fbpx

We Can Never Unlock Full Value for our Customers by Working Alone

The value of teamwork and the ability to work together towards a common goal should be ingrained in all of us. A lone hunter wouldn’t have had much chance of downing a mastodon or wooly mammoth, but by working together everyone got a good meal.

Given that working as a team played such a big part in our evolutionary success, it’s perhaps surprising that teamwork has proved so elusive in our industry.

It’s easy, and possibly justifiable, to point the finger at adversarial procurement and contracting, or at the financial pressures brought by wafer-thin margins. But we should also look at ourselves and ask some searching questions:

  • What goals and objectives are guiding the decisions our people make every day?
  • What behaviours are we incentivising and rewarding?
  • How easy do we make it for people to collaborate and work together?
  • How often do we use expertise from outside of our organisation to improve what we do?

Cross-Sector

Simply getting our own teams to work more closely together can bring valuable improvements. The cross-sector ‘one team’ approach adopted by Osborne Infrastructure and Construction teams produced significant gains on the Twickenham Station upgrade delivered in partnership with Solum.

On project after project, our teams are proving the benefits of getting engaged early and working closely with designers, engineers, customers and other contractors.

Outward Looking

Stage one of becoming a learning organisation is recognising that you don’t have a monopoly on good ideas and innovations. Learning to look outwards to see what we can learn from other sectors and other countries is essential. This teaches us a great deal, not just about how to overcome technical challenges, but also about how to manage resources efficiently, how to promote more collaborative working and how to make continuous improvement ‘business as usual.’

This all adds up to value gains for our customers and, just as important, a more enjoyable and satisfying work environment for our people. We are, after all, hard wired to want to work together to achieve our goals.

X