We have officially changed our name from Recall Solutions to WEAVE Communications. Our new website is www.getweave.com. If you go to our old website, you will be redirected to the new URL.

Team building and teamwork skills are critical for your effectiveness as a manager or entrepreneur. Even if you are not in a leadership role yet, better understanding of teamwork can make you a more effective employee and give you an extra edge in your office. 

Team building success is when your team can accomplish something bigger and work more effectively than a group of the same individuals working on their own. You have a strong synergy of individual contributions. But there are two critical factors in building a high performance team. 

The first critical factor of teamwork success is that all the team efforts are directed towards the same clear goals - the team goals. This relies heavily on good communication in the team and the harmony in member relationships. 

The other important element is the diversity of skills and personalities. When people use their strengths in full, but can compensate for each other's weaknesses. When different personality types balance and complement each other. 

Here are some additional team building ideas, techniques, and tips you can try in your situation. 

1. Make sure that the team goals are totally clear and completely understood and accepted by each team member. 

2. Make sure there is complete clarity in who is responsible for what. Do your best to avoid overlaps of authority. For example, if there is a risk that two team members will be competing for control in certain area, try to divide that area into two distinct parts and give each more complete control in one of those parts, according to those individual's strengths and personal inclinations.

3. For issues that rely on the team consensus and commitment, involve the whole team in the decision making process. For example, use group sessions with collective discussions of possible decision options or solution ideas. What you want to achieve here is that each team member feels his or her ownership in the final decision, solution, or idea. The more he or she feels this way, the more likely he or she is to agree with and commit to the decided line of action. 

4. Make sure there are no blocked lines of communication so you and your team stay fully informed. 

5. Build trust with your team members by spending one-on-one time in an atmosphere of openness and honesty. Be loyal to your employees, if you expect the same. 

6. Allow your office team members to build trust and openness between each other in team building activities and events. Give them some opportunities of extra social time with each other in an atmosphere that encourages open communication. For example, in a group lunch on Friday. 

7. Be careful with interpersonal issues. Recognize them early and deal with them till full resolution. 

8. Never miss opportunities to empower your employees. Say thank you or show appreciation of an individual team player's work. 

9. Do not limit yourself to negative feedback. Be fare. Whenever there is an opportunity, give positive feedback as well.

Finally, though teamwork and team building can be challenging, the rewords from high team effectiveness are well worth it.

Submitted by amowad on Wed, 2010-05-26 14:19

Calling patients who are due for appointments is one of the most time-consuming—and vital—tasks for any busy dental office. Most dental offices have hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue tied up in these patients. Without an automated system in place, it usually falls to front desk employees to manually search the patient database for those patients who are due for appointments and then call to schedule their next visit. The problem with this system is that it requires serious multitasking and management—front desk employees are already handling patients in person, and struggling to stay caught up with paperwork and billing.

Another problem is that, often, patients on the call list tend to be unreachable during regular business hours. Until Recall Solutions, the only automated systems in place to help tackle these problems were texting and emailing services. Two major drawbacks with these services are that they tend to be very impersonal and they only provide one-way communication which still relies on the patient to act upon the message they receive. 

Software developer Recall Solutions set out to address these industry challenges by offering a service for outsourcing patient calling and scheduling. But expensive per-seat automated dialing solutions and per-minute rate calling plans kept the service out of reach for all but the largest dental practices that could afford to outsource. To create a lower-cost option for its dental clientele, Recall Solutions set out to develop a Web-based service that could automate both patient list creation and automatic dialing.

The result is ScheduleMAX, a new software service for the dental industry built on Ribbit's open platform for communications innovation. “This process of automated notifications would not have been possible nor cost-effective without Ribbit's cloud-based programmable communications platform, “ says Brandon Rodman, CEO of Recall Solutions. “Integrating Ribbit into our application was extremely easy and straightforward, and helped us solve a major issue for our customers. In addition, it has provided us with even more opportunity by giving us the ability to launch additional services for our clients.”

ScheduleMAX is in trials right now, but is expected to be rolled out to customers later this year.