• When teams are successful, they can improve productivity, creativity, employee involvement, and even job security. They are not appropriate for every situation - even when they are, companies should weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of a team-based approach.
• Participative Management: The effort to involve employees in the company's decision making.
Advantages:
- Increased information and knowledge: A team has access to more information in the decision-making process.
- Increased diversity of views: Team members bring a variety of perspectives to the decision making process.
- Increased acceptance of a solution: Those who participate in making a decision are more likely to support it and encourage others to accept it.
- Higher performance levels: Working in teams can unleash new levels of creativity, energy, effectiveness as well as reduce employee boredom, increase feelings of dignity and self-worth, and reduce stress and tension.
Disadvantages:
- Groupthink: Occurs when peer pressures cause individual team members to withhold contrary or unpopular opinions.
- Hidden agendas: Private, counterproductive motives, such as a desire to take control of the group, to undermine someone else on the team, or to purse a business goal that runs counter to the team's mission.
- Cost: Assigning schedules, arranging meetings, and coordinating individual parts of a project can eat up a lot of times and money.
Guidelines for Collaborative Writing
• In any collaborative effort, it's important to recognize that team members coming from different backgrounds may have different work habits or priorities. To collaborate effectively, everyone involved must be flexible and open to other opinions, focusing on team objectives rather than on individual priorities. The following guidelines will help you collaborate more successfully:
- Select collaborators carefully: Choose a combination of people who have the experience, information, and talent needed for each project.
- Agree on project goals before you start: Starting without a clear idea of what the team hopes to accomplish inevitably leads to frustration and wasted time.
- Give your team time to bond before diving in: Make sure team members can get to know each other before being asked to collaborate.
- Clarify individual responsibilities: Because members will depend on each other, make sure individual responsibilities are clear, including who is supposed to do what and by when.
- Establish clear process: Make sure everyone knows how the work will be done, including checkpoints and decisions to be made along the way.
- Avoid writing as a group: Group writing is often a slow, painful process that delivers bland results. The best approach is to plan, research, and outline together but assign the task of writing to one person.
- Make sure tools and techniques are ready and compatible across the team: Minor details such as different versions of software can delay projects. Test the system before work begins.
- Check to see how things are going along the way: Don't assume that everything is working just because you don't hear hear anything negative.
• The focus of most meeting technologies is to enable participation among people in two or more locations. These technologies have spurred the emergence of virtual teams, whose members work in different locations and interact electronically in virtual meetings.
• Teleconferencing: Long distance meeting tool that connects three or more people by phone simultaneously.
• Videoconferencing: Combines audio communication with live video, letting team members see each other, demonstrate products, and transmit other visual information.
Web-based meeting systems: Combine the best of instant messaging, shared work spaces, and videoconferencing with other tools such as virtual whiteboards that let teams collaborate in real time.
• Visit www.secondlife.com to learn about their recent developments in virtual meetings and other communication activities in virtual worlds.
The Important Process of Listening
• Listening is a far more complex process than most people think - and most of us aren't very good at it. To listen effectively, you need to successfully complete five separate steps:
- Receiving: You start by physically hearing the message and acknowledging it. Reception can be blocked by noise, impaired hearing, or inattention.
- Decoding: Your next step is to assign meaning to sounds, which you do according to your own values, beliefs, ideas, expectations, roles, needs, and personal history.
- Remembering: Before you can act on the information, you need to store i for future processing.
- Evaluating: Your next step is to evaluate the message by applying critical thinking skills to separate fact from opinion and evaluate the quality of the evidence.
- Responding: After you've evaluated the message, you react.
Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal Communication is the interpersonal process of sending and receiving information, both intentionally and intentionally, without using written or spoken language. These signals play a vital role in communication because they can strengthen a verbal message, weaken a verbal message, or replace words entirely. The range and variety of nonverbal signals are almost endless, but you can grasp the basics by studying six general categories:
- Facial expression: Your face is the primary vehicle for expressing your emotions; it reveals
both the type and the intensity of your feelings. Your eyes are especially effective for indicating attention and interest, influencing other, regulating interaction, and establishing dominance. - Gesture and posture: The way you position and move your body expresses both specific and general messages, some voluntary and some involuntary. Some unconscious signals that reveal how you are feeling include slouching, leaning forward, fidgeting, and walking briskly.
- Vocal characteristics: Voice carries both intentional and intentional messages. Varying pitch, pace, and stress can convey different messages.
- Touch: Touch is an important way to convey warmth, comfort, and reassurance - as well as control.
- Time and space: Like touch, time and space can be used to assert authority, imply intimacy, and send other nonverbal messages. Some people try to demonstrate their own importance or disregard for others by making other people wait; others show respect by being on time.
• Attention to etiquette is essential to success in every form of business communication - so much so that etiquette is considered an important business skill. Poor etiquette can hinder team efforts, drain morale and productivity, drive away customers and investors, and limit your career potential.
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