is your team slacking that's the question we've asked over 1,200 leaders and managers for the past 17 years when people on your team are not contributing they're not pulling their weight literally in a very first demonstration of this people were pulling a rope on average people were able to pull 63 kilos of force per person you put those people into teams of three it goes down to 53 kilos per person you put them in teams of eight now we're down at 31 kilos per person this social loafing effect has also been replicated in intellectual challenges
creativity tasks complex reasoning and it occurs across cultures India Japan Taiwan in addition to the US I had an opportunity to work with the senior vice president at the bulkmatic Transport company Brian's safety team at bulkmatic was tasked with a really important project how to install 500 smart Drive cameras in their tractors and produced coaching clips and instill driver acceptance the team had been working for several months but there hadn't been any progress the team wasn't engaged drivers were quitting team members were not showing up to meetings and when they did show up they came
60 to 90 minutes late they hadn't produced a single coaching clip the phone calls were wandering off in different directions so Brian and I put our heads together and worked up a four-pronged intervention plan to increase engagement step one de develop a team contract A Team contract is a onepage preferably half a page mission statement of the team focusing on three things the goal the responsibilities and the Norms everybody signs everybody commits Brian called me the first day after he introduced the contract to his team he said this was the most productive meeting the team
had ever had and it surprised him how much a simple tool could increase the engagement of the team step two short frequent meetings as opposed to long drawn out meetings the research is in teams worked to fill their time Brian's safety team noticed that the longer the distance was between the meetings the more the team started to drift off track so Brian started hosting more frequent shorter meetings and at each one of these meetings they Revisited the team contract step three Stand and Deliver literally every week team members need to stand up and Report out
to the team what they've accomplished that week case in point Google Ventures weekly Tuesday meetings everybody stands up and reports out what they've accomplished the research is in teams that stand up are 34% more productive than teams that sit down step four create a line of sight when team members can see how they're having an impact on the in goal they're much more engaged let me give you an example this was looking and engagement in a fundraising Organization three groups one team had Direct contact with the beneficiary another group read a letter from a beneficiary
and one group had no contact at all with the beneficiary one month later the group who' had Direct contact with the beneficiary raised 171% more money so what happened at bulk mtic the safety team successfully installed 500 smart Drive cameras on schedule prior to the intervention they had only installed 60 after several months and atrisk Driver behaviors cut to only 5% down from high double digits the team contract was a game Cher for bulkmatic and it can be a GameChanger for your team as well
