Managing Service Teams

Posted: October 17th, 2013

Managing Service Teams

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Managing Service Teams

            Efficient delivery of services to customers requires the business organization to acquire skilled employees. Once the firm has obtained the best employees, they are grouped into teams depending on the needs of the company in question. Setting up of teams will ensure that the employees all the tasks allocated to them diligently. In addition to this, the creation of teams will encourage cooperation in the organization that will result in good relationships between the employees. It has been determined repeatedly by the use of research that customer satisfaction is entirely based on the way the teams are shaped. That is, the members, how they interact with the customers and the level of cooperation in the team. If all these aspects are followed, the business will have satisfied customers who will be loyal to the organization because of the services accorded to them by the employees in the business.

However, creation of a winning team is not an easy task. This is because employees are of different characters. Some of their mannerisms may only be displayed after the person has been employed for a long time in particular circumstances. For this reason, creating a new team may be very difficult for management since they do not know how well the employees will interact when they are placed together. Nevertheless, this should not deter them since the creation of the teams is beneficial to both the business and the employees in question. While assigning employees to specific teams, some factors should be considered. The two major factors are the expertise of the individual and his or her character. These factors should govern the selection process in order to ensure that each team is balanced (Shapiro et al, 2005, p. 57).

Balance in a team is achieved when the team is made up of people with diverse characters and skill, which will complement each other. This will be very important for the success of the team. It is very probable to find an employee who is very friendly while another one is antisocial. The management should ensure that each team has one social employee and an antisocial employee as well. This will ensure that the two teams will be balanced. In the case that all the social employees are put into one group while the antisocial in another, the imbalance will cause a significant effect on the business as it will lose customers since the antisocial lot does not know how to interact with them. The team members themselves will also be affected since they will become frustrated because their productivity will be low. In addition to this, unhealthy competition may arise in the firm between the two teams (Brody, 2005, p. 70).

The example given above displays the case of an imbalance based on the characters of the employees. Such a situation will have significant effects to the both the team members and the organization. Instead, the management should ensure that the teals are all balanced out. This will be beneficial since both teams will compete favorably since they have equal resources. Each of the teams will allocate the best-suited individual for the tasks that have been allocated to them. For this reason, the team will perform all its jobs effectively. In addition to this, the relationship between the employees will be significantly improved. In another case of disparity in character, some employees may be shy while others are very confident. This variation in character will automatically warrant a difference in the tasks that each of the employees will perform.

Dissimilar jobs should be given to them in order to ensure that they are comfortable and they can perform them well. If this is done, their productivity will increase significantly since they are not straining themselves in any way. However, they should be given tasks that will challenge them occasionally in order to help them improve in the specific fields that the work in. It is expected that the shy employee in this case will have tasks that do not require interaction with customers too much allocated to her. On the other hand, the confident employee may be given tasks that will include a lot of interaction and explanations to the customers. If this is done, the business will become very successful as it focuses on the strengths of each of their employees (Kozlowski et al. 2010, p. 120).

Expertise refers to the aspect in which a certain employee is very good. As expected in an organization, the specialties of the employees should be diverse. This is imperative for any business to become successful. Diverse skills will ensure that all the needs of the business are met and that the business will be very productive. The deviation in expertise is mainly due to the difference in academic training. For instance, one employee may have a degree in marketing while another has one in finance. Management should keep this in mind while allocating employees to their groups. If the team will work in the human resource department, it is fundamental that employees who are well versed in this department will be selected for the team. It will be rather futile to allocate a person who is proficient in accounting but has no knowledge in human resource management (Osnowitz, 2010, p. 98).

Skill may also arise from experience. That is, an employee may become very good at something because they have repeatedly done it for several years. Management while creating the teams should also consider this factor in order to ensure that the team that they are creating will be well balanced out. In other cases, expertise is sometimes innate. This is to mean that some skills that some employees may have are not necessarily due to any training that they have obtained. For example, a person may have a natural problem solving ability. That is, he or she always considers every problem like a challenge and is always able to come up with solutions to the problem yet the other employees neither may nor be able to. Such employees contribute a great deal to the success of the team and subsequently the organization in question.

Variations in the employees’ character and expertise are therefore a very important aspect of business. This is because the divergence has an effect on the overall performance of the business in question. The effects may be direct or indirect but they affect the success of the business. For this reason, the management of an organization or business should consider these factors care fully before they create teams. This is because the satisfaction and loyalty of the customers of the business depends principally on the efficiency of the teams that have been created in the business.

References

Brody, R, 2005, Effectively Managing Human Service Organizations, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Kozlowski et al, 2010, Learning, Training, and Development in Organizations, Routledge, New York.

Osnowitz, D, 2010, Freelancing Expertise: Contract Professionals in the New Economy, ILR Press, Ithaca.

Shapiro, D, et al, 2005, Managing Multinational Teams: Global Perspective,. Elsevier JAI. Amsterdam.