Looking to create a new team or take your current team to the next level? This strategic teambuilding guide shows you how to design a team for maximum value, how to get results from your teambuilding activities, how to train a team and cross-train a company, and how to organize teams for effective communication.

Designing the Team

Many Americans get their first job working at a fast-food chain. You may have been one of them. If so, you probably remember your first day. Maybe you started at a register. Or perhaps you began in the kitchen. Either way, you had a lot to learn in a short amount of time. Everyone was counting on you to help keep the lines moving. Patience isn’t a virtue in this business, after all.

Fast-food restaurants make for good first jobs because the tasks are fairly easy to learn and don’t require any specialized knowledge going in. But they’re also good first jobs for another reason. When you get a job in fast food, chances are you’re joining a well-designed and effective team that works smoothly under pressure. Fast food lines might not always be as fast as we’d like, but they’re reliably quick, and it’s the team design that makes it so.

It’s extra impressive what fast-food teams regularly accomplish given that the team can only move as fast as the slowest person on it, turnover tends to be high, and a lot of the crew has little other job experience. And yet these teams move with a purpose. You may have read that when a COVID-19 vaccination clinic needed to get its backed-up drive-thru moving, it brought in a Chick-fil-A manager.

If you’re creating a new team or restructuring one you already have, you could do worse than look at fast-food teams for inspiration. You probably won’t be mimicking the particular functions, roles, or processes of those teams, but there’s nevertheless a lot to learn from how these teams are designed and how they operate. What’s their secret? These teams succeed because they’re clear about the value they provide and because their functions, roles, and processes are all designed to provide that value. Let’s look more closely at their design and what it can teach us.

Clarifying Value

Like all restaurants, fast-food chains serve food, but the food isn’t the value they provide. The value is the speed with which you get your food. It’s the convenience of a quick meal. It’s also the uniformity of the experience. Whether you purchase a Whopper and fries at a Burger King in Eugene, Oregon or in Ankeny, Iowa, you expect the meal to look and taste the same, and you expect to get it fast. In most instances, you do.

Businesses like this are set up to deliver a fast and uniform customer experience. Get in line, get your food, and go about your day. No delays. No surprises. This is what you expect when buying fast food, and every decision made at a fast-food joint is designed to satisfy this expectation. The measure of success for every function, process, and performance is whether this value is delivered.

Before you determine or reconsider team functions, processes, and roles, clarify the value your team is meant to deliver. That value, remember, isn’t a product or a service or an internal “deliverable.” It’s the need or want satisfied by whatever your team provides. It’s the why behind what your team does.

If you’re not sure what value your team is meant to have, ask yourself what success looks like. What are the one or two or three big signs that your team is or would be doing a good job? What makes relevant parties happy when your team has done its job well? Those should clue you in to your team’s specific value.

Considering Functions

The functions of a team are those things that need to happen for the value to be delivered. When a customer orders a hamburger at McDonald’s, they expect to get it quickly and for it to taste like every other McDonald’s hamburger they’ve eaten. A series of tasks makes that happen. The order is taken and communicated to the kitchen. A bun is prepared. Condiments are added to it. A beef patty is cooked and placed on the bun. The finished burger is wrapped, handed off, and bagged. Money is taken. Food is delivered.

When you’re considering what functions your team performs or will perform, don’t think about roles just yet. Think first about what value your team is expected to deliver and what functions make that happen. Write down all of the work that gets done or needs to get done. Account for every task.

Next, ask yourself how each function contributes to the value that your team provides. Consider also whether that work actually needs to happen. Fast-food restaurants, for example, found that indoor lines move faster when customers fill and refill their own drinks. The task of filling drinks, when done by employees, slows things down. Removing this task from the team sped things up, i.e., increased the value they provided.

Assigning Roles

Don’t confuse functions and roles. If you pop into a McDonald’s during a lunch rush, you’ll likely see five or so people in the kitchen each assigned to a separate task. But arrive during an afternoon lull, and you may just see one or two people doing all this work. In places like McDonald’s, managers typically determine roles with each shift. Today an employee may be scooping French fries into containers. The next day, they may be taking drive-thru orders. This flexibility enables employees to learn all of the team functions over time, builds speed and familiarity with each one, and it keeps the work from quickly becoming monotonous. Because everyone can do everything, sudden reassignments, say when an employee calls in sick last minute, are easier to accommodate. Speed doesn’t suffer (too much).

Day-to-day role assignments may not work for your business, but it’s still a good idea to keep functions and roles separate in your mind and in your future team planning. Conflating the two risks locking people into roles that don’t develop (or enable them to develop). Aligning roles with functions too rigidly can also isolate your people, limiting the number of people with whom they interact and the places where they can add value. But dividing up functions more liberally can bring more variety to each role and expand the areas where people in those roles are able to collaborate with others on their team.

Implementing Processes

The process of getting a burger made and in the hands of a customer is fairly simple and straightforward, but the demand for speed and the volume of orders both make it easy for mistakes to happen. During a rush, the kitchen crew has a continual stream of orders on the table, each with a different destination.

To manage the flow of ordered items and keep multiple lines of people moving, fast-food teams must communicate quickly and clearly. When an assembled and wrapped burger moves from the kitchen to the frontline crew, there can’t be any question about which bag or tray it should go to. Any uncertainty wastes time and decreases value.

Clear communication is valuable everywhere, of course, but speed may not be the value your processes should be designed around. People tend to like it, for example, when their doctor takes extra time to listen to them and understand their needs. Medical offices that get patients in and out as fast as possible aren’t delivering the value those patients typically want. They soon get a bad reputation. That reputation fares even worse if doctors take ample time with patients, but the staff scheduling appointments have been told to schedule as many appointments as possible.

When you’re figuring out how your team should communicate and collaborate, let the value your team provides be your guide, and make sure every member of your team is guided by the same value.

Deciding Who Decides

Fast-food chain managers decide who to hire and fire, what to pay, and whom to schedule, but they have no say in the decisions about the products they make and sell. They don’t decide what temperatures to cook the meat or how much mustard or ketchup to use or how large the fry containers should be. Those decisions are made outside the restaurant. This makes perfect sense. Customers expect uniformity, so you don’t want the kitchen staff experimenting with the secret sauce or patty sizes or seasonings that go in a taco. Not even a franchise owner has the liberty to make those decisions.

But if uniformity isn’t what interested parties expect from your team, you probably don’t need as many decisions dictated from on high. The members of a team tasked with coding a video game with never-before-seen features would probably do well having the freedom to experiment, take risks, fail, and try again.

Deciding who makes decisions and in what circumstances can be daunting for managers. A lot can go wrong. Some people enjoy having autonomy and authority over their work, and they’d choose other employment if they had no say over their work and how it gets done. Others don’t want the stress of making decisions that could help or harm the company. More people making decisions invites more bad decisions and workplace drama, but fewer decision-makers can restrict a team’s ability to be creative and innovative.

Whatever you decide about your team’s decision-making authority, make sure it aligns with and supports the value your team delivers, especially long term. Next, explain to your team how decision-making on the team works. No one should be uncertain about who makes decisions and when. Finally, hold people accountable to their decisions. Reward decisions that add value, and address issues with decisions that detract from it. That also means holding yourself accountable for how decision-making is done in your organization.

Developing the Team

You may have noticed that we haven’t covered the essential step of hiring and retaining the right people for the roles you need. That was deliberate. The steps above—clarifying value, considering functions, assigning roles, implementing processes, and deciding who decides— form the design of your team. Think of this design as the team architecture that your team members operate in, whoever they may be.

That said, don’t be afraid to allow your particular employees to help shape the overarching team design. For a team to be effective, it must be a source of value to the people on it. People don’t stay engaged with a team or remain on it when that team doesn’t meet their own wants and needs. Team input can make a good team design even better.

Getting Results from Team-Building Activities

At some point in your career, you’ve probably participated in team-building exercises that made you wonder, “What’s the point?” Maybe they were useless group activities that everyone mocked under their breath. Or maybe they were inconsequential events with colleagues that, while fun, didn’t change the way anyone interacted in the workplace. Team-building activities don’t have to be this way. They can improve a team’s productivity and efficiency. The key is to approach team building strategically. To do that, you have to know what it means to build a team and how to measure a team’s performance.

What It Means to Build a Team

It would be nice if building an efficient and productive team required no more than hiring skilled workers with agreeable personalities. Unfortunately, teams don’t work that way. Like any successful relationship, team relationships take thought, effort, and compromise. Each person has their own manner of doing things, their own preferences, their own values, and their own strengths and weaknesses. One member of a team might value deadlines and prefer to get work done in a timely fashion. Another might value quality over speed and prefer to take extra time to get things right. If these differences are not acknowledged and addressed, conflict and frustration inevitably ensue.

The purpose of team building is to get the people on a team to work well together. More specifically, team building teaches team members about one another so that their differences serve as a basis for collaboration and innovation instead of conflict and frustration. It’s okay to have social events without much formality or structure, and these can be helpful for team building simply because they allow people to let down their guard and get to know their coworkers on a more personal level. But more structured activities will get you closer to your goal.

Knowing What Activities Are Best for Your Team

When you plan a team-building activity, first take note of who the people are on the team. You’ll want them engaged in a task that brings out their individual work preferences, habits, values, and strengths. Teams with money to spend might opt to participate in some professionally organized game in which their behaviors are observed, but you don’t need expensive elaborate set-ups to see and assess your team in action. You could have them design a fun, informational poster about their team, discuss what superpower would be most beneficial for their job, plan a ten-minute tour of your workplace, or collectively role-play their response to an upset customer.

It’s important, however, that the activity not be part of their work. Employees doing work need to focus on getting the work done and doing it well, not on getting to know one another. Work has its own purpose. Treating work itself like a team-building exercise would be like treating a performance as if it were a practice.

Giving Purpose to Your Team-Building Activities

When the team members are engaged in a team building task, pay attention to the behavior of each person. What differences are at play? Has someone tried to do all the work themselves? Is anyone keeping a close eye on the time remaining to complete the task? Is someone delegating? Is anyone raising objections to what’s been proposed or what’s being done? When the task is done, you will all have seen the different ways that each person behaved. Now it’s time to discuss those differences. Ask each team member to explain why they did what they did. Then ask them what they learned about one another. Finally, have them discuss ways in which their differences could be beneficial or harmful to their work as a team. After you’ve talked through their behaviors and your team members better understand one another, it may be time to make some changes based on what you’ve learned. Let’s say you had someone who took it upon themselves to monitor the team’s progress with a constant eye on the clock. This person may have underutilized project management skills. Perhaps they would be good at keeping the team on track with various projects. Or suppose a member of your team displayed creative thinking and problem-solving skills you had no idea existed, perhaps because their job duties don’t typically require those skills. Consider how those skills could be used within the team. What workflows make the most sense given everyone’s strengths and weaknesses? What conflicts exist on the team? In what ways could they be resolved?

Making It a Team Effort

The best team building, though, doesn’t come from on high. If you try to impose new workflows on a team that require them to be more collaborative, and the members of the team don’t want to collaborate more, you’ll get pushback and likely make the team function more poorly. Forced to work together more, they’ll argue more about the way they want to do things.

Before team-building efforts can be successful, the workers on a team must want those efforts to be successful. They need to be willing to disagree and debate in good faith, compromise when needed, and balance out one another’s skills. A proven way to engage employees in team building: put them in charge of it. Let them plan their team-building activities and decide how best to incorporate what they learn into their workflows. Give them the freedom to be creative and build up one another. Trust them and encourage them to trust one another. After all, team building must be a team effort.

Assessing Success

Any team-building effort requires time and resources. In other words, you’re paying for it. You therefore should be able to determine whether such efforts were worth the cost. A vague feeling of improvement is not sufficient—especially not when the fruits of team building can be measured. Before, during, and after team-building activities, you should be recording and analyzing metrics pertaining to team efficiency and productivity. Did the team meet its goals? Look at the key performance indicators that make sense for your team. Production, morale, and retention are good figures to examine. Definitely measure whether the team has been
able to get more work done in less time. Keep an eye on the numbers, account for other variables, and be willing to try new teambuilding activities or rethink your team-building strategy.

Making it Happen

Before you get started, remember that you’re not just building any team, but the team you have. Your goal is to help the people on this team understand one another better so they’ll be better able to collaborate. So, begin by considering what you already know about your team and brainstorming activities that will require their collaboration, communication, and compromise. When they do these activities, observe their behavior and discuss it with them afterwards. If you learn anything that could improve the team’s workflow, consider giving it a try, and then pay attention to the team’s performance metrics in the weeks that follow.

Expanding the Scope of Training

One barrier to developing talent internally is that training usually tends to be role specific. We might expect someone in an entry-level sales job to receive some additional sales training so they can stop making cold calls and start going out to meet prospective clients. We would not typically expect that same individual to receive training that’s unrelated to their sales job or career path.

This barrier, too, is easy to understand. Budgets are limited, and it’s usually not in an employer’s interest to teach employees skills they don’t need for their job now or won’t need in the near future. Why would an engineering manager want their team members to learn about marketing techniques, sales processes, or customer service? That sounds like a waste of money, no?

In a work culture where roles and career paths are specialized, it certainly does. But hiring individuals with specialized skill sets, and keeping those employees on predetermined paths, isn’t the only way to build a team. Imagine if every employee in a company received a basic level of training in other aspects of the business. Nora, for example, might be her company’s graphic designer, but she’s also been shown how to conduct a sales call, create a budget, write social media posts, calm a frustrated customer, create a pivot table and analyze its data, interview a job candidate, and facilitate the development of a new product. In turn, Nora has taught her colleagues some of the basics of graphic design.

This approach, called “cross training,” creates a versatile team of people who can move about within the organization outside of the routes originally dictated by their specialized skills sets. It establishes a work environment where people’s place in the organization isn’t limited by the skills they came in with or team they started on.

Cross-training also has the benefit of exposing everyone to what their coworkers do in the organization. Cross-team collaboration is difficult for a lot of organizations because different teams have different ways of operating, different priorities, and different needs—and the people on those teams often don’t understand and appreciate those differences. Putting on someone else’s work shoes and hat can help us see another’s work world from their perspective.

In practice, cross-training is more common in smaller organizations where there aren’t enough employees for everyone to wear a separate hat. It’s much more difficult and less cost effective for larger organizations where there are people with the same or similar specialized roles.

For organizations both large and small, some of the benefits of cross-training can be realized by taking a team-focused rather than task-focused approach to employment. In a task-focused workplace, people apply and get hired for a job—a set of tasks—and to the extent that they have to work with others, they’re part of a team. The team forms almost as more of a byproduct of individual people doing their work in tandem. In contrast, in a team-focused workplace, people join the company to be on a team, one that works together to complete the needed tasks. The difference here is subtle, but it can make a big difference in how
employers and employees see one another.

When someone is hired merely to fill a position, their connection and loyalty to the organization may only be as strong as their interest in the job duties on a given day. If they grow tired of doing their assigned tasks, they’ll naturally look for a position that better suits their interests. They wanted to do a certain job, but that job isn’t motivating them anymore, so there’s no use sticking around if their employer has nothing else of interest to them. Conversely, if the tasks they do cease to be of value to the organization, and there’s no immediate position that matches their skill set in the organization, the employee will no doubt be let go.

When someone is hired to be on a team, they’re part of something that extends beyond their current job duties. They’re attached not simply to a set of tasks, but to a community of people. There are tasks to perform, of course, but these assignments are seen not as belonging simply to individuals, but as the responsibility of the team to manage. Team focused leaders aren’t just intent on keeping the positions they manage filled, but in creating a team, developing that team, preparing it for future needs, and keeping it together.

Regardless of training methods, people will continue to join and leave the team when it’s in their interest to do so. But a team-focused approach to employment creates both broader and deeper social bonds among team members and their leaders, and if leaders are thinking about the future and preparing people on their team to perform future tasks (e.g., through upskilling and modern apprenticeships), the incentives for people stay with the organization
long term are stronger.

Organizing for Effective Communication

Imagine a car so poorly designed that pressing the accelerator sometimes feeds gasoline to the engine, sometimes feeds it onto the tires, and sometimes feeds it into the trunk. The car would always stink and only sometimes drive. Seems silly, right? No one would try to drive a car like that! And yet many companies suffer from basically the same problem as this unreliable car.

Companies need fuel to move forward just as cars do. The fuel for companies is information. Decisions must be made based on what’s happening inside and outside the company. If information isn’t getting to where it needs to go, then those decisions cannot be made or made well. Solutions can’t be proposed and tested if problems aren’t brought to the right party’s attention. And often one department can’t do its job if it’s unaware of what’s happening in another department. The right hand should always know what the left hand is doing and be operating with the same information!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t suffice to tell everyone to talk to each other and share information. Structural groundwork must be laid to establish clear channels of communication. Fortunately, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There are several effective company structures that, when implemented correctly, will help information flow from department to department or person to person. The trick is determining which one would work best for your company. The functional structure is the most common of the bunch. In this hierarchical structure, the head of each functional area reports directly to the CEO. Picture a pyramid or family tree. As its name implies, this arrangement groups employees and operations into functional units (sales, marketing, HR, etc.). With its clear, vertical lines of communication, the functional structure keeps the CEO apprised of problems and developments in each department, enabling centralized decision-making.

Horizontal communication (department-to-department) isn’t stressed as much in this structure, so it’s important for companies that use this arrangement to establish effective ways for functional areas to communicate with one another and be aware of what everyone is doing. The CEO can help with this endeavor by providing everyone with regular summaries of what’s happening in each department.

The functional structure will not work well for every company. Businesses with separate product lines or distinct sets of customers may want a product-based structure instead. In this arrangement, the company is divided into separate product lines, each with its own functional divisions. The division has information flow up and down through each product line, but not so much among them.

There are other divisional structures to consider. Larger companies with operations in different regions, countries, markets, or industries will often use a geographical or other decentralized structure based on whichever divisions make the most sense. The various divisions each report to the CEO, but the depth and breadth of operations makes it necessary for VPs or other leaders to make major decisions for their division.

No matter what structure you use, it helps to chart the reporting channels so everyone can see how information flows throughout the company. The key is to keep it simple. The purpose of the chart is to give everyone a bird’s-eye view of the place each unit has in the company so they can easily and clearly see the paths of communication and lines of reporting. A chart, however, is only a means to an end. The important thing is to have an organizational structure that makes sense for the type of company you have—one that effectively and efficiently gets information where it needs to go.

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