Enterprise Mobility: Team Building and Mentorship Resource

An Overview of the Project by Tanner Bowden

My name is Tanner Bowden and I’m a communications major with an emphasis in strategic organization.

Project Purpose

A year ago I completed an internship with Enterprise Mobility in Oregon. After completing the internship I was offered a job and started working for Enterprise in Idaho Falls. While at Enterprise I saw the importance of effective teamwork and the cost of ineffective teams. This inspired the idea for my project, to create a team building resource for Enterprise.

Enterprise has built a strong culture of hiring young talent and developing them into leaders and managers. This culture, while proven to develop successful individuals, causes local branches and areas to experience high rates of employee movement, both from new hires and promotions. New members being added to branches can throw off team dynamics including, trust, effective communication, and achieving goals as a team.

With these needs in mind, I created a resource for individual branches to use that outlined the importance of building effective teams as well as ways to do so. Building effective teams will lead to branches being more successful both in organizational culture and profitability.

The Process

As I set out to create this resource my first step was to research the topic more in depth. There is an immense amount of resources out there from other companies human resources, educational studies, books, and so on that talk about the different ways of building effective teams within the workplace.

It was clear to me that taking into account the specifics of an organization and the culture that they already have created was important to the success of creating a team building resource.

Enterprise is structured in a way that relies on teams and encourages their employees to promote as quickly as possible. In order for an employee to promote their numbers alone aren’t enough to do so, without the supporting numbers of their team they will be ineligible to take the next step in their career. This creates two unique situations to consider when encouraging the building of effective teams; First, collective success and individual success are important and should not hinder one another. Second, teams are ever changing and evolving and need to be nurtured as such. The responsibility of building a team is not and cannot solely be the job of leadership, it should be up to each and every employee within the branch to foster trust and create an environment where everyone can succeed.

Taking this, and all the research that I had done up until this point, into account I created an outline of key points that I wanted to focus on as I continued my research and started to build my resource. These points included; the role that teams played in company success, how to welcome new employees into the team, mentorship programs, building trust within a team, succeeding as a collective, and motivating team building.

Once all the research was done all that was left was to compile into a booklet that outlined the importance of building effective teams and ways that each branch can do so.

The Finished Product

Challenges

The biggest challenge I faced was in creating a resource that I felt the company could actually use and aligned with what they currently had. Starting out I thought about creating an onboarding process, but after researching and talking with leadership I ultimately decided that a resource that helped establish and keep effective teams was more beneficial to the company today.

Another challenge I encountered was in sifting through the sheer amount of information out there and turning it into a document that really exemplified Enterprise’s culture and values. I wanted each and every point that I talked about to fit in with what the organization had already built.

The last challenge came from the design aspect of my project. I had never created a resource on my own that needed to be formatted and designed, only needed my writing. There was a learning curve to using Canva and a lot of research on what other resources at the company looked like that ultimately led to my finished product.

Final Insights

This project showed me the value of teamwork. There are all sorts of numbers and statistics about how effective teams make a company more productive and efficient, improve employee retention and culture, or lead to an overall better work environment, but the bottom line is that teamwork is an essential part of any organization. Effective teams can make or sink a branch.