Free web resources for team building

Teamwork may be the last bastion of efficiency improvement in maintenance departments. Read this article to find some free web resources that'll strengthen your team.

By Russ Kratowicz, Executive Editor

PlantServices.com

For years now, maintenance professionals in manufacturing plants across the country have been immersed in a nasty do-more-with-less world that can be frustrating. They might know the plant needs a piece of hardware or an upgraded tool, but they know they’re not going to get the requisition past the bean counters. That’s fine, they can deal with it. They’re engineers, after all. They have ingenuity, they’re clever and they have an established track record of implementing workarounds to mitigate the lack of hardware. They solve that problem and move on to the next biggest one.

Downsizing has become an endemic feature of the plant landscape. Those relentless budget cuts start eating into the intellectual capital that keeps the maintenance department one short pace ahead of the steamroller. Now, it’s a case of do-more-with-fewer, where it’s harder to find an acceptable workaround that compensates for a lack of people.

Pretty soon, the only asset you’ll have left will be a few personal interactions, and those had better be effective. Yes, my friends, teamwork may be the last bastion of efficiency improvement. Let’s take a dive into the morass we call the Web in search of practical, zero-cost, noncommercial, registration-free Web resources that will help stack the chessboard in your favor. Remember, we search the Web so you don't have to.

Light reading
The good folks at Brandeis University try very hard to make it easy for a student to become a leader while on campus and after graduation. A section of the school’s Web site is dedicated to the proposition that a student can get out in front and make things happen in a variety of activities and venues. A relevant page of this training manual is titled “What makes a team a team?” and it resides at www.brandeis.edu/studentlife/takethelead/workshops/handouts/workshop3a.doc. The main takeaway is a listing of the characteristics of an effective team and the five stages in a team’s life cycle. Hey, we’ve got to start somewhere.

The library
OK, so the last staff meeting laid another burden upon your already full work day. You’re now in charge of turning a bunch of people into a team. Now what? You do a literature search, that’s what. This month’s explorations uncovered a great page that you can use as a starting point. Send that literary mouse to www.managementhelp.org/, then scroll down to click on “Group Skills.” When that page opens, scroll about half way down and click on “Team Building.” This takes you to Carter McNamara’s link-rich page that lets you hit the ground running. If nothing else, you’ll be able to dazzle them with jargon at the next progress review. Nevertheless, this is where you can pick up information about the basics of team building, building informal work teams, being an effective team member and ensuring team effectiveness and performance. This site, owned by Authenticity Consulting LLC, Robbinsdale, Minn., is a keeper.

Team power
Once upon a time, there were two struggling chemical plants in the United Kingdom. These poor old plants got shuffled from one owner to the next several times, and each new owner tried cutting back everywhere in an attempt to make the facilities profitable and producing at nameplate capacity. As you probably would guess, a succession of financial hatchet men got around to targeting plant maintenance. The results, as you probably would guess, were predictable. But teamwork saved the day when someone finally realized that uptime and reliability are worth their weight in pounds sterling. Let your mouse drive down the left side to www.dti.gov.uk/bestpractice/assets/cssabanci.pdf for the details in this case study that highlights team-based maintenance efforts.

Give it a sporting chance
Long before industry started exploring the power of teams, athletes had been getting together to stomp on the rabble they faced across the playing field. The sports track record is probably longer than industry’s. That’s why I’m recommending “Spotlight: Team-Building Wisdom from the Ottawa Senators,” an interview that the Industrial Relations Centre at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, conducted with John Phelan, the mental skills coach for the Ottawa Senators hockey team. According to Phelan, there are striking similarities between the organizational aspects of the industrial world and the way hockey is played. He highlights the importance of role clarification among team members as well as the value of team conflict and its resolution. Skate over to www.industrialrelationscentre.com/infobank/articles/team-building_wisdom_from_the_ottawa_senators.htm for the pep talk.

Better practices
The people at the Center for Collaborative Organizations at the University of North Texas spend time studying, as you would guess, teams and teamwork in a variety of forms. Among the tools they use is the venerable case study and they have a few of them, each of which provides more insight into mankind’s inherently cooperative nature. These pearls of wisdom have been collected into “Abstracts and Lessons Learned from Case Studies,” a document that discusses some of the real-world findings of 39 case studies from several sources. Team up with your trusty mouse and pay a visit to www.workteams.unt.edu/edu/caseindx.htm, where you’ll be able to examine some of the Center’s work output. Look at this site as another source of ideas for best practices when trying to develop your in-house dream team.