Formation Of An Employee Policy Taskforce

Abstract

This paper documents that process of forming a team tasked with updating employee policies for a geographically dispersed corporation. The paper will first give some background information on the company and define the type of team being created. Then, the paper will focus on building the team, starting with the leader. Then it will identify the planning required of the leader before the team can start operating. Next, the team startup activities will be addressed followed by a description of the operational concept for the team during its existence. The final section will identify some of the problems the team may encounter due to the logistics of working in a geographically dispersed fashion. This portion of the document will also discuss possible resolutions to those problems.

Background Information

First, some background information on the team being discussed in this paper should be supplied. The team will consist of employees from a medium sized corporation. This corporation employs 400 people and maintains two locations approximately 250 miles apart. The main office houses three-quarters of the staff, while the remote office is home to the remaining quarter. The charter for the team is to analyze the current employee policies from both locations, propose updates to policies that are out-of-date and recommend consolidation of duplicate policies. The team will have six months to complete their work and then present their findings to upper management, who will make the final determination on policy changes.

To start our analysis we should first define what a team is and identify the type of team best suited for this scenario. The most generic definition of a team emphasizes that it is two or more people interacting together to accomplish a common purpose (Huszczo, 1996). More specifically, the team being formed to analyze employee policies would be considered a task force. The term task force infers that the team is formed to investigate a particular problem and is then dissolved once it identifies recommendations to solve the problem (Huszczo, 1996). A task force is often a cross-functional team that utilized the knowledge and talents of people throughout the organization that have some stake in the outcome. This enhances the support of the recommendations made by the task force by the population at large. This premise is the foundation for the recommendations that will be made in the remainder of the paper.

It should be noted that a task force must have the total support of management for it to be successful. First, employees must be given the time to participate in the focus group activities while continuing to perform their normal duties. This may mean reducing their work load for the duration of the task force. Secondly, team training will need to be supplied to ensure all participants are prepared for the assignment since some people may have no prior team experience. Third, virtual collaboration technology along with some travel budget will need to be supplied for team meetings. At the very minimum, the initial kick-off and team training session should be done with everyone brought together in one location.

Building the Team

The first step in creating the task force is to identify the leader. In this scenario, the task force leader will reside at the main office. This means additional care will need to be taken to ensure the remote site feels equally engaged. The lead role is crucial to the success of the task force, so care should be taken in filling the position. To aide in the selection process, the responsibilities of the position have been documented. They are as follows:

1. Reporting task force progress to upper management

2. Ensuring completion of and adherence to the task force charter

3. Coordinating overall activities of the task force

4. Coordinating and participating in a common communication process

5. Coordinating task force meetings, ensuring meetings take place as often as necessary and also ensuring participation by all task force members

6. Arranging for meeting notes to be summarized into specific action items and distributed to members (Galpin & Herndon, 2000)

Once the task force leader has been identified, he or she must begin the process of organizing the effort and assembling the rest of the team. If there are too many policies to operate as a single task force, the best approach would be to create sub-teams to focus on groups of related policies. It would be the task force leader’s responsibility to define the structure of the sub-groups and the division of the policies. Once the structure of the sub-teams is known, the leader can begin the process of identifying the rest of the team. Because the charter of the task force is to recommend changes to employee policies, the Human Relations (HR) department will necessarily have a large presence on the team. In fact, an HR representative should be required to be the lead on each sub-team to ensure appropriate and legal decisions are made regarding the policies being reviewed. I also recommend the sub-teams contain employee representatives from both locations. Involving employees in this activity will enhance the acceptance of the resulting employee policies. When people are invited to come together to share their ideas, concerns and needs, they become engaged. They move from being passive recipients of instructions to committed champions of decisions (Dressler, 2006). Departments from both locations will be responsible for identifying their own representatives by asking for volunteers. These volunteers will select three sub-teams they would be interested in working on. The reason for selecting three is to allow the leader to level load each sub-team in case too many people volunteer for the same one. The leader should take great care to ensure each sub-team has employee representatives from each of the two locations. This will help the employees from the remote location feel they have had an equal participation in the effort.

Planning

At this point a focus group leader and a series of sub-teams with leaders from HR and member representatives from each department from both locations have been identified. Before work can begin, the task force leader will need to have completed some additional up-front planning. He or she would have identified meeting logistics, selected collaboration tools, identified deliverables along with their due dates, and determined the status