Identifying Barriers to Team Effectiveness on a Tight Timeline

“Facing both urgency and unprecedented expectations for project success, Kai assembled the stakeholders to map out and make immediate improvements in recruitment and hiring processes. Through collaboration, workshop participants created a framework that resulted in a resounding success.”

Brian Nguyen

Problem

A global technology company planned to hire over forty people in two months during a strategic reorganization, and failure to meet the deadline would significantly impact the organization’s revenue. The number of new hires was four times larger than any hiring effort in the past, and previous hiring initiatives had been characterized by a lack of communication and difficulty in completing tasks in a timely manner. Moreover, there had been recent turnover in the HR leadership team and another key HR leader was out on leave. My client tasked me with identifying and correcting barriers to team effectiveness before the hiring initiative began.

Solution

I investigated why previous hiring initiatives had faltered by conducting a strategic audit of stakeholders. These interviews revealed a consensus about inefficient software systems but little else. Because the software systems could not be improved in the time allotted to the project, I needed to empower the stakeholders to take ownership of the problem and design their own intervention. I led a design thinking workshop for all stakeholders that allowed them to reach consensus on process bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Together, they brainstormed new agreements and KPIs that enabled them to meet their hiring targets on time. 

Methodology

Stakeholder interviews revealed that the team was excited to be working on a high-profile project and they were invested in doing a good job. However, the interviews also revealed a lack of communication between hiring managers and the hiring team, with both sides blaming the other for slow responses. Despite their frustrations, all parties spoke respectfully of their peers, and they agreed that the processes and software the company relied on created bottlenecks.

Encouraged by the good will of team members towards each other and their enthusiasm to perform well on this project, I organized a design thinking workshop to clarify exactly what the current process was, where the most significant barriers to effectiveness lay, and how the team could improve their effectiveness.

Employees shared their frustrations with the hiring software and processes, which required many time-consuming manual steps. I promised to advocate for a better software solution, but set expectations that a new software implementation was outside of the scope of this project.

The next most vexing problem was the lack of timely responses between the hiring teams in HR and the hiring manager. When asked to brainstorm solutions, all stakeholders requested a KPI of a 24 hour response time, to be reported weekly to the executive team. The hiring managers agreed to a weekly status meeting with their recruiters to ensure timely communication. Both my client and the HR executive agreed to monitor and enforce these KPIs.

However, I was concerned that the team still lacked sufficient processes to meet their KPIs. The HR team relied on ad hoc, one- on- one communications to monitor progress, and too often, this left them scrambling to correct an issue that could have been easily avoided if the team had known about it in advance. With some reluctance, the team agreed to try a thirty-minute weekly meeting to keep each other informed. They quickly found the meeting to be effective, far less time-consuming than they had feared and effective at strengthening relationships between stakeholders. The team was excited and energized by their improved performance, and they successfully hit their deadline. The client gave positive feedback, and the entire team was recognized for their successful performance at a company-wide all hands meeting.