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Active participation by employees in the planning process and in the setting of strategic direction helped the NPR Best-in-class partners garner the best ideas of the workforce and helped create buy-in to the organization's direction. Generally, people expected to achieve results were empowered to fulfill that responsibility.

The Best-in-class partners recognize the importance of building organizational capacity that is centered on people and processes. For an organization to be successful, its employees must be committed to an organizational ideal. Focus on capacity forces companies to:

• Consider staff capabilities.
• Ensure that staff have necessary knowledge, skills, and tools for success.
• Provide whatever training is needed to ensure achievement of objectives.
• Emphasize process management as a way of ensuring that inefficient and ineffective processes do not get in the way of the drive to success.
• Adopt and employ a volume of best practices to help units be their best.
• Measure individual contributions to the team and team contributions to the unit.
• Compensate dimensions of performance.

EMPOWERED TEAMS

The good news is teams can learn new behaviors just as individuals can:

• How to communicate more effectively,
• How to solve their problems more effectively,
• How to have meetings that accomplish something without killing people,
• Many ways to make decisions (and how to decide which way is best),
• How to implement decisions once they are made,
• How to handle conflict constructively,
• How to care for their members,
• How to diagnose their own problems and resolve them, and
• How to act more and more ethically over time.

Solving problems, making decisions, and working through conflict within a team are very different than doing so individually:

• Most current organizational reforms ask that diverse groups of people learn to deal with each other in different ways. This sounds incredibly simple. It is incredibly difficult to implement in reality.
• There are people who do not value collaboration. It is often impossible to deal with such individuals collaboratively.
• Just like people, organizations can range from extremely healthy to pathologically sick.

To foster productive teamwork, the Dominican Republic Mission (PDF 49KB) staff needed to learn new skills and embrace different attitudes. Empowered teams must:

• Commit to a team approach for Mission operations, including an understanding of the advantages of team models and expected benefits.
• Conduct appropriate team startup activities that enable teams to clarify their mandate and purpose, establish performance goals, develop and agree on team working agreements, and develop a work plan.
• Create and maintain a team learning framework that will enable the team to be conscious of its learning and manage its continuous improvement.
• Test and develop models of high-performing teams: small groups of staff with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, work closely together, hold themselves mutually accountable, and produce extraordinary results.
• Develop technical, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills to function effectively as a team--this involves several new skills for USAID staff.
• Help team leaders understand their role and how it differs from a supervisory role.
• Team leaders must be willing and able to perform in a facilitative, nonhierarchical manner.

Several steps are useful for motivating individuals to "want" to work on teams.

• Create a participatory process to create an effective program. Develop deliberate actions that involve employees at all levels. Provide an opportunity for team members, team leaders, and management, as well as, stakeholders, e.g. unions, to express their views.
• Benchmark other agencies and the private sector to measure the success of the program. Benchmark what incentives are being used to encourage teamwork, what successes and/or failures they may have had, and what was learned from their experience.
• Share your personal picture of what an ideal Incentives Plan would look like and the objectives you would like to achieve. Create a shared vision with buy-in by having meetings, general discussions, focus groups, questionnaires, sub-teams, or use other methods.
• Take actions to show transparency in managing the process. Publicize the results and give an opportunity for feedback. Some coaches use the e-mail and newsletters and initiate open discussions to provide an update on the progress of the plan.
• Be creative. Change how performance is measured and how rewards are approved. Develop clear work objectives and performance measures in the work plans and other appraisal mechanisms that evaluate high performing teams, their members, team leaders, and managers. Give the team's customers, partners, colleagues, stakeholders and others an opportunity to provide feedback.
• Reward the results of changed behavior. Diagnose the gap between extant behavior and the desired behavior. Focus on implementing cultural change in the teams. Take specific actions to show the benefits of change and reward the results.
• Be fair. Clearly identify and describe the incentives (monetary/non-monetary), who is eligible, the criteria, how/if any funding is attached to the incentive, the nomination process, who must approve, and how often the incentives may be granted.
• Recognize Results. Look for what's being done right and give it public recognition. Publicly announce what is going right and say specifically why rewards and recognition are given. Assure results are recognized during the employee evaluation process and that the form of recognition is placed in the employee's personnel record.
• Institutionalize methods to track how well things are going with implementing the plan. Publicize the results and give an opportunity for feedback.

EMPOWERED TEAMS AND INCENTIVES

Recognizing team members' accomplishments is important because:

• Measurable results demonstrate how customer's needs are being met and reflect participation of customers, partners, and team members.
• Behavioral changes in coaches and team members demonstrate the team's commitment to high performance and results.

Specific examples of results demonstrate the success of the team's performance and management of resources. This can be a basis for requesting resources in the future. The following guidelines may be useful when planning implementation of an appropriate set of monetary and non-monetary rewards.

• The reward system should be clearly defined, well publicized, and responsive.
• Rewards for smaller achievements should be immediate; larger rewards for broader accomplishments need not be.
• Employees should have opportunity for participation and recognition.
• The system for awards decision making must be predictable, open, and simple.
• Focus should be on non-recurrent rewards versus an annual "entitlement". Awards must be contingent on performance.
• Certain rewards need to be self-selected.
• Rewards must match accomplishments and employee needs.

The behavior of senior leaders is critical to the success of an incentive program. Senior leaders should:

• Create a shared vision, present challenging goals for managers and team leaders, clarify values and define objectives for the success of the organization's Incentives Program.
• Establish clear performance measures with specific indicators for measuring progress. Set up feedback mechanisms to evaluate the program and whether behavioral changes are sustainable. Allow recipients to provide feedback to make improvements in the program.
• State policies, procedures and guidelines that describe specific rewards and recognition, responsibilities, authorities, and action steps for implementation.
• Describe desired changes in behavior, establish positive reinforcements for sustaining behavioral patterns, and identify specific actions to recognize behavior that consistently values teamwork.
• Recognize that money awards are not always the answer. Honorary and informal recognition can be powerful tools to promote organizational and team goals and objectives.

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