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Human Resources Development Practices
Human Resources Development (HRD) practices include offering employees access to opportunities such as additional formal training, career development, performance reviews and individual mentoring. Running parallel to this Human Resource Development practices also include broader organizational restructuring such as establishing strategies to ensure all employees work successful as a team. The wider management goal for these development practices is to create a strong and cohesive workforce in which every employee feels valued and collaborative working is encouraged. Using Google as a case-study, this research article will analyse the benefits and disadvantages of applying a team-based approach as a strategy for Human Resources Development.
What is a team-based approach?
A team-based approach, sometimes called a whole-team approach is a method of management that holds every team member responsible for the outcome and quality of a project. This approach is used in a variety of industries including software development, creative media and advertisement. Google’s team-based approach understands that every employee must work together in order for the project to be successful. The strategy insists that each employee must recognize their team members strengths and abilities and work cohesively towards the same goal. In Google’s style of project management, roles are not fixed and employees may be required to flexibly switch tasks according to the demands of the project. The key objectives of Google’s team-based approach are to streamline processes, increase employee productivity and reduce costs.
The primary benefits of utilizing a lateral team-based approach to increase company performance is the ability to capitalize on employee strengths and delegate their weaknesses to other employees. Google’s team-based organizational structure assigns workers who perform particular tasks - whether it be software development, engineering or marketing - into project groups that all work together towards a specific end goal. This method of structuring teams ensures the best productivity in certain functions such as product development, increasing customer satisfaction or fixing technical errors. Google’s organizational structure is flatter than most companies (for instance Amazon or IBM) as it has eliminates numerous layers of management that it considers to be unnecessary and time wasting. Research has shown that excessive control, micromanagement and extra levels of authority can hinder decision making, often resulting in wasted time, the duplication of tasks or a lack of overall objective. Typically at Google, team groups are encouraged to resolve issues amongst themselves rather than seeking approval from higher levels of management. With fewer superiors to receive approval from, entire functions and processes within the company can be streamlined. This constructs a balanced atmosphere where employees have enough control and authority to make operational decisions themselves. In addition this kind of lateral structure reduces administrative and salary costs.
Because all team members are working towards the same goal (such as product or service development and delivery) Google’s structure improves employee relationships and promotes a strong team morale and communication between departments. By establishing a working environment in which each employee feels empowered and valued, Google increases the productivity from each of its workers. Google ensures that teams communicate constantly with each other through regular meetings and digital forums. This constant inter-team dialogue and collaborative group dynamic encourages creativity and innovation in development discussions and brainstorming meetings.
What training issues does Google face?
In Google’s team-based approach, team members are reliant on the expertise of their colleagues to make group decisions that do not require management approval. For inexperienced teams, this can present numerous challenges. By adopting a team-based approach, it is imperative for Google to train team members with skills to flourish within a lateral organizational structure. Google utilizes accepted Human Resources Development practices such as skills development, formal training and mentoring opportunities to do this.
Google trains it teams in effective communication, project management and allocating specific roles to each team member. At Google, each team is allocated a team leader who is giving formal training to respond to the demands of the project by delegating tasks and sufficient resources accordingly. Every team leader must effectively define and execute the direction, purpose, priorities and roles of the team. By training competent team leaders in this way, Google’s structure ensures that projects move along quickly without destabilizing the team ethic with a rigid hierarchical structure. In applying the team approach, one of the biggest hurdles for Google to overcome is the successful sharing of information between teams. As teams at Google are isolated according to their function, they often have less exposure or contact with other departments. Because of this Google mentors team leaders to communicate with other interdepartmental leaders, thus encouraging a lateral organizational collaboration across all functions of the business. Team leaders are tasked with creating and sustaining an information policy that outlines which team members need to share what information, how they will share it and when they will need to share it. On top of this, a team-based approach requires team groups to be constantly changing, with certain members jumping between teams to assist in various projects. Teams undergo perpetual change and this instability can lead to chaos or disorder if team leaders aren’t trained to step in to communicate effectively with new team members and stakeholders. To counteract developing tensions, team leaders are mentored in skills to retain organizational consistency, adhere to project objectives and adapt to the fluid movement of workers between teams.
In addition to team leaders, laterally structured teams are encouraged to create liaison positions for certain employees. These are members of the team who are tasked with fostering communication and collaboration between teams and individual team members. At Google, such roles create a complex and interdependent network of teams across the wider company. In addition to this, successful teams require three categories of members: action-oriented, people-oriented and thought-oriented. Action-orientate members encourage the team to streamline processes and finish tasks. People-orientated positions adopt a supportive role, guiding team-members through each project and assigning adequate resources. Finally, thought-orientated members are responsible for innovating and evaluating certain processes of the project using their specialized knowledge. At Google, adopting a balanced structure like this amongst the remaining team members ensures that all angles of complex problems are considered and solved efficiently. Defining a purpose and role for each member of the team ensures that everybody understands the project objectives and is committed towards achieving a common goal.
