Monday, 22 february 2021 | Redacción CEU
They have a common goal, are governed by principles of collaboration and solidarity and constitute the organizational structure par excellence. Who are they? We are talking about work teams. The success of companies depends to a great extent on these groups of people, because only through their synergy can the objectives of these firms be achieved. And if we add to these diverse groups of individuals the current pandemic situation, with social distancing and a lot of uncertainty, everything seems to get very complicated. Is it as difficult as it seems to keep a team together in times of coronavirus? How to get team up in a context as adverse as the current one?
In recent years, the world of Human Resources has begun to appraise performance collectively. They have gone from using a people-centric approach, in which the unit of evaluation is the employee, to a team-centric approach, in which the unit is work teams themselves. In this new and much more shared vision of work, managers have also moved from setting individual goals to setting goals for the entire organization. Once they are defined, they can be divided into smaller objectives split up into different business units or teams. However, the essence remains the same: goals need to be achieved through collaboration and teamwork.
Logically, this new approach has influenced the way we work. Employees have now more autonomy when it comes to carrying out their work, even by setting their own goals to achieve those of the company. This does not mean that the figure of the leader has lost strength within the team, but that there is just a different work process. Nor does it mean that employees do not have to report their progresses to their superiors or that their individual inputs are no longer important. If the individual does not communicate, the team loses. If the individual fails, the team fails too. On the contrary, when a team worker meets the target they contribute positively to the achievement of their team’s goals, and therefore, of their company’s.
Cohesion with social distancing
The arrival of the coronavirus put all companies to test, even those already working with this approach. Not only did work teams have to set new goals in a much more hostile and uncertain context than usual, but they also had to learn to work in a completely new way.
Telecommuting has spread over the last few months and many team members, and even entire teams, must now work from home. This fact is causing this new way of working, which is much more autonomous and flexible, to be gaining more and more importance currently. And this is a challenge for the people who take command.
Leaders must create good teams, keep them together (even though they are many kilometers apart from each other and do not see each other for months) and make them run like clockwork. To do this, they need to understand both the limitations and advantages of this new way of working, and preparing, because it is highly likely that, in the future post-covid scenario, the hybrid model will be the most popular model.