Metrics for Merging Teams
When your teams don’t understand and collaborate well it can be incredibly frustrating – and costly!
All too often departments adopt a mindset that they only need to be concerned with how their own team is performing, without considering the overall goals of the business.
This is particularly apparent when businesses have merged. Each business comes to the table with their own way of working but often there can be a jarring of processes and a resistance to understand how each other works.
A brilliant opportunity that just isn’t working
We saw a great example of this with our clients Richard and Judy. Richard’s company provides till systems for florists, while Judy’s company sells order fulfilment systems to deliver flowers and plants to customers from online and phone orders.
Richard and Judy were both very excited about merging their two companies and could see what a great opportunity they had to provide a joined-up system for florists.
Before the merger, Richard’s team spent their time out and about selling and installing their tills on site. Judy’s team are office based, setting up order booking systems and connecting them to delivery services, and carrying out client meetings via Zoom.
It’s clear to Richard and Judy that the merger is great for business. The joined-up deal their combined teams can offer customers allows them to install the tills on site, and then take care of the order fulfilment configuration and delivery booking systems back in the office.
Conscious uncoupling and recoupling is required
Unfortunately, Richard and Judy soon realised that their teams really weren’t meshing. While both teams had the opportunity to earn a performance bonus if they hit their sales targets, they had different work models and objectives.
Both teams were still very wedded to their original company and personal goals. Richard’s team loved face-to-face customer interaction and being out on the open road, while Judy’s team wanted to get home at night!
Each ‘side’ knew their own part of the business really well, but neither team knew how to sell everything they offer or how to make things work. This lack of understanding meant they passed business to the other team, but this ‘two sales teams and two sets of messages’ approach just left their customers confused.
Richard and Judy could see their combined costs were rising because their teams were becoming less efficient! So, they called in our team at Grant Jones for help.
A little understanding goes a long way
Our starting point was to sit down with Richard, Judy and their teams to review all of the different business processes, goals and also, very importantly, each person’s personal goals. Doing this allowed the combined teams to start understanding one another and they began to see the potential for better ways of working.
We then guided them to design a set of metrics that incentivised them individually, while also encouraging collaboration. These metrics gave them a great balance of individual performance and team results.
Together we created new personal scorecards for each team member, so now they can easily see how they’re performing. These work alongside a team scorecard that highlights where they need to collaborate and help one another out.
In addition to the scorecards, we showed Richard and Judy how to introduce 360 feedback tools, which ensure the two team managers can share learnings. These tools are a great way to break down the ‘them and us’ mentality that often occurs with mergers of any kind.
With these new metrics in place Richard, Judy and their teams now work as a cohesive unit, which has increased turnover and helps their customers to feel confident in the service they’ve purchased.
If, like Richard and Judy, you’re finding your teams aren’t meshing and would like help creating metrics to get things on track, give Grant Jones a call.
