A good teamwork should let the team accomplish more than what individuals can do, boost the friendship among teammates and increase team loyalty. According to a Deloitte study, 38% of companies have shifted from a functional structure to a dynamic network of teams. Without doubt, successful teamwork experience will help us a lot no matter when it’s during the job search or later on at work.
Evaluation
However, it is never an easy task to work efficiently and productively as a team especially when there’s little time to meet in person and everyone has his/her own work to do. Our practicum suffered from relatively low productivity and the main reason, from my perspective, is that this is a research-based project.
Unlike other projects, we do not have hard deadlines and very specific tasks that given by our MIP. Most of our work is to research and work on tasks that have unknown outcomes. When things are not expected to have meaningful and impactful results, people are hard to have much motivation to do it, unless there’s a strong interest in the topic.
As a result, here comes the evaluation of our team productivity in the last quarter. First of all, we performed perfectly in school’s assignments as well as urgent tasks that were deemed as a deliverable to the MIP (MSBA Industry Partners). When approaching the deadline, everyone of the team can sit together and collaborate efficiently, and finish the task with a high quality. However, when it comes to other tasks which can only be finished in the long run and are hard to deliver impactful results, the team became less motivated and most of the team members tended to put practicum related work at lower priority. Another reason that led to our relatively low team productivity is that we lacked the evaluation of everybody’s work. Though we did perfectly in setting both long-term and short-terms goals and assigning individual’s task, on the meeting we hardly had time to evaluate each person’s work and summarize the one-stage progress. This also made some team members think that their assigned work was not significant, and thus they would probably pay less attention. Approaching job hunting season, as personal workload is mounting, it will be even harder for the team to put effort into practicum.
Solution
However, it’s never too late to remedy. For the next two quarters, improvements about team management must be done to increase team productivity.
Tracking progress and evaluate everybody’s work
First of all, after setting goals and allocating tasks, continuous progress should be tracked and results need to be presented to all other team members for evaluation and correction. Project manager or leader should take responsibility of it.
Asking for help
Second, never hesitate to ask for help. The meaning of a team is that everyone has different skills and competences and there’s always something that you are not good at but your teammates are. Thus, as a team, we should never waste the internal resources that can help us improve. Additionally, internal training sessions can be conducted to share the knowledge or train the skills.
Communication
Third, communication is always the key to the success of a team. The communication within our practicum team is smooth and efficient though, not enough. Especially during this quarter, everyone has five groups for five courses and is overwhelmed by all kinds of group assignments. In this situation, we have no idea about what each other is doing and how’s the progress. As Jordan Cohen says, in today’s complex and collaborative workplace, the real challenge is to manage not just your personal workload but the collective one. To achieve this, we should have continuous communication informing the done work, current status and the short-term expectation. This will not only make all the team member always on the same page, but also act as an urge for everyone to do their own work and make contribution.
