Over the past couple of months, I have visited with frontline teams in Colorado, Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Honolulu, Los Angeles and Oakland. Without exception, I observed a broad cross-section of our unionized workers and their partners struggling for positive outcomes.

“Struggle” describes what is involved in unit-by-unit improvement work. Struggle can be positive. It’s necessary for people to transform, and not just make a few cosmetic or ephemeral changes.

Call centers: One of the toughest workplaces

One example that comes to mind is a discussion I observed among UBT co-leads in a large call center. The team leaders focused on a more than yearlong battle to improve attendance. Call centers are tough places to work day in and day out. The calls never stop. The work is sedentary. As one worker told me, “When you are at work all day on the phones talking with and advising Kaiser Permanente members, you have very little, if any, interaction with your co-workers.”

This team didn’t give up. They recognized they needed to create more camaraderie in the call center. They implemented several tests of change:

• The team has figured out how to meet regularly, despite the challenging logistics.
• When leaders suggest changes in call center operations, the representational team surveys members of the unit before making them.

• They created a set of message boards in break rooms. On these bulletin boards, employees were encouraged to post news about family, friends and community. The boards are wildly successful and seem to be bringing people together.

This team was feeling lots of pressure to improve. The managers were feeling the heat, yet they did not collapse under the pressure. Rather, they stuck to the principles they had been taught about how to bring about frontline improvement.

There is no easy way out

Struggle is positive and necessary. It takes a toll but is also exhilarating. Employees and managers at the front line feel pressure to make their teams high performing. This is understandable, since the 2010 National Agreement sets forth aggressive goals around expanding the number of high-performing teams. But frontline teams cannot do it alone. They need the support of the whole organization.  

Our colleagues from Rutgers University, in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University and Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Organizational Research, have identified five essential systems of support and encouragement for frontline teams:

• Leadership
• Line of sight
• Team cohesion
• Processes and methods
• Infrastructure and support

The report is easy to read and easy to use; you can download the full report or an executive summary at LMPartnership.org.

Among the many valuable insights in this report:

“As a final point, a theme running through all these findings is the degree of flexibility, particularly in structures, processes and methods, shown by these successful teams. While the inclination in many labor-management partnerships in the past has been to create rigid requirements for how frontline committees function, given the variety of jobs and diverse types of work settings within the Kaiser community, it makes sense that offering teams the flexibility to function in ways that meet their particular needs would result in greater team success.”

 As we proceed on the Path to Performance, let’s all support our co-workers in ways that meet their needs. Finding the time, space and environment for team development is critical to their success.