Editor's note: Michael Mitrano is a principal at Transition Strategies Corporation, a management consulting firm serving the research industry.
Among small and mid-sized full-service research companies these days, you'll hear people talking about whether their staff should be organized into "teams." What does this really mean - and why are people talking about it?
In one sense, any organization is a team - a group of people working together to accomplish a common goal. In a small company of, say, five to 10 employees, the organization really does function like a team. Everyone talks to everyone else, workload and information are shared freely, and - hopefully - all are focused directly on completing projects and satisfying clients.
As a company gets bigger, two things start to happen:
First, the top person can no longer oversee everyone directly. The staff needs to be organized in some fashion so that supervision can be delegated.
Second, specialization becomes more important. Survey research involves a wide range of tasks, from client service, research design, questionnaire writing, and analysis to questionnaire programming, interviewer supervision, coding, tabulation, and multivariate statistics. No individual can be top-notch at all these tasks. As a company grows and the kind of work it can do becomes more diverse, specialists are brought on staff.
To accommodate the need for delegation and specialization, the traditional departmental organization has emerged. Larger companies structured this way may have separate departments for sampling, questionnaire programming, field, data entry, coding, tabulation, and statistics. Even the sales and client service staff may be separate from those who manage projects and write questionnaires and reports. Each of these departments has a head who is expert in the functions of that department and manages work assignments within the department. Projects flow from department to department like autos in an assembly line, entering the factory as "sales" and emerging as shiny new "final reports."
This sounds very efficient. It lets the "geeks" work on their computers all day and the "people people" handle the project management and client contact. It provides for knowledgeable supervision, so that, for example, beginners in tabulation are working under the direction of veteran experts. It allows for the development of good work processes and quality standards, so that tasks are performed consistently. It lets the difficulty of a given project be matched with the skill of the person doing it, so that routine work is given to junior staff and the most complex tasks are reserved for the expert. This matching of work and skill levels leads to happier staff and lower project costs. Specialist staff have clear career paths that don't require them to master every aspect of the research process.
Problems emerge
If the benefits of departmental organization are so clear, why then would anyone want to change it? The answer to that question lies in human behavior. As people are organized into departments based on functional disciplines, problems often emerge.
Department staff can become focused on the execution of their task, to the detriment of the whole process and the client. Departmental standards and scheduling policies may take on lives of their own, optimizing the efficiency and quality of a department's work but making timely completion of the whole project tough. By becoming removed from client contact, departments can become inwardly oriented, viewing clients as problems rather than the source of their livelihood. Inter-departmental communication and scheduling can become time-consuming and flawed as project managers or operations schedulers negotiate each project's schedule with a series of independent department heads. Each department may feel that it is performing perfectly, yet the whole process viewed from the outside can seem rigid, bureaucratic, and ineffective.
In response to problems like these, some companies are organizing by teams. They are breaking up functional departments and organizing their staff into units based around client groups or research types. These teams include people with all or most of the skills necessary to complete a study from beginning to end. A typical team might include several client service/project management people, a field director, a questionnaire programmer, and a tab spec writer. Tasks such as coding may be carried out by general clerical staff or junior project managers. Staff are frequently cross-trained in multiple functions. Almost always, the team is headed by a senior staff member with a client service or project management background.
There are many variations on this theme. Within the teams, work may remain specialized (the spec writer does the tables) or there can be extensive cross-training (everyone does tables). Highly specialized functions (such as statistical analysis) that are carried out by one or two experts may remain as functional departments, available to all. A hybrid approach is also possible, where some functions are moved within the teams while others (such as field management) remain as separate departments.
Several benefits
When a functionally organized company reorganizes into teams, staff perceive that the operating departments like coding and tabulation have been "broken up" and dispersed among the client service units. If not carefully handled, this can lead to considerable ill will. Once a transition is completed, though, top management may see several benefits.
Because each client group controls its own resources, scheduling and communication are easier. With no department heads or central scheduling to go through, the group head directly prioritizes the work of everyone working on his or her projects.
Technical and operations personnel become closer to clients and more aligned with their needs. By reducing the organizational distance between the client and these staff members, it is easier for them to appreciate the client's situation and focus on serving his or needs.
Staff may develop more flexibility and broader skills. Cross-training and cross-assignment of work are easier when all the people involved report to the same person.
Restore focus
Organizing your company into project teams recaptures some of the benefits of being a small company. It's an anti-bureaucratic move that can restore client focus to a mid-sized company suffering from growing pains. It can work well when setting up new offices - because the communication and goal-alignment problems that can arise with functional departments grow worse when the departments and their internal clients are geographically separated. It also works well when projects are extremely large, and can support specialist staff full-time.
With all these benefits, why do companies remain organized departmentally? Teams do not work in every situation. They make it much harder to develop and retain top-level people in specialized functions. They make quality standards hard to develop or enforce. They can reduce efficiency by tying up high- or mid-level specialists with lower-level work. And they definitely require far stronger group heads -executives who can and will manage the operational functions in their groups as well as the research functions.
Are teams right for you? If your different client groups have different operational needs, putting those operations within the groups can make sense. If you are having difficulty breaking down organizational barriers and getting everyone focused on client needs, project teams can bring improvement. If your group heads have a track record of successful cooperation, you are less likely to find yourself with idle team members in one group while specialist staff in other groups are overwhelmed with work. The easier an operations function is for researchers to understand, the easier it is to handle within a team. Coding, for example, is more easily managed within the team than CATI.
Not the only way
While teams do shorten communication channels and increase client focus, they are not the only way to do this. If your departmental organization isn't working, the problem may be your managers' attitudes and management skills rather than the structure of your organization.
For some companies - and some functions within those companies - teams make sense. In other cases, their liabilities outweigh their benefits. You should carefully consider your client needs, staff capabilities, and mix of work when deciding if teams are right for you.