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Admit it. The first time you heard the phrase “Hoopla Team®“—maybe last week, or last month, or ten seconds ago, in that headline—you rolled your eyes. Oh you did so.
But the eyes stop rolling when people hear about the remarkable turnarounds happening across the country when leaders get serious about the transformation of their workplace culture—a transformation that has the Hoopla Team smack dab in the center of it.Wait a minute, you say. Did you just use the words “serious” and “Hoopla” in the same sentence? You’re darn right I did. Being serious about workplace transformation isn’t the same as being “serious.” In fact, real transformation starts with a serious commitment to JOY.
A Hoopla Team is a group of seven to ten volunteers drawn from the enthusiastic employees in your company—those special, dynamic, irrepressible folks who know how to get things done and do it with a smile. They should come from various positions and departments, and only one team member should be an executive.
The sacred duty of this team is to provide the energy and enthusiasm to sustain and accelerate breakthroughs in performance according to an implementation formula. They are responsible for continually rolling out new ideas every couple of months to power the ongoing evolution of the culture. Most important, they exist to help everyone in the organization recognize and celebrate successes at every level.
The team is also responsible for finalizing your bank’s service standards and following a process to assure those standards are constantly lived with impeccability through these rollouts and quarterly celebrations.
In short, the Hoopla Team is the keeper of your culture and the driver of your vision. It’s not what they do, but how they do it that creates miraculous results.
Now if you’re imagining a lot of random, meaningless cheerleading and willy-nilly woohooing, you’ve got the wrong idea. There’s method to the madness. Hoopla Teams focus on celebrating and documenting successes not just to pump sunshine up everybody’s skirt, but to get everyone focused on what works and letting go of what doesn’t. Nothing could be more practical.
Get the picture?
The point is to get the culture change generating from the grassroots level instead of being imposed from above. In this way, everyone at all levels has more ownership of the transformation.
It takes all hands on deck to shift a culture. Supporting your Hoopla Team is crucial if you want the rest of your efforts to actually get results.
There is real magic in creating a culture of people who, instead of telling you why everything can’t be done, tell you why it CAN be done. That is the difference the Gallup organization cited when their research showed that for every $10,000 in payroll, $3,400 is lost to “disengaged employees.” You can’t afford that. And THAT is why you need a Hoopla Team!