Many of the boundaries of the traditional organization have disappeared. The organizational chart lingers as an easily presented visual, but the majority of work is accomplished through messy, informal networks.
Employees play a large role in shaping and sustaining these informal networks. Effectively leveraging those networks to create ad-hoc teams brings certain challenges. As such, new tools are required that enable teams to be successful.
In the world of teaming, employees can reach out to colleagues, customers or business partners, coming together as ad-hoc teams to solve specific needs, and disbanding or reforming just as quickly. Teams can easily reach across levels, functions, and, frequently, geographies.
With so much latitude, though, several important considerations arise: Who should be involved and what perspectives need to be included, at what level of resourcing and for how long? Ultimately, each of these questions contributes to how effective the team will be in accomplishing its work.
Historically, people managers were tasked with building the ideal team and had time to plan around each question. The organizational hierarchy provided further guardrails on how teams were formed.
Now, teams are developed on the fly, in real-time, and with whatever information is at hand.
Team composition may come down to who an individual has worked with in the past, scant documentation from similar projects, or perhaps a reliance on a trusted colleague’s network. The manager, in the role of coach rather than team-builder, can also help provide access to novel connections or resources.
Each of these paths depends on employees having information that keeps up with the speed of work, and reflect the complex patterns of social connection and expertise that exist.
With social technologies that facilitate continuous peer-to-peer performance conversations and feedback, that type of information is more widely available. It encourages employees to step outside of their own experiences, leveraging the collective knowledge of the organization to build a better team.
The truth is that informal networks can be resource-intensive, particularly when time is spent developing rather than learning from those networks. Social tools can help shift this balance in the positive direction, increasing the amount of learning while spreading out the costs of network development.
Research has also found that individuals in more mature networks are less likely to develop novel connections, limiting the effectiveness of ad-hoc teams tasked with addressing novel challenges or developing innovations. Technologies that increase employees’ exposure to the work being done around them have the opportunity to minimize those potential negative effects.
Fast-paced and ad-hoc teams have the potential to contribute to the success of the organization, but only if employees are equipped with information that allows them to create effective teams in the first place. How does your organization support teaming?
As Globoforce’s Vice President of Client Strategy and Consulting, Derek Irvine is an internationally minded management professional with over 20 years of experience helping global companies set a higher ambition for global strategic employee recognition, leading workshops, strategy meetings and industry sessions around the world. He is the co-author of "The Power of Thanks" and his articles on fostering and managing a culture of appreciation through strategic recognition have been published in Businessweek, Workspan and HR Management. Derek splits his time between Dublin and Boston. Follow Derek on Twitter at @DerekIrvine.
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