Build 'Scaffolds' to Improve

Performance of Temporary
Teams
Many critical tasks are performed by teams created on the fly, but lack of
stability can hinder their performance. Amy Edmondson and Melissa
Valentine use the idea of scaffolds to produce greater collaboration and
efficiency on temporary teams.

by Roberta Holland
"Four minutes," a triumphant Amy C. Edmondson exclaims as she arrives at
her Harvard Business School office, clutching a bike helmet and explaining
that her commute is 10 minutes faster by bicycle than by car. Edmondson,
the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at HBS, knows a
thing or two about efficiency.
But it's one thing to make yourself more efficient, quite another to make a
team more efficient, and still another when that team's membership is in
constant flux. With short-term teams assembled on the fly becoming
increasingly common in today's workplaces, Edmondson and a colleague
set out to investigate how fluid teams can work better.
In their paper Team Scaffolds: How Mesolevel Structures Enable RoleBased Coordination in Temporary Groups, Edmondson and lead author
Melissa A. Valentine show how a very minimal structure can lead to greater
collaboration and efficiency on a temporary team. What they call a team
scaffold is fixed while individual team members flow through the structure.

THE BIG AHA WAS HOW VERY LITTLE STRUCTURE

THIS IS
The paper, published in the March-April 2015 edition of Organization
Science, focuses on the redesign of a city hospital's emergency department
around temporary teams called pods. The low-cost redesign led to dramatic
improvements, both qualitatively and quantitatively, including a 40 percent
reduction in how long a patient would remain in the ED before being
discharged or admitted. The hospital, located in the southeastern United
States, was an early adopter of a team-focused structure that many
emergency departments are now implementing.
The research showed that temporary teams mimic the behaviors of more
permanent teams, which have definitive boundaries around a group of roles,
a clear goal, interdependent tasks, and stable, appropriate composition,
Edmondson says. "Here we say we've got only the minimal version of those
four factors-just a whisper of those things-and yet we get an awful lot of
benefit."

Perf
ormance of temporary teams can be improved with light
structuremuch like how scaffolds are used.iStock.com/KarenMassier

Prior research makes clear the importance of team stability, yet that's not
always possible when an organization must work around the clock with
overlapping shifts.
Given more and more dynamism in the modern workplace, "my interest
started to be, how do you have effective teamwork when you can't have the
traditional structural features of effective teams, [and so] I shifted my
emphasis from teams to 'teaming,'" Edmondson says.
Valentine shared that interest in "messy" teams, making it the focus of her
dissertation for the Health Policy (Management) doctoral program at HBS.
(Edmondson chaired her dissertation committee.)
Prior to the redesign, the hospital used ad hoc groupings in the emergency
departmentany available nurse would triage a patient, then return the
patient's chart for any available resident, who would then leave the chart for
any available attending physician. The nurses did not know which doctor
was working on which patient, and vice versa, which led to inefficiencies and

a lack of accountability to one another. Schisms between the professional

groups also hampered communication.
The redesign divided the ED into four pods, which were essentially bays with
the necessary equipment to treat any type of patient. One senior or
attending physician, one or two residents, and three nurses were assigned
randomly to a pod at the start of their shifts. Patients were assigned
consecutively to the four pods, with each pod having ultimate responsibility
for its queue of patients. Because of the staggered and differing shifts, the
entire team membership could changeover in as little as five hours.
The qualitative data showed better coordination between the pod members
because they were co-located, making it easy to know who was on the team.
It increased communication, follow-up, and the setting of mutual priorities,
especially since the pod members were collectively responsible for getting
the patients through the ED.
"The big 'aha' was how very little structure this is," Edmondson says. "We
still have no assigned membership to specific teams over time. I think it
speaks to the subtle interpersonal challenges we face trying to catch and
work with relative strangers, and that even those small moments of
hesitation or miscommunication matter."

POD WARS
While the scaffolds helped break down barriers between professional
groups, they created new, albeit temporary, affinity groups to some extent,
triggering competition between the teams, which the staff referred to as "the
pod wars." No one wanted to be stuck in the slowest pod, and other pods
didn't tend to help you out if yours was bogged down, the staff interviews
revealed. "People were only affiliated with their pod for four or eight hours,
and despite how temporary their team memberships were, they were still
competitive with one another," says Valentine, who after earning her PhD
from Harvard in 2013 joined Stanford University as an assistant professor of
management science and engineering.

Valentine says one caveat of the quantitative improvement is that the

hospital was not performing as well as its peers before the redesign.
Although not every workplace will see such dramatic improvement, the
research shows how powerful a tool grouping people deliberately, even if
temporary, can be for managers. In other research, Valentine studied four
other hospitals that implemented team scaffolds in their emergency
departments with less success, which is the basis for an upcoming paper.
The city hospital in the joint research with Edmondson had a robust change
process, getting a lot of input from staff and buy-in, and used a pilot pod to
train staff. One other hospital had a decent change process and bounded
groups, but did not assign the pod ultimate responsibility for the patient flow,
which hampered the pod acting as a team, Valentine says.
While a hospital may be a natural setting for team scaffolds, Edmondson
and Valentine see other applicable sites.
Many large, global companies are trying to enable better lateral coordination
to solve client issues more efficiently. "Just the designation that you're part of
this temporary group can eliminate some of those bureaucratic layers where
the coordination between people laterally is harder than it needs to be,"
Edmondson says.
Valentine was one of the authors of a Stanford paper on crowdsourcing
teams to handle more complex projects, applying many of the ideas of team
scaffolds. She has also incorporated the research into one of her courses,
with students creating e-books in 48 hours through crowdsourcing on a team
scaffold platform. While the hospital's pod members were physically in the
same area, Valentine notes that co-location can be virtual in the case of
crowdsourcing, using chat rooms, shared folders, or shared websites.
"There's more complex work that really requires this teaming on the fly, and
the social technologies make it more possible to find and coordinate with
each other," Edmondson says.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roberta Holland is a writer based in Norwood, Massachusetts.

Taken from: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7783.html