What about multiteaming?

Today’s organizations are becoming increasingly more complex and sophisticated. The continuous search for added value, innovation and competitive advantage enhances the internal struggle to reduce waste and inefficiencies.

The delivery of new products or services, nowadays, demands a broader view on the content and context of work. Managers and their teams must now look on all the faces of the business dice, not only on their own.

In the modern workplace, silo work is slowly being replaced. Progressively, organizations are adopting their work and internal processes around project teams that allow them to leverage the output based on a larger set of skills and academic backgrounds. Much of the change that has been happening in the workplace occurs through the ability to use teamwork as a key driver of change.

Additionally, as a study done at Google (Project Aristotle, 2012) uncovered, psychological safety is one of the key features of teamwork. The understanding of our strengths and weaknesses allow a better distribution of workload and creates an environment of high performance and collaboration.

While the ‘war for talent’ and shortage of highly qualified workers is still an issue, some organizations discovered an alternative way to deal with this subject. Multiteaming is the organizational process based on the premise of sharing of resources (human resources) with multiple teams and projects, sharing not only their time but also their expertise (Mortensen and Gardner, 2017).

Although we live and work in a world which is increasingly becoming faster and more mobile, some organizations still run the same work routines or have extensive bureaucratic work cycles. In some cases, projects may be put on hold for some time, leaving workers available to share their time and resources in other areas/projects of the organization.

What’s the biggest advantage of multiteaming? The gains on efficiency, return on investment of qualified workers and knowledge transfer (Mortensen and Gardner, 2017).

On the other hand, the major challenges for managers and HR professionals is monitoring the fit between these individuals and their teams. We now know that person-organization/team fi it’s one of the most important antecedents of work performance and productivity. The way through which we accomplish our tasks and sense of belonging in a team contributes to the creation of meaning at work, which is fundamental for our well-being and crucial as a burnout buffer.

References

Mortensen, M., & Gardner, H. K. (2017). The Overcommitted Organization. Harvard Business Review, 95(5), 58–65.

[Originally published in Bound Makers Blog, https://boundmakers.wordpress.com/2019/05/13/what-about-multiteaming/]

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