Importance of Team Building

Yesterday Winning Workplaces hosted its 15th webinar. Attendees of "Five Powerful Strategies to Develop and Retain Top Notch Technical Talent" got double the value from this session, as Tamsin Jolley, President of Decagon Devices in Washington state, and Jeff Young, Chairman & General Manager of ATA Engineering in California – both Top Small Workplaces – each shared their five most powerful retention strategies, for a total of 10 in the webinar.

Jeff Young's list of strategies to help with not just retention but good team building and interpersonal engagement included the following:

Hire the best people possible
Offer employee ownership
Train, coach, and mentor
Grant responsibility and authority
Create an environment of trust

The last item here is perhaps the most ambiguous. Check out this audio clip to hear how Jeff and his fellow 80 employees do this at ATA Engineering:

mp3 - 2.7 MB - 2:54

Their particular (some would say unorthodox) approach to workplace team building is as follows:

Trust staff to treat company resources as their own (example: approval of expenses)
Focus on overall performance (example: one P&L statement)
Less focus on individual achievement
Egalitarian culture and flat org chart (good when an employee doesn't know who his/her supervisor is)
No "executives": No exec perks or separate compensation system; same pay scale for management and engineering staff

So what's the ROI from all this? At ATA, which has been in business for only nine years, it's the following:

Employee surveys perennially show a high level of enthusiasm and commitment.
This is underscored by annual turnover of only 1-2%
Strong financials – including significant tax savings from their employee ownership, profitability every year including their first year, their return on revenue has exceeded the industry in three of the last four years, and revenue has also exceeded leadership's expectations in three of the last four years

This is proof that employee engagement strategies designed to build trust can have a tangible impact on the bottom line.

Stay tuned for a sound bite from Tamsin Jolley's presentation from yesterday's webinar. Go here for our roster of upcoming and recorded sessions.