Home / Effective teamwork / Create and develop self-managing teams

In self-managing teams, day-to-day control, responsibility and decision-making is devolved to front-line employees and the traditional supervisor's role changes to team coach. This type of team-working has an established track record of improving productivity and job satisfaction in manufacturing industries. More recently, self-managing teams have been adopted in domains as diverse as health care, power generation, the prison service and offshore oil production.

Successful implementation of self-managed teams is not a trivial task. The Keil Centre has delivered projects to aid self-managed team implementation including:-

• on behalf of a BP's Grangemouth oil refinery and the UK Health and Safety Executive. This project included completing three benchmarking case studies, advising refinery management and publishing a research report for the offshore oil and gas industry
  
• Two projects in chemical manufacturing firms, which improved the ability of self-managing teams to communicate with each other at shift changeover
  
• Designing a comprehensive team development survey to assess team development towards self-management across three manufacturing sites
  
• Assessing the suitability of self-managing teams for certain parts of the power generation industry, and producing management guidance for publication by an industry body.