Human Resources: Will Team-building Help or Hurt Your Catalog Operation?

It often seems necessary to assemble teams within your organization to tackle certain tasks. New merchandising initiatives, catalog design overhauls and Web site launches all have the potential to involve employees from various departments across your company. But are teams always the best way to get the job done?

To determine if a team approach will be beneficial for your next project, The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) offers the following audit questionnaire in its recent whitepaper, “The HR Generalist’s Guide to Teambuilding.” Here are some questions and pointers from the paper:

* What business problems or issues does the organization plan to address by using the team approach? The key is in establishing whether or not individual effort would be better suited to the task than a team of individuals, SHRM officials write.

* Does your company have a clear mission and value set to which all employees subscribe? One of the most important factors in building a successful team is a strong sense of accountability throughout the company hierarchy.

* Are teams appropriate at this point in the organizational life cycle? “If the company is just starting up,” the report says, “it may not be appropriate to introduce self-directed work teams. But a task force may work just fine in selecting a new payroll system.”

* Does senior management fully support the team’s concept? Management styles and the very nature of your business come into play in deciding if teams will work for your company. “This can make the difference between teams being viewed as ‘nice to have’ or as a fundamental part of how business is done,” the authors write.

To get a copy of the SHRM whitepaper, “The HR Generalist’s Guide to Teambuilding,” go to http://www.shrm.org/hrresources/whitepapers_published/toc.asp