Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
During these crazy busy times for most marketing teams, you must get the most out of everyone working for you.
One way to optimize team performance is by conducting an effectiveness assessment. It’s a questionnaire-guided audit that will provide you with information on what your marketing team is doing right and wrong, how severe your team's issues are, and any opportunities for improvement you may have.
This article will explain:
What a team effectiveness assessment is
How to run one effectively
How to respond to one
What to do to create an assessment of your own.
What to Know About Team Effectiveness Assessments
Team Effectiveness Assessment: What It Is
A team effectiveness assessment is a quiz or questionnaire that helps managers understand a team's strengths, ability to work together, and overall performance. The objective of this kind of assessment is to help leaders understand what their employees are doing well and identify areas for improvement.
A team effectiveness assessment is a good starting point for understanding what you should be concerned about, along with what your workers are getting right. It gives you real-world, real-time information on whether you need to take fast action to improve how your team functions or if you should be celebrating its success and taking it to the next level.
This kind of assessment isn’t the ultimate testament to your team’s performance. However, it can be an excellent way to determine whether things are on track… or heading off the rails.
How to Run a Team Effectiveness Assessment
A team effectiveness assessment helps you understand performance-based attributes that have the most impact on your team's success now and in the future. They typically include but aren't limited to:
Goal achievement
Knowledge
Motivation
Team chemistry
Processes and procedures
Roles and appropriateness for them
Skills
Willingness and ability to learn
With your ideal attributes in mind, you can either create an assessment of your own or refer to the ideas in the final section of this article. Once you develop an assessment, have others in your leadership team review it to ensure it will capture the information you need to optimize your marketing organization.
What to Do if Your Team Effectiveness Assessment is a Good One
Even if your team’s assessment is positive, don’t just view it as a win and go home. Look back at the answers you received from individuals and see if there are hidden issues that could pop up in the future. Averages are averages. You may be seeing a lot of four-out-of-five scores on your assessment, but if those scores are the result of many “fives” averaged with some “ones,” you could have some disgruntled workers holding overall team effectiveness back.
How to Respond if Your Team Effectiveness Assessment is a Negative One
If your team effectiveness assessment returns less than favorable results, don't panic. Start by figuring out which areas are particularly bad. Find the questions that earned an average score of one or two and make it a priority to figure out what’s happening to cause the dysfunction. Also look for patterns among questions that get bad scores. You may find patterns that demonstrate interconnected or related issues.
Do you have a management problem?
Perhaps you aren’t hiring the right kinds of people.
Maybe you aren’t offering your people adequate training.
If your score is concerning, once you completely understand what’s happening, be quick and decisive in acting on the results. Explain what’s happening to the people on your team. Start by training them on things they can improve through education. Bring in new talent as necessary. If you find it challenging to handle these things on your own or in-house, consider bringing in a consultant or outside training organization to help facilitate the improvement process. There are no negatives about doing this. People are often more open to taking direction from those they don’t view as part of the “problem.”
If you have layers of management on your marketing team (for instance, advertising, creative, or social media managers leading groups), make them responsible for aspects of the change management process. Make it a part of their work goals and annual assessment. Compensate them for improving what’s wrong. It will help get them to buy into the process, ensuring it will be successful.
A poor team effectiveness assessment doesn't necessarily mean your marketing organization will fail in its responsibilities to your business. However, it does mean you can't afford to keep letting the issues revealed through the assessment continue.
Now that you know the basics of conducting and responding to a team effectiveness assessment, let's look at some questions you could use in your evaluation.
Sample Team Effectiveness Assessment Quiz
Here are some sample questions and statements you may want to use in your assessment. Responses should be on a scale of one to five, with one being the most negative response and five the most positive.
How well do you understand the value of the work you do to the business?
How well do you understand how your work contributes to the bottom line results of the company?
Do you have the training you need to do your work effectively?
Do you feel appreciated for the work you do?
Are you fairly compensated?
How confident are you that you can complete your work effectively and on time?
Do you have a clear understanding of how to prioritize your work?
Do you understand who the business is marketing to?
Are you able to recruit and hire the people you need?
Do you know how to interview job candidates effectively?
Are you able to hire the best candidate to fill a position?
How good is the communication on your team?
How good is the communication across the organization?
Rate the quality of the company’s training programs.
Rate the quality of the company’s systems and technology.
Rate the quality of our project management process.
Are you able to use the company’s technology effectively?
How good is the company’s marketing plan?
How clear is the company’s marketing plan?
How well are the goals of the business aligned with its compensation program?
Do you clearly understand how your work contributes to sales goals?
Do you have regularly scheduled coaching sessions?
Do you meet with your manager consistently to discuss progress toward your goals?
Do you have the systems and training required to do your job?
Do you enjoy coming to work every day?
Do you work a fair number of hours each week?
Is your work life balance reasonable?
These are just some examples of questions you could include in your assessment. Ask about anything you have concerns about. Make sure you phrase your queries in a way that allows for answers on a scale of one to five. You can also include “don’t know” as an option, which could be an indicator of an issue. It’s a smart idea to limit your survey to 20 questions. This provides a one-hundred-point scale to measure against and keeps the quiz from becoming too cumbersome to complete. If possible, use an automated questionnaire or database system to create your quiz. It will make it easier for employees to complete and for you to analyze the data.
Ultimately, an assessment quiz is a powerful tool to uncover issues within your organization. But it’s not an end in itself. Once you find out what’s going on, you need to take steps to remedy what’s wrong, prevent emerging issues, and optimize the things that are going right.
