Resilient and future-ready teams are equally prepared for good times and bad. They empower their organizations to adapt to change and thrive in a changing environment. Their leaders enable the organization to create value for clients and ensure the company can get through any situation — including an economic downturn — while remaining profitable.
So how can you create high-performing and resilient teams in your company? In this blog post we discuss the best practices GAP implements within our own teams and for each of our clients.
Standardize Work Processes
When an economic downturn strikes hiring freezes and smaller team sizes may force you to work smarter with your remaining resources. Smarter means standardized work processes and procedures with clearly defined roles and responsibilities at every level.
It also means uniformly implemented policies well-defined benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) that show your people what to do what not to do where they are and where they need to go.
Technology can help simplify the standardization and documentation effort. Collaboration platforms and project management apps enable you to improve your team’s efficiency and productivity and build a culture of open teamwork which is crucial to ensuring business continuity and resilience during a downturn.
Unlock Knowledge Silos and Prevent Knowledge Drain
Many companies have first-hand experience with the debilitating effects of knowledge drain. The drain of technical role-based or “tribal” knowledge typically occurs when employees leave an organization. This loss can temporarily disrupt operations. In the worst cases the loss of a single employee can cause an entire project or department to fall apart.
Resilient and prepared organizations don’t let this happen. Their leaders actively fight knowledge drain by fostering a collaborative knowledge-sharing culture. This positive environment encourages the open sharing of best practices and lessons learned. It promotes transparency trust and celebrating wins and discourages knowledge-hoarding and toxic competitiveness.
Prevent critical knowledge from disappearing when team members leave by creating a knowledge-sharing ecosystem. Delegate responsibilities and get multiple people to know the various processes systems and tools work to distribute and democratize knowledge.
Nurture Talent and Create Opportunities for Leadership Rotations
Having to do more with less is a tough but common ask. However it can also be a silver lining by opening leadership opportunities for the remaining team members. Use this challenging period to nurture employees who have demonstrated the ability to be leaders.
- Encourage existing leaders to mentor future leaders. Mentors should share their expert insights and experiences and support mentees with advice and encouragement when they face roadblocks.
- Establish a formal mentorship program and clearly state the potential benefits to both mentors and mentees. Outline the program’s basic structure but let the individual participants work out the details of their 1×1 relationships.
- Allow employees to rotate the ownership of certain tasks. Such rotations give opportunities to learn new skills and encourage employees to step out of their comfort zone. In this way they will be able to amplify their value to the firm while you increase their workplace engagement and motivation.
GAP has implemented these best practices with great success both internally and across many clients. Referred to as the Cycle of Development it is a key component of a healthy talent growth retention and continuity program.
Encourage People to Communicate Progress and Discuss Roadblocks
One problem with knowledge drain is that when employees leave the teams working in silos — especially “silos of one” — will struggle a lot more than teams that collaborate on projects communicate regularly and share both wins and losses.
Break down silos by getting team members to regularly share updates with each other. They should present their work give demonstrations or share ideas at team-wide brainstorming sessions. The goal is to have everyone on the same page at all times and to ensure they are prepared to pick up projects if someone suddenly leaves.
Revisit Your Onboarding Program
Fast effective onboarding is essential to get new team members operational — and more importantly productive. But if you have pruned your workforce you may now have fewer training resources to onboard new members.
This presents a good time to revisit your existing onboarding programs and look for ways to make them more effective. For example consider replacing or augmenting in-person training with eLearning modules. Or you can invest in a self-training platform where employees learn the skills required for their roles in a hands-on self-guided manner. It’s also useful to work with a partner like GAP to create and revise these programs.
Onboarding is a GAP specialty. Not only do we understand how to hire the best talent and engage them with meaningful work but we also follow a rigorous team design process to improve our clients’ onboarding success rates.
Every new employee we source gets assigned to a project lead who will show them the ropes and ensure they get a running start on your project. Our documented onboarding process covers the first 30 days of a new joiner’s tenure. Moreover our onboarding program focuses on making new members part of the GAP culture; but more importantly your culture.
Ready to Get Started?
GAP has empowered many organizations in North America to achieve their team efficiency goals with world-class technology consulting and engineering teams. We bring the skills experience expertise and domain knowledge that enables companies to scale smarter transform their business and gain a competitive edge.
Let GAP help you maintain business continuity even if you are implementing a hiring freeze or operating in an uncertain environment. Staff augmentation with GAP will get you through these times without losing momentum on mission-critical projects. Let’s get started!
