The pace of change in the business environment is prompting organization to continuously innovate to stay ahead of the competition and retain their competitive advantage. The work is getting fragmented, requiring complex problem solving and cross functional skill sets. In such a scenario we are making a case for making teams autonomous or self-managed which will lead to greater execution and lesser management or governance.
Autonomous teams and key characteristics
The concept of autonomous teams is not new. In fact, it’s more than six decades it was first introduced, primarily in the manufacturing sector and later saw adoption in service sector as well. By autonomous teams we mean, “groups of independent workers, who regulate much of their own task behavior around relatively whole or “full stack” tasks.” Autonomous teams typically are allowed to select, induct and train new members, set their own work pace, supervise most of their own activities and often inter change roles among themselves to achieve the common goals. Few of the characteristics of autonomous teams are:
- Effective communication and independent decision-making.
- High employee involvement leading to trust, which positively contributes towards intrinsic motivation.
- Frequent feedback to enhance work quality and better engagement.
- Provide a sense of ownership amongst team members
- Greater flexibility, faster coordination and access to information
Why autonomous teams are the way forward?
Increased competition has led organizations to continuously innovate to retain their competitive advantage. A paradigm shift in the perceived notions about work, workplace and workforce has been observed in the past few years accelerated by technology integration, fragmentation of work and increased agility and dynamism on the business environment. These changes are forcing the workforce to upskill themselves and be ready to embrace the change and disruption. With the need to continuously innovate and cater to employees’ basic needs, organizations are moving towards flatter structures with maximized adaptability.
In a traditional workplace setting, the presence of centralized decision-making tends to hinder employees’ autonomy. Solving problems required decision-making authority which was with the managers – leading to greater control, governance and management. These methods of management need to shift in the workplace to survive. Autonomous teams are making the case to support this shift in managing teams in the new age workplace. The teams are assigned decision-making authority for timely diagnosis of problems and implementation of solutions. Autonomous teams are self-directed, self-governed and pursue common organizational goals. With organizations becoming agile and requiring continuous upskilling of their workforce, autonomous teams are creating an impact by delivering these benefits.
Technology as the new co-worker
With technology advancements in place, the past few years have seen a rise in the integration of technology in business models. The rule-based decision-making has turned into automated decisions resulting in the elimination of manual clerical work. As technology continues to mature, set patterns of algorithm-based problem solving no more requires manual intervention. In order to co-exist with the rapidly evolving business challenges and to maintain relevance, employees must focus on complex problem solving. The World Economic Forum (World Economic Forum, 2016) has listed complex problem solving as one of the top future skills. To acquire complex-problem solving skills, the organizations are acknowledging the rising need for cross-functional teams that are autonomous to sustain in the future and enhanced productivity.
In our earlier blog, our colleague, Lokesh Nigam, made an interesting case for freeing up the workforce from robotic tasks while reiterating the need to maximize the human abilities.
Autonomous teams allow employees the freedom to put their best foot forward while working in a cohesive unit. These teams are intrinsically interested in their work and have fully embedded the work’s value and its accompanying rules. In addition to the self-directed workforce, these teams hold complete control over hiring as well as the termination of the team members. An organization wide-commitment and proper allocation of resources contribute towards the successful functioning of these teams.
Conclusion
At Kognoz, we have been researching in this very exciting area. We have observed that autonomous teams have the potential to make a multifaceted contribution to an organization’s competitive advantage. As organisations strive to become more agile in future, autonomous teams empower employees to transform processes, generate knowledge and innovate to achieve desired outcomes. Through our own solution, Immerse, we enable autonomous teams in growing organizations operating in this dynamic environment.
Organizational agility can be accelerated by creating autonomous teams empowered to solve business challenges. Autonomous teams bring focused execution and innovation while freeing up the management bandwidth for decision making.
How are you making teams autonomous in your organization?
It may be assumed safely, therefore, that nature has designed humans to learn.However, modern systems that have evolved in the last few centuries have done a lot of injustice to learning ability of humans – in regimenting them to a sequential program and treating humans as sort of a pseudo-machine to deliver industrial rather than “industrious” work.
Is not a workplace about task completion in the most effective manner – and in that sense the focus being on productivity and availability of right resources at the right time.
Then on a second look, we find that industry had the biggest influence on education system in the first place – wanting silos, specialization, and limited abilities to carry out the rhythmic industrial tasks.
That is another story, that on the other side of the value chain, we also want the same people to be equally robotic in consuming.
While this had benefits in standards of living, it certainly is also devastating at the same time for human agency.
Now, there apparently are three issues involved in upgrading skills in a workplace – one, unlearning the previous way of working, sometimes something that is deeply institutionalized – in the name of process, efficiency, and productivity.
You might have seen that many people in hospitals have spent most of their time learning how to take care of a patient or make them well.
But only a few of them have taken any course in business administration or business management.
Which means only a few of them have knowledge about running or managing a hospital or health care facility.
For such reasons, healthcare consulting firms in India or any other country is very important.
For moe information visit: https://tecnovaglobalbusinessconsulting.blogspot.com/2020/05/why-healthcare-consulting-firms-are.html
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