Rewarding Teams : Lessons From the Trenches - Softcover

Glenn M. Parker; David Zielinski; Jerry McAdams

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0787948098 ISBN 13: 9780787948092

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2000

Synopsis

Using actual case studies from a variety of leading companies, Rewarding Teams provides a blueprint for building team reward programs that spur development and success. The book focuses on the three most important types of team-based rewards programs--recognition plans, project team incentives, and group incentives--offering readers detailed advice on how they can create and implement such programs themselves. Twenty-seven profiles of team reward and recognition plans from today's top companies give readers an in-depth look at how these plans work in actual practice. They also provide the basis for the set of best principles included in the final chapter.

About this title

About the Author

GLENN PARKER is a consultant who has worked with pharmaceutical companies, telecommunications organizations, manufacturers, service businesses, and health care providers to create and sustain high performing teams, effective team players, and team-based systems. He is author of the best-selling Team Players and Teamwork.
JERRY MCADAMS is the national practice leader of the rewards and recognition systems for Watson Wyatt Worldwide and the co-director of the nonprofit Consortium for Alternative Reward Strategy Research.
DAVID ZIELINSKI is a business journalist who has covered the human resources, organizational development, and business management fields for more than ten years.

From the Back Cover

Work teams have become an essential part of business in almost every industry, yet most companies still rely on outmoded compensation systems geared only to individual performance. Rewarding Teams is a resource for managers on the front lines who are looking for practical advice about how to design and implement team-oriented incentives, rewards, and recognition systems that will advance their organization's cultural and strategic objectives.
The authors identify the three most important reward systems for teams--recognition plans, project team incentives, and organizational unit incentives--and provide numerous examples of how today's top companies are using them to spur the development and success of their work teams.
Twenty-seven case studies from organizations including Chase Manhattan, Ralston Purina, Lotus Development, Bayer, and Rockwell Automation describe in detail how each company designed and implemented their systems. These case studies show readers how to handle a variety of difficult issues such as whether to use cash or non-cash rewards, dealing with team members who don't pull their weight, combining plans for maximum impact, and communicating clearly about compensation. The authors summarize key solutions from all the case studies in the book's closing chapter.
By shining a light on struggles, successes, and lessons learned by real-world organizations, Rewarding Teams gives readers the guidance and tools they need to tackle the formidable task of building compensations programs that appropriately and effectively reward and recognize the work of teams.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rewarding Teams

Lessons from the TrenchesBy Glenn Parker Jerry McAdams David Zielinski

Jossey-Bass

Copyright © 2000 Glenn Parker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7879-4809-2

Preface

The bookshelves of American businesses spill over with works on how to build, train, coach, and sustain teams, and on the nature of virtual teams, self-directed teams, global teams, and dysfunctional teams. That's not surprising; the potential of efficient teamwork is boundless. But creating good teams is a vexing challenge, especially in the United States. How can you get employees in the world's most individualistic culture to sacrifice and pull together for the common good?

To the abundance of books on teamwork, however, we add one more. And for good reason: how to best reward and recognize the work of business teams-of whatever kind-is still neglected territory.

Certainly there are good books for compensation professionals (see the Bibliography: McAdams, 1996; Belcher, 1995; Lawler, 1990; Wilson, 1999) on the technical aspects of designing incentive plans for teams, and handbooks that offer creative laundry lists of recognition ideas for individual contributors. But there are few sources for people on the firing line looking for practical advice coupled with real-life examples of how to design reward and recognition systems for teams, not individuals.

This book provides practical advice and detailed examples of effective organizational unit (group) incentives, project team incentives, and recognition plans. It is for managers in organizations that have made a commitment to a collaborative culture and who want to create effective reward systems for teams. The "team of the month" award won't do: you need incentives that are fair, motivational, and properly linked to desired behaviors and results and that reflect the unique aspects of your business and its structure, systems, and culture.

We suspect that many leaders in business, government, and nonprofits want real-world advice on such issues as these:

Determining what works, what doesn't, and why, according to those who have used various reward plans

Rewarding individual excellence on teams

Making recognition plans work

Deciding when and how to use cash rather than noncash awards

Dealing with team members who don't pull their weight but still receive team incentives or recognition

Understanding the organization's payoff from good team reward plans

Knowing how to combine plans, such as recognition and organizational unit incentives, for maximum impact

Ensuring that everyone in the plan understands it

Knowing how the design process differs between large and small organizations

Using incentive plans to build business literacy in the workforce

At the heart of this book are case studies of reward plans in companies large and small, in many industries, and of many cultures. For every Chase Manhattan or Rockwell, we have included a Markem Corp. or a nonprofit such as the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corporation.

Whenever organizations try to make teamwork the norm, many supporters become frustrated because the usual reward-and-recognition programs don't support it. In this book, the fictional BIZCOM Corporation and its managers show how frustration about teams can turn into success. BIZCOM's trials and tribulations are based on the authors' years of experience working with organizations.

The numerous sidebars, graphs, and the like that you will see are simply parenthetical discussions that draw out lessons learned and offer advice in using reward and recognition tactics to spur teams to new heights.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?

To put it simply: executives and managers looking to implement a strategy that has teamwork and collaboration as a central tenet; team champions, sponsors, and leaders who need to understand the critical role and implications of team rewards and recognition; human resource professionals called upon to advise teams on the options and issues associated with rewards and recognition; and compensation experts who are asked to add to their expertise and understanding to new team reward and recognition plans.

If you are an executive or manager, this book explains how to create a successful team-based organization. It describes the key role of reward and recognition systems in supporting the transition to effective teams, gives cases and examples you can adapt to your company's environment, and explains how management must reinforce rewards and recognition for teams so as to achieve strategic goals. If you're a team champion, sponsor, or leader, you'll come to understand that even well-intentioned efforts to build and nurture effective teams may fail without meaningful reward and recognition practices. You'll learn what it means to "hit the wall" and, most importantly, how to get beyond it. If you're a human resources professional, you may have seen promising teams become derailed even when the track seemed clear and well maintained. Even with your successful coaching, facilitation, and training efforts, you've seen some of the best teams bog down or fail to reach their potential. This book should help you understand how critical it is in team-based cultures to link rewards and recognition to other organizational systems. We provide examples and advice to use as a framework for driving needed changes in your rewards and recognition systems. If you're a compensation professional or consultant, the case examples and accompanying analyses may be useful. The "warts-and-all" approach helps highlight and bring to life the challenges of designing and implementing team systems in the often messy real world.

HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN

The three authors bring distinct but overlapping skill sets to this book. Glenn Parker's books and surveys on teams and teamwork are a staple in the field. Jerry McAdams has led much of the research on reward and recognition systems in North America. Dave Zielinski has covered the human resources, organizational development, and business management fields as a journalist for more than ten years.

The book is primarily based on the friendship of Parker and McAdams, which began when they appeared separately at human resources conferences around the country but compared notes over dinner. The friendship eventually became a professional collaboration. As the team revolution took hold in the early 1990s, McAdams focused more and more on the reinforcement of teams, and Parker on the connection between team development and team rewards.

Enter Zielinski. He used his knowledge of human resources and organizational development, and his uncanny ability to translate technicalities into readable text, to create this book.

OVERVIEW OF CONTENTS

Chapter One describes BIZCOM, a fictitious company that wants to use a team approach to address a critical business problem. It delineates the natural history of teams and includes a discussion of team and organizational development issues such as vision, sponsorship, membership, stakeholders, launches, training, coaching, management style, and organizational support.

In Chapter Two, BIZCOM's leadership takes a hard look at environmental barriers to team success and develops a road map for creating a team-based organization. Building reward and recognition systems for teams is explored at length, including detailed explanations of how best to use group incentives, team recognition plans, and project team incentives.

Chapters Three through Five detail more than two dozen case studies of recognition plans, project incentives, and organizational unit incentives that encourage and reward team performance. Each explores why the organization launched one or more teamwork reward plans, how the plans work, what units or teams the plans cover, obstacles encountered in design or implementation, lessons learned, and how each plan is measured for success.

Chapter Six brings it all together. It summarizes the cases and advises you on how to apply your new knowledge to your unique work environment. And we take a last look at BIZCOM for some final lessons.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Rewarding Teamsby Glenn Parker Jerry McAdams David Zielinski Copyright © 2000 by Glenn Parker. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0787948098
• ISBN 13: 9780787948092
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256