We’ve all had the experience of working with a high-performing team. Whether it was high school athletics, a volunteer initiative, or a work project, we saw how much a powerful group can achieve and how satisfying it is to be part of it. Your grocery employees can form these strong alliances as well; it just takes some leadership, accountability, and teamwork skills.
In over-achieving teams, several factors come together.
- Leaders set clear goals, make transparent decisions, and remove obstacles for the rest of the team.
- Each team member contributes a unique skill and value that complements other members.
- Everyone communicates clearly and openly, focusing on objectives, facts, and results.
- Each team member takes accountability for their contribution and understands how their work supports others.
- The team approaches challenges with a problem-solving mindset, looking for alternate solutions, experimenting, assessing, and adjusting until the issue is solved.
- The team members practice continuous learning, working on their own skills and helping others grow at the same time.
When your crews are pulling together at the department level, store level, and company-wide, you’ll see the benefits of good teamwork:
- Increased productivity
- Better communication skills
- Common focus on store objectives and brand values
- More effective training
- Reduced employee turnover
So How Can You Improve Teamwork at Your Stores?
Unfortunately, with the challenges grocery stores face today, you can’t wait for teamwork to develop organically. And most managers have little time in the schedule for dedicated team-building activities.
However, even time-strapped managers and owners can encourage collaboration with digital checklists. You may be surprised, but checklists have a proven track record of helping grocery store employees build strong working relationships. In fact, using digital checklists each day will help focus your team on common goals, improve communications, enhance individual contributions, foster continuous learning, and nurture problem-solving skills.
Working Toward a Common Goal
Most employees understand their store’s business objectives. Leaders set goals and spell out brand values regularly, but it’s not always clear how to translate performance targets into action. With checklists, leaders can reinforce goals and values and give employees the guidance to act on them.
Each checklist spells out the daily steps everyone needs to take to meet your objectives. And leaders can tally the results over time, correlating the team’s work with improved metrics. Data-driven proof of their efficacy encourages employees to take more responsibility and accountability for their assignments, feeding the cycle for even better performance.
Checklist results and data from digital field audits also help managers set goals that employees can work toward competitively. Teams can compete from different departments or different stores to see who logs the most complete checklists, who has the best schedule adherence, or which stores decrease inventory loss the most.
Competitions pull teams together and add an element of fun to the work. Winning groups can reap rewards such as movie tickets, a night out, or t-shirts to wear in pride. The shared commitment helps people develop stronger social relationships and build up cooperative skills.
Communicating Clearly
With digital checklists, every team member knows exactly what to do and when. The coordination is done for you. And if you need to make a change, you can update and push the new checklists to the right people instantly.
There’s no misunderstanding about who is covering what tasks, so the team makes fewer mistakes and works more efficiently. With data instantly uploaded to the cloud, team leaders can review individuals’ progress throughout the day, which in turn encourages ownership and accountability.
Optimizing Individual Contributions
When an employee first starts, managers may ask them to fill positions where help is most needed. But as time goes by, leaders will review how well each one is doing and identify their strengths.
Depending on a person’s abilities, store managers can adjust job responsibilities, customizing task assignments to align everyone’s work with what they do best. If some folks are interested in expanding their skills, working for another department, or taking on more responsibility, managers can use checklists to help train them on the new position and follow up to ensure they’re succeeding.
With digital checklists, managers maintain standards of operation and brand values even as team members are learning new roles that capitalize on their talents. As a result, you make the most of each person’s contribution to the team.
Training for Continuous Learning
Digital checklists make training easier and more flexible, which in turn helps you build a culture of continuous learning. And with performance data in hand, leaders provide objective, useful feedback about where employees are doing well and where they can use more practice.
Using checklists, you can give employees learning modules and videos to watch when they have time. Checklists also help colleagues teach each other via shadowing or quick tutorials. Sharing skills between colleagues helps build social bonds and improves the overall capability of the group.
Solving Problems Together
With the help of checklists, you start forging stronger and stronger teams who support each other, have solid social connections, and communicate well. As you reach for higher and higher performance goals, you can rely on these people to help you tackle inevitable challenges.
Over time, your groups will feel confident and experienced enough to suggest ways to handle unexpected events and work through solutions with each other. For example, your team might brainstorm ways to enhance product displays or complete inventory counts faster.
Having a store full of problem solvers that work together and support each other will attract customers, sell more product, and introduce innovations that give you the edge against competition.
Explore MeazureUp’s DailyChex for Building Teamwork in Your Grocery Stores
If you’re working on turning a group of strangers into a high-performing team, DailyChex makes it easy for each person to communicate, contribute, and collaborate toward a common goal.
- Easily customize checklists for all job functions.
- Update processes and procedures with the touch of a button.
- No employee is ever at a loss about what to do.
- Track daily progress in real time.
- Compile reports on performance trends for individuals, teams, regions, and the company.
- Integrate with smart technology to monitor food temperature.
- Reinforce brand values and enhance training.
To learn more and take DailyChex for a spin, click here.
