External Pressure in a Team Environment

Companies rely on employees to produce and deliver high-quality products and services. Employees are impacted by a variety of forces—both internal and external—as they attempt to perform their job duties. Employers who are aware of these forces, and who are prepared to leverage or counteract them, can increase productivity and loyalty.

Basically in this article, I'll be looking at the external pressures available in workplace and the business environment.

An effective team environment is comprised of a number of related components. If any of these components are missing or not in place, the team is likely to experience problems. If you have these component right, then your team should run like a well-oiled machine.

The best teams are able to perform without being distracted by too many internal and external issues. Great teams are those that work well together, where all parts just seems to be connected and working properly. This doesn’t happen by chance. It requires creating a team environment that has the right variables for improvement and high performance.

The best team environment encourages team members to learn and grow, and incorporates positive short-term stress to encourage team members to strive for achievable, meaningful goals.

Positive team environment also involves consequence for poor input on the part on the members that constitute the team, as well as reward for good job well executed. Ensuring the right resources also exist to get the job at hand done.

Certainly, a good team environment needs external pressure to function effectively and to keep improving. Just as the Sun in the solar systems, external forces and pressures are required to sustain the team environment in the business world and work environment.

Image from: https://www.thoughtfulleader.com/effective-team-environment/

The importance of external forces on your team environment cannot be undermined. The pressure on a team and its leader is fundamental to the team being successful and to keep progressing.

Quickly, we will be considering the significant external pressure and their overall effect on the team spirit in the work environment. A team environment with the right mix of this external pressure helps to improve performance and generate the right atmosphere in the work place.

1.       Time Pressure: this forces your team to try to hit deadlines set by the entities of your team environment.

2.       Budget Pressure: forces your team to operate efficiently to avoid scrutiny from the financial functions of your company

3.       Quality pressure: the quest for quality and excellent service delivery also help mount pressure on the team to be able to deliver result, avoid repercussion from bad work. Bad work will surely hurt the company's reputation, referral level will be lowered as well. In order to ensure that prospective client become and loyal customer, a lot is required ranging from good customer service delivery, excellent customer retention strategy and to mention but few.

4.       Competitors Pressure: Your competitors are on the look out! And you cannot afford to mess up. Some much pressure coming for your competitors that you team can't afford not to deliver. In order to stay in the game, business must handle the pressure coming from your competitors. Successful businesses have been able to handle and turn the tide in their favour. Some competitors have even go as far as doing a counter or negative advertisement to deter their competitor’s reputation. To also stay ahead, you must be innovative, ensuring unique value proposition, value added service amidst other practises must be put in place.

5.       Corporate Image: The brand and corporate identity must no suffer, and the team must be aware of that. Some can even choose to put up advertising strategy project the brand when you would expect them to be advertising their product and services. This is to tell you the emphasis company placed on their Corporate Image. Team members can afford to give less for the sake of company's image. Staffs are expected to act in such a manner that is the best interest of the company.

6.       Technology: Technology has significant influence both positive and disruptive on the behaviour of the employee or team members within the organization. Technology can often help streamline processes and make work easier for employees, learning how to use new technology while remaining productive can be stressful.

7.       Innovation: "Innovation is the process of integrating existing technology and inventions to create or improve a product, process or a system. Innovation in an economic sense is the consolidation of a new product, process or system improvement" (Freeman, C., 1982). Innovation is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth and grow. This influence of innovation poses a lot of threat except the company is able to remain dynamic and move with the flow of innovation and incorporate innovation into their organizational structure.

8.       Company's Culture: can have varying effect on employee performance and motivation levels. Often times, team work harder to achieve organizational goals if they consider themselves to be part of the corporate culture. Complexity, nepotism, spousal influence, freeloading, misaligned goal, identity crisis, non-quality family employee pose a lot on treat on the team spirit and performance. Different cultures operating in one company can also impact the overall company performance. For example, I have been opportune to work in a company that doesn’t  fire employees because of the practise that the company had built over time. This could have a positive and negative impact on the employee performance at some point in the course of discharging their core responsibility.

9.       Locus of Control: Employees impact can also be a function of the level of their own internal and external locus of control. Those with external locus of control are looking for people to tell them what to do. These set of employees need direction and expect the team lead to give clear and detailed feedback at all times. Those with an internal locus of control feel empowered to make decisions and act on their own---they feel in control of their destiny rather than at the mercy of external factors. Hence, the employer must get them into the team in the right balance to ensure optimum productivity.

Also, internal pressures in the work place such as rewards are quite relevant for maximal team output. Rewards are important for showing team members that what they do matters. On the other side of the coin are consequence for poor performance.

Maintaining the right balance of resources is important in any team environment. The right mix of resources enables a team to run efficiently and effectively. Effectiveness is getting the job done right, which is about having the right people in the right roles. Efficiency is about doing the work with a minimal amount of waste by having the right amount of people.

Learning and development is also critical in a team environment. It helps to ensure that team members have the appropriate skills and knowledge to perform their role. The external pressure on the team will require it to improve to maintain high levels of quality and performance, and to stabilise the costs. The other common alternative is simply to hire more resources. Hiring doesn't solve performance problems in a sustainable way because of the increased cost involved.

Motivation in the team environment is important for maintaining team performance also, even if the right team components are in place.

To create an effective team environment, you need to ensure that the above components are in place. Don’t forget that external pressure is good for the team. An effective team environment is comprised of these related components. If any of these components are missing or not in place, the team is likely to experience problems.

How you satisfy these components will differ by industry and organisation, but if you have the components in place, you have the best chance of achieving good performance.

So far, We have highlighted 9 external factors that influence the team environment in this article, let's go over the checklist again

• Time Pressure
• Budget
• Quality is the word
• Oh Competitor
• Company's image
• Technology
• Innovation
• Company's Culture
• Locus of Control 

What other external pressures are in the team environment? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.