Training Case Study: Building New Teams

The Problem

A major life company had closed its book to new business and was managing the impact on the culture and approach of the administrative functions to customer service. A new team was formed, pulling individuals from different business areas, to bring together the right mix of skills and knowledge to deliver a long-term project to review and change the process for customer service delivery.

The solution

This group had not worked together before and had to both form and operate well as a team which would be dispersed over two locations in a normal operating environment. The team had to put in place a plan very quickly to establish how the customer facing elements of the administrative are would operate in the future to ensure that existing business was retained.

The group contained individuals who brought experience and knowledge of: -

Marketing
Complaints handling
Compliance
Life policy administration
IT systems

They had not previously worked together before and through discussions with the new manager it was agreed that they needed to: -

Understand and respect the knowledge and skills each individual member brought to the team
Quickly learn to work together as a team
Develop a high level plan for change

We created a 3 day residential program that began with exercises designed to get the team working together on non work related problems which were designed to bring out personalities and natural team roles. Belbin profiles were used as the foundation for this approach.

By the first evening everyone agreed that they felt as though they had known each other for some time and the team were clearly moving forward. The next day began to focus on the challenges in the workplace interspersed with experiential exercises which would continue to build on the experience of day one.

On the second evening the discussions were focussed on how the team would measure their success and a number of Key Performance Measures were devised that could be monitored on a week-by-week business that already existed in the business. They were: -

Customer retention rates
Response times to customer enquiries
Staff retention
Complaints

Day three was a business planning event and having established the measures for success the actions needed to improve current standards were identified and prioritised. A SWOT analysis of the department’s current ability and resources to meet the challenge was undertaken and through converting the weaknesses and threats key actions were identified.

The results

At the end of the three day event the team felt ready to tackle the challenge and that this event had condensed what would normally have taken them 3 months to achieve had they begun without it. Importantly, they felt that despite the fact that the team would now split to the two locations, because they each understood how the others worked and why they were taking the planned actions, they would stay on track.

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