Research last year from the Human Capital Institute on “Designing Effective Teams” showed the following:
How many employees in your organization would rate their workplace teams as “very effective”? Unfortunately it’s probably much fewer than you want to believe. Here’s an idea: take the time today to go around to your team members/department/staff and ask each person privately to rate how effective the team is at performing and accomplishing team goals. Encourage each person to be completely honest and then ask for their feedback on ways the team can improve to become more effective. This isn’t about pointing fingers at people to blame them; it’s about gathering different people’s perspectives on the team’s weaknesses and different strategies for changing them for the better.
Increasing a team’s effectiveness could be as simple as holding more team building activities, taking them out to lunch to reward them for their hard work, or holding a team meeting with a coach to have an impartial third party review ways to improve team effectiveness. But you’ll never know how your team members really feel about how well (or poorly) they’re performing if you don’t ask for their input.