Transform with Teams

This is a boring, but necessary article. It describes how to implement Teams during a two-hour staff meeting. If you’re looking for inspiration on why to implement Teams, look at this post or this post. But, since somebody’s got to discuss the agenda and tactics for the two-hour staff meeting, I gue...

So why did I put such a non-business photo at the top of this business post? It’s because non-work activities such as the subject of the photo may be what your employees are most interested in, and why you must use WIIFM to get them to buy into Teams (or any collaboration improvement) from the start...

“You’ve got to help us!” The man across the table from me practically came out of his seat as my single sentence resonated with him. All I had said at the Chamber of Commerce networking event last Friday was that we help organizations eliminate all internal email.

Such is the pain felt by most orga...

The Situation

Soon after the merger that doubled our company’s size in 2012, the Senior Vice President of Power Generation Operations informed his Regional Vice Presidents that he needed a “Weekly Report” by Sunday morning each week so that he could in turn, compile and present his own report to th...

The Situation

The company had been hit with a couple of untimely negative news stories in national, state, and local news. One was the result of a serious environmental event due to a pipe failure. Executive management conducted a risk assessment to identify potential future disasters having low pr...

The Situation

While on a large conference call, a general manager asked several dozen employees to email their shirt sizes to his administrative assistant because the organization was going to buy polo shirts for employees on a special occasion.

Being one of the employees on the call I realized th...

The Situation

In 2005, employees at our largest coal power plant (and the third largest in the country) used various, inconsistent means to request “Lockout Tagout” before working on equipment. “Lockout Tagout” is a process by which mechanics, electricians, and other maintenance employees ask the o...

The Situation

Due to very negative publicity resulting from an environmental issue in early 2014, the company began an effort to increase oversight of all activities having any risk of environmental consequences. It was decided that all such activities first be reviewed and approved by a team consi...

The Situation

After the 2012 merger, and with a workforce of more than 5,000 employees in just the fossil-hydro generation section, the fossil-hydro organization was struggling to match those with technical needs and issues with the people responsible for high-level technical decisions and consulta...

The Situation

One large generating station conducted a regular weekly meeting in which recent barriers to efficient maintenance work were discussed and actions planned to eliminate such barriers in future work.

These barriers were such things as mechanics getting the wrong parts due to incorrect p...