By Spencer Chalifour
Working in teams has countless advantages, but it’s also very easy for collaborative projects to go awry. Previous articles for this blog have described how group members can learn from each other and pool their strengths together to approach projects more effectively than any group member could individually. However, to get to this place as a team, you must first learn about each other and determine how best to collaborate. This step becomes even more complicated when your team can’t meet in person and must instead rely on remote collaboration.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers and students in all disciplines have had to become more accustomed to remote collaboration. That said, just because working online has become a new normal doesn’t mean everyone knows how to collaborate remotely successfully. A recent study showed that 75% of employees ranked collaboration, as opposed to productivity, as having suffered the most in the shift to working virtually.[1] While everyone can work at the same pace as before, we still need some help adjusting to working together virtually.
In this article, we’ll cover three ways you can adapt activities developed by the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETDI) at Georgia Tech to better collaborate with your team members when you cannot meet in person.
Create a Team Action Plan
The first thing you generally do when getting to know new people is talk about your likes and dislikes. You make friends based on shared passions like music, sports, and movies. Similarly, couples usually begin by discussing their shared values. In the same vein, a strong team should understand each other’s needs, but this can be difficult when you’re not in the same room.
By creating a team action plan, you can clearly outline what each team member wants and how you can support them. You can adapt the team action plan activity on the ETDI website for remote work by having each member contribute to the team action plan handout through a platform that allows online collaboration, such as Google Docs or Dropbox. Team members can indicate what they resent when working collaboratively by choosing statements based on their strengths from the personal value activity.
Next, the team can use a video call or group chat to discuss how to respond to the most prominent “I resent” statements. Keep in mind that even if two members choose the same “I resent” statement, they might require different ways of addressing it. Let’s say two people state that they resent chaos and confusion. One might request the team have a written reason or plan of action for every major group decision, while the other might require that the team record and assign responsibilities in a task manager tool.
Once your team action plan is complete, you will have a clear document that provides actionable steps to ensure your team collaborates effectively. This process eliminates the need to check in with each other constantly, saving time. For more information on how to make your plan actionable, see the instructional video here.
Practice Effective Email Communication
The disappearing teammate is everyone’s least favorite magic act. Nobody wants a Houdini on their team—someone who is nominally part of the group but doesn’t show up for meetings or turn in work on time (or ever). To help address this issue before it arises, consider adapting our email communication and team expectations activity.
In this activity, students draft emails to the infamous fictitious Georgia Tech student George P. Burdell, a practical joke from the 1920s who has evolved into a legendary alumnus who has achieved immense honors despite never existing. If drafting your own emails would be too time-consuming, you can also critique the sample email correspondence in the activity instructions.
The most important step in this activity is to clearly establish a template for email correspondence where you can be respectful but firm in addressing any issues that might come up, including nonappearances from teammates. Staying on top of group members when working remotely can be especially difficult. However, if everyone understands how to address these issues, it will be much easier to correspond with your group members in the long run.
Delegate Tasks and Responsibilities
With any collaborative work, it’s important to identify tasks and responsibilities for each group member. However, it’s equally important that everyone in the group understands the difference between tasks and responsibilities. While tasks are the specific actions or short activities each group member will do, responsibilities are major aspects of a project that a particular member oversees by encouraging other group members’ contributions so that aspect moves forward.
You can think of tasks and responsibilities in the context of sports: The quarterback of a football team has the task of throwing the ball, but it’s their responsibility to know which player to throw the ball to depending on the play. Responsibility also means knowing your teammates’ skills and being able to maximize those skills for the occasion; if a quarterback is always throwing to their wide receivers, they aren’t effectively taking advantage of their running backs or tight end.
In this activity, you identify every group member’s strengths according to their CliftonStrengths profile. Then, the group will work together to determine the major steps they must complete for their project. Each member will claim a step as their responsibility using their strengths as a guide.
Once you’ve determined your responsibilities, you can then define the tasks you will complete as part of your responsibilities. For example, if one of your strengths is Consistency, your responsibility could be ensuring that a written document maintains the same tone and voice despite having multiple authors. An initial task you could complete is creating a style guide for your group members to ensure they all know how to write your document. When working remotely, this would be an ideal activity to implement when you begin collaboration. This way, you will all have specific tasks to complete, and you can rely on your teammates to support you through their unique responsibilities. Sometimes the hardest part of working virtually is being responsible for yourself, but with this activity, all teammates can share responsibility and support each other.
Develop Successful Remote Collaborations With Effective Team Dynamics
If you’d like any additional assistance creating successful remote collaborations, or if you’d be interested in participating in a free ETD workshop, please contact us here.
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