A team is a group of individuals working together to achieve common goals. It also can be defined as “A specific group whose members are collectively responsible for achieving the goals of the team, which flow into the achievement of the goals of the organization”.

The need for work teams:

There are a number of symptoms that suggest adopting the work teams as a fundamental solution which can be mentioned as follows:

1. The high level of waste in the organization’s resources.
2. Increasing complaints among the organization’s members, along with a focusing on individual goals.
3. Manifestations of conflict and disagreement between members of the organization.
4. Not sharing information with others, and considering information as power.
5. Lack of clarity of tasks and relationships.
6. Failure to understand and comprehend administrative decisions or not to implement them appropriately.
7. Lack of loyalty and commitment, and the emergence of signs of high turnover rate among individuals.
8. The ineffectiveness of meetings and the weakness of the spirit of initiative and creativity.
9. Opposition to change or the introduction of new technologies.
10. Increasing customers’ complaints.

Transforming from a traditional hierarchy to work teams:

If management wants work teams to be more than just an experience, this initiative must dramatically change the culture of the organization. The organization must be reconfigured for the work elements in the organization to be in line with the teams, for instance: changing the traditional models (formulating policies, work descriptions, performance appraisal models…etc.) On a collective basis and not on an individual basis.

The following table shows some of the differences that occur in some elements of work when switching to work teams:

Team building elements:

When carrying out the process of team building, the management must ensure the availability of a set of elements that will help in the coherence of the team:

1. Define the purpose (setting a clear direction for the team):

Where the reason for forming the team is determined, what is expected from it, what is the nature of its work, what it is trying to achieve, and what is its purpose. In other words, what the final result of the team’s work is.

2. Management support:

The team’s production increases in an organization that provides it with resources that support its work in order to achieve its tasks.

3. Determining the individuals and competencies required for the task:

Determining the appropriate number of team members and determining the skills, experiences, and knowledge required for the team’s work, whether it is technical or behavioral skills, such as the ability to communicate with others, the ability to negotiate, persuasion, and understanding different thinking patterns.

In addition to that, the availability of team-building elements without the presence of suitable individuals and their success in their tasks will not benefit anything, as the team is not just the best five, or ten individuals, but it is a combination of working individuals through fruitful cooperation.

4. The plan:

How does the team work?  An appropriate plan can be developed by answering a number of questions, such as:

• Will each team have a leader?
• Will the position of the leader be fixed, or will it rotate among the members?
• What responsibilities and powers will the leader have?
• Will team members meet regularly?
• How much work will be accomplished during those meetings?
• What is the amount of work outside those meetings and individually, what time is expected of any member to devote to the team?

5. Determine the basic relationships:

The work team will not work alone and it is necessary to identify the various parties that may affect the course of its work. These parties may be represented by the team’s sponsors, clients, business partners, and competitors. However, the relationship with each of them depends on the quality of the team’s mission.

10. Monitoring surrounding factors:

The team will work in light of the surrounding factors inside the organization, such as the various departments of the organization and outside it, such as the organization’s competitors, laws, and regulations. These factors must be taken into account to form a team capable of interacting with these factors and characterized by flexibility in its work.

How to build a team?

1. Objectives stage:

This stage is the building block for an effective team, objectives to be achieved that meet specific needs or solve a problem must be identified in addition to expected gains, time to complete tasks, and the required resources.

2. Forming stage:

 At this stage, team members try to understand the nature of their work and feel that they are part of the team, however, they may feel anxious as a result of entering into a new work atmosphere different from what they were accustomed to in the past, in addition to their relationship with the leader is weak and incomplete. While they tend to obey his orders, they express their negative feelings towards some orders in a calm and polite manner, and here comes the role of the team leader, which is to work on strengthening the positive aspects of the team and helping them to set the main fixed points for their common goal.

3. Storming stage:

Competition and conflicts appear between team members, while each individual tries to prove him/herself, so at this stage, work must be done to clearly define the authority of the team in order to gain a greater understanding of the roles of each individual.

4. Normal relations stage:

Members begin to organize themselves and become more open to the opinions of others and feel more comfortable expressing their opinions and discover the energies and capabilities of their team and see that the problems faced by the team belong to all its members and they must work together to solve them.

5. Performance stage:

The team members have developed a sense of team loyalty and commitment, while everyone contributes to increasing and improving performance and developing achievement in an atmosphere of organized and conscious team spirit that has begun to reach its goals.

6. Recognition and reward stage:

The team reaches a stage where it deserves appreciation and reward, and this may be in the form of articles in the company’s newspaper, or the inclusion of the team’s name on the product, or a bonus, however, it is necessary that the individual reward systems do not conflict with supporting the team’s performance.

Benefits of work teams:

1. Effectiveness in solving problems:

Complex problems are easier to solve if there is more than one opinion or an attempt to reach the best root cause analysis and most appropriate solution.

2. Exchange of information:

Team members who have learned to support and trust each other transfer information freely and understand the importance of exchanging information among themselves to work in a more effective manner. Information also flows in both directions from management to the team and back.

3. Better decision making:

Decisions are taken based on the opinions of all team members, as each member derives from his/her point of view what needs to be done, while the individuals take their decisions unanimously, thus reducing the time required to complete the task.

4. Cooperation:

Cooperation is the main benefit where individuals want to work together and support each other because they unite with the team and want it to be successful, thus reducing competition and striving to be one.

5. Optimum use of resources:

Where resources are used in all their forms on a regular and optimal basis, whether they are material or intellectual resources, due to the integration of the roles of team members and placing the interests of the team and the organization in the first place.

6. Reducing burdens and distributing roles:

Large and complex tasks become easier and smoother when they are distributed among several people equally according to each individual’s competency.

7. Quality:

Because the individuals feel that they are part of the team and its activity, and they want their team to reflect the best image in the organization and outside it, so quality and perfection are a priority for them.

Types of work teams:

1. Problem solving teams:

A group of individuals working to confront a problem faced by the organization, and the team tries to mitigate its effects by finding the root cause of the problem and developing a fundamental solution, such as crisis management teams.

2. Self-managed work teams:

This type of team is empowered with privileges and performing tasks that were monopolized at the top of the organizational hierarchy, such as determining financial needs, defining and requesting resources, training, selecting new members, determining and measuring performance levels, confronting and solving problems, and the leader of these teams is chosen by consultation. Among team members, however, leadership is often alternating between team members.

3. Multifunctioning work teams:

In this type of team, individuals retain their roles within the organization in addition to their role in the team. The basic idea of ​​multifunctioning teams is that each member exercises his/her skills and experiences from his/her primary job and dedicates them to the benefit of the team’s mission.

Bringing these individuals together leads to finding a common language for work. In addition, it eliminates the boundaries between departments, for example, the senior management work teams, where these teams play the role of a link between the organization and the external environment, and their performance affects the organization as a whole.

4. Change teams:

It consists of a group of experts whose main goal is to change and implement it in the organization. These teams help in influencing the prevailing cultures in the organization to achieve continuous improvement in results by applying modern techniques.

5. Quality improvement teams:

Members of this type are formed from one organizational unit and they work to improve the level of quality or productivity so that organizations use them to improve quality. These teams work to identify areas of work that need to be improved and collect data that shows the level of performance quality and suggest new ways to improve the quality of products and performance.

6. Project work teams:

It is formed in order to accomplish a specific project related to the organization, such as launching a new product or building a branch of the organization. It depends on mutual understanding among members and requires good organization of activities and a detailed plan for the performance of the team.

7. Virtual work teams:

This type of team is widely used by companies whose activities are of an international nature, as these teams are spread on an international level and over wide geographical areas, and their members communicate with each other through the internet in order to achieve a common goal or consult and exchange experiences.

Virtual work teams have been widely used due to the circumstances of the pandemic to get the basic tasks done which used to be accomplished in the office. That thing has made a dramatic transformation in the culture of organizations as well as management that many organizations became more aware of the importance of the technical aspects to increase the ability of its employees to communicate and deliver their tasks on time regardless of the workplace which led to closing offices and branches or transforming them to meeting rooms for the sake of flexibility, cost reduction and redirecting the investment to reliable technological infrastructure.