Improving teamwork among accounts receivable team

• Main Author: Ferrer, Elaine Joy
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Organizational change; Teams in the workplace
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5682
• Institution: De La Salle University

In this action research, I focused on addressing the issue of lack of teamwork between the collections group and cash application group under the new process centric set-up. The manifestations of the issue include increasing number of wrong posting of payments and unidentified payments, lack of communication and collaboration between collections group and cash application group, knowledge gap and unfamiliarity of team members. Teamwork consists of interactions among team members as they work toward in achieving the teams goals and objectives (Salas, et al., 2015). Team members should be able to adapt to changing business needs. This action research aimed to: 1.) improve communication and collaboration between cash application group and collection group, 2.) improve interpersonal relationship within the team and 3.) minimize posting errors and unidentified payments. The goal of our action research is to improve efficiency, effectiveness and increase customer satisfaction. Katzenbach and Smiths team effectiveness model guided us where to focus our intervention in order to achieve performance result. We identified different skills which we need to work on and used William Bridges Transition Model to initiate change in the organization. For our first cycle activities, we implemented goal setting, training, weekly team meeting and team outing. The team outing and weekly team meeting was unsuccessful. There was low outcome for the team outing. For the weekly team meeting, we were limited to an hour which we missed to tackle some issues within the team. The unsuccessful implementation of the two interventions led us to our second cycle activities. We got rid of our weekly team catch up meeting and replaced this with a daily team huddle to cover all issues the previous day. We conducted different games within office premises before our joint team fostering instead of going on an out of town trip for teambuilding activities. The second cycle was effective in achieving our objectives and creating a culture of teamwork within the collections group and cash application group. I learned to be open-minded. I learned that teamwork and collaboration is crucial in achieving organizational goals. The effect of teamwork had positive effect in our working environment. It motivated team members and increased morale of the team. In implementing change management in the organization, it is important to consider the emotions of the employees undergoing change process.