On the Job: An employee's view of the teamwork myth and realities

WARNING CV theft: Major problem, big risks for job hunters

Generation Y vs. HR culture: Buzzwords at ten paces »

Back to Main Page

Print This Post

Email This Post

On the Job: An employee's view of the teamwork myth and realities

November 17th, 2008

Teamwork is now a sort of sacred cow of the buzzword industry. You’d think they’d invented the idea. In the workplace, it’s a bit of a joke. The word teamwork means actual work, not theory.

Nobody on the job sits around holding mutual congratulation sessions. We’re all too busy, thanks to losing team members and lack of recognition of the effects of adding so much more work.

Real teamwork on the job is almost unspoken. People fit themselves in to the roles to get the work done. The supervisors know we know what to do, and what has to happen when the gaps show up. They do their bit and try to spread the load properly, but they can’t do much with things they don’t have.

So when people start talking about teamwork, you have to wonder what they think they’re talking about.

Making a sort of ideal out of a concept that just isn’t put into practice is a bit more than ridiculous.

Particularly when you consider all the office wars raging in so many workplaces. That’s teamwork? Or is it team building?

How many double standards can you fit into a conceptual workplace, let alone a real one?

About 30% of the American workforce has chronic job dissatisfaction, usually either through workplace conditions, or career issues.

Apparently the teamwork idea doesn’t extend to any real results for employees in terms of career goals, work conditions, or even practicing basic employment law about grievances.

That rather undercuts the value of using team values as a way of expressing the realities of the workplace.

With severe unemployment on the rise, it looks like just another obstacle to people trying to get jobs, to use teamwork as a criteria for employing people.

Add to this the fact that anyone can claim to be a great team player, and nobody’s going to know the facts until they’re actually on the job.

Not all employees are great team players, and every employer on Earth knows that very well. So do other employees, supervisors, and clients.

So where’s all this blue sky babble coming from?

In practice, teamwork is what makes the workplace work at all. Mutual reliance, understanding each other’s problems and issues, are fundamental. Solving those problems and resolving those issues in a practical way is the heart of teamwork, on the most basic level.

So if we’re talking about teamwork, are we talking about a set of multiple choice questions, or the real thing? On the job, you don’t talk about teamwork, you do it, and you do it every day.

This is one of the areas where the employment market has become far too academic about something which isn’t academic at all.

One of the most basic rules of judging an employee is by actual performance, not stated performance. Managers aren’t being taught to manage any more, they’re being taught to use methods which just don’t apply at the coal face.

Any employee, supervisor or experienced manager could tell you that talk is the cheapest, and least useful of workplace skills.

Maybe it’s about time the employment industry woke up to that.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 7:18 am and is filed under On the job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.

Sample Resume Job Promotion CV

Cover Letter Guide Job Search Organizer

Job Search & Career Blog

On the Job: An employee's view of the teamwork myth and realities

November 17th, 2008