It’s tough for a team to deliver top performance when members keep coming and going. Constant turnover makes it hard to maintain team spirit—and the continuity of skills and knowledge necessary to get the job done.
But sometimes companies don’t have any choice but to keep shuffling the deck. Teams might need different workers at different stages of a project—designers at the start, for instance, and prototyping experts later on. Likewise, the team members may not all be available at the same time, or employees might constantly come and go because of layoffs or mergers.
Questions to Ask Yourself
- Are you constantly shuffling people on and off teams in your company, either out of necessity or by design?
- Do new team members take a long time to get up to speed?
- Do longstanding team members resent the extra work it takes to get newcomers trained?
- Do team members who are constantly shuffling from manager to manager complain about a lack of career oversight?
- Overall, do you find that these unstable groups aren’t performing as well as they should?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need to rethink how you set up and manage your teams. You should craft team roles that take little on-the-job training, and make it as easy as possible to slot people in and out. As part of that, you should come up with formalized procedures for employees to follow, making it easier to get newcomers up to speed. Finally, find ways to motivate workers who are always moving among teams, and help them identify with the organization and its goals—such as assigning them to a manager who oversees everyone at the company with similar skills, instead of bouncing them from boss to boss.
Some managers, meanwhile, want to keep team membership unstable on purpose. They may want to rotate employees in and out of groups to give them exposure to different parts of the business, or to cut down on theft or other bad behaviors that can develop when employees work together closely for a long time and turn a blind eye to each other’s misdeeds.
So, how can companies get the most out of teams under unstable conditions? Here’s a look at the most common problems that teams with fluid membership encounter—and the best ways to solve them.
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This might also be a sign that the org is over-committed, and likely is not aware. Via shuffling all the time the normal quality and rate-of-completion measures are all distorted. I like agile dev for good teams, and a common problem is trying to do too much with the available resources.