The Power of Teamwork

There are all kinds of metrics we use to grade our performance. Whether that is in our business career or in our personal lives. Some of those metrics are true indicators of achievement, others are merely data points that are interesting but really don’t provide an indicator of future performance. Our tendency is either to track nothing or too much and finding the optimum performance indicators is more art than science.

In business, we want to track customer satisfaction and the likelihood that they will remain our customers. How happy are they? Will they continue to be our customers or will they leave us and go somewhere else? Are we performing at a level that exceeds their expectations? We track and modify and report and still are concerned with customer retention. There are all kinds of best practices that companies employ in an attempt to predict retention and like all metrics, there are some that are leading indicators and some that are trailing indicators. So what are the “best” trailing indicators?

To answer this, you could turn to the San Antonio Office of Building Solutions. The retention rate for 2016 was a whopping 100%. So how does this happen? If you would walk through the doors of this office, it would become immediately apparent. There is an esprit de corps. A feeling of teamwork, of working together to exceed the customer’s expectations. 

There are lots of ways to attempt to describe this, but it comes down to the attitude you can feel run through the organization and something not easily articulated. There is a sense of urgency to customer requests. While there is separation of duties and responsibilities, there is no job that is beneath anyone in the office to do to attend to a customer. They take what, for most people, is an unglamorous job and they do it with a pride and sense of accomplishment that is hard for any metric to track. It’s not about one person it is about the team that works together like a family. Too bad we can’t put that into a metric, because it would be so much easier to replicate if there were specific tactics that could be followed to emulate this performance.