the job. This had led to improvements in commitment and morale. Integrated Working was subsequently introduced to all Blue Circle Cement plants.
Total Quality Approach
However, this was in many ways only a starting point for a process of continuous improvement. The next step was to develop a Total Quality Approach throughout the organization. Quality improvement is a continuous effort to eliminate wasteful practices and to make improvements. Quality requires power and responsibility to be put in the hands of everyone in the company. Blue Circle Cement has developed the theory of a Total Quality Staircase. There are eleven steps in Total Quality Approach which are identifying barrier to involvement, develop a common vision, develop the plan, keep people informed, develop the Total Quality concept, building a supportive structure, developing facilitators to help the process, empowerment flow, improvement teams, customer focus, and continuous improvement.
Our group agree that Total Quality Approach that implemented by Blue Circle Cement helps an organization as the result is proved by them. Today’s organization can consider applying this approach. This approach strengthens the competitive position, provide higher productivity, improve job security, deliver better workforce, and develop innovative processes.
In conclusion, Blue Circle Cement is a real example for today’s organization to refer. This company took ten years to achieve this huge change in culture from a ‘them and us’ adversarial culture to one of greater employees’ involvement and shared goals: a ‘win/win’ situation. Most importantly, it becomes so successful. Mary E. Pearson once said: ” change doesn’t happened overnight- it’s molded by people who don’t give up.’ We believe that change will not immediately tangible, it is a process and Blue Circle Cement did it.
Works Cited
Kuipers, B. S., & Witte, M. C. (2005). Teamwork: a case study on development and performance. Int. J. of Human Resource Management 16:2 , 185-201.
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