“Lack of Team Cohesion”;
Lack of Team Cohesion
Our primary recommendation would be to develop a process to effectively bring the Creative Voice team together through the following steps:
1. Reinstate Restructured Team Meetings
We recommend that the team meeting, which would occur on the second Thursday of every month at 05:30 PM, be reinstated as early as possible. This meeting was particularly useful in bringing everyone to the table and facilitating useful exchange of ideas. The time and location of the meeting should be adjusted since there might be logistical issues, which need to be resolved to accommodate every employee of the organization.
Research by Applied Change, a leading business change consultancy in the UK, has shown that team meetings have the following benefits:
A. Team meetings are great for building supportive relationships, giving each team member an opportunity to voice his or her opinion and support each other.
B. Team meetings are quintessential for learning about our colleagues’ motivations, fears, hopes and troubles, especially, whenever a colleague is an introvert. More than 50% of our daily communication is conveyed through our body language (in a non-verbal manner), making it important to observe each employee’s demeanor and disposition carefully.
C. Team meetings provide us with a “closed” environment, presenting the opportunity to share information we wouldn’t be very comfortable sharing in a written format.
D. Team meetings bring employees at all levels on the same field in an open-ended discussion in which everyone has an equal opportunity to communicate and listen. Hence, every employee has the chance to speak freely and receive feedback too.
E. Team meetings are especially important for leadership, giving the team leader the opportunity to clarify the mission, state objectives and assign roles and responsibilities. Leadership is difficult if the leader doesn’t engage with the team in an open manner.
F. Team meetings can be eminently important in difficult situations such as a crisis. Nothing can replace the intimacy, closeness and security of a face-to-face meeting with conference calls and video conferencing.
G. Team meetings allows employees to focus away from day-to-day operations and concentrate on other important areas such as working on cross-functional tasks together.
H. Team meetings help exchange constructive feedback about work. This type of feedback has shown to improve the motivation and morale of employees. It must be noted that critical feedback should not be exchanged in team meetings but only in one-on-one meetings.
I. Team meetings are an inevitable part of the organization and business in general. They are a learning and improvement opportunity whether one likes them or not. They help the employees of an organization to bind together to achieve a purpose.
Moreover, the Harvard Business Review mentions a five-step guide to structuring better meetings –
A. Define the work of the team by excluding topics on which one person has clear accountability and can proceed without any additional input. Instead, focus on the items where the team’s input will change the trajectory of the work. The leadership team should emphasize issues that cut across the departments and parse out topics that can be addressed by individuals or subgroups of a team.
B. Parse the items to different categories so that meetings can be tailored to the content since meetings become ineffective when they combine different types of discussions. This is because we aren’t good at changing the pace or tenor of a conversation once it starts. Therefore, it is better to split discussions into categories before bringing them into any meeting.
C. Determine the frequency with which you need to discuss each category. The short time horizon topics (for example, project events for the coming month) need to happen frequently and the less urgent topics (issues with the application) can be discussed less frequently. Conduct daily huddles or bi-monthly/monthly meetings as per the priority and importance of any topic of discussion.
D. Set the length of the different meetings because each type of meeting needs a very different feel. For instance, the daily huddle needs to be crisp and therefore as short as possible. However, the bi-monthly/monthly meetings need more time because the topics require space for people to explore and dissent strategic issues. The daily huddle could be for just 30 minutes in duration; whereas, the bi-monthly/monthly meetings should last for at least 2-4 hours.
E. Prepare a plan for overflow by scheduling a regular overflow spot on the calendar. This prevents cramming at the end of meetings and reduces the likelihood that people’s time will be wasted on issues requiring only a small subset of the team. Such items can also move to the overflow spot whenever required.
2. Develop Standards for Video Success/Failure
We recommend that the organization establish well-defined standards for determining whether a video has been successful or not. These standards must be duly agreed upon by all the employees of the organization. This is possible by ensuring that the whole team is present/involved while defining each metric of success and failure for every Creative Voice video.
Research from the University of Missouri-St. Louis has indicated that the following are the top factors found in projects that have failed due to their challenges –
1. Lack of user input and involvement.
2. Incomplete requirements and specifications.
3. Lack of resources
4. Changing requirements and specifications
5. Technical incompetence and illiteracy.
6. Unrealistic expectations.
7. Lack of executive support.
8. Lack of planning and testing.
9. Uninformed market research.
10. No framework for IT management.
We believe that most of the above factors are applicable to Creative Voice videos and think that the organization should focus on the below top five factors found in most successful projects to overcome the above problems –
1. User Involvement
2. Executive Management Support
3. Clear Statement of Requirements
4. Proper Planning
5. Realistic Expectations
3. Establish Set Team Meeting Agendas
We recommend that each team meeting should have a defined agenda, where they focus on feedback from previous events, picking new events, the future of the app, and other miscellaneous discussions.
“Ground rules” are powerful tools for improving team process, including setting the right agenda for a meeting. With a sound set of behaviors and explicit agreement about what they mean and how to use them, a team can see improved results. The Harvard Business Review mentions “eight ground rules” for having great meetings –
A. State views and ask genuine questions, enabling the team to shift from monologues and arguments to a conversation in which members can understand everyone’s point of view and be curious about the differences in their views.
B. Share all relevant information, enabling the team to develop a comprehensive, common set of information with which to solve problems and make decisions.
C. Use specific examples and agree on what important words mean, ensuring that all team members are using the same words to mean the same thing.
D. Explain reasoning and intent, enabling members to understand how others reached their conclusions and see where team members’ reasoning differs.
E. Focus on interests and not positions by moving from arguing about solutions to identifying needs that must be met to solve a problem to reduce unproductive conflict and increase everyone’s ability to develop solutions that the full team is committed to.
F. Test assumptions and inferences, ensuring that the team is making decisions with valid information rather than with members’ private stories about what other team members believe and what their motives are.
G. Jointly design next steps, ensuring that everyone is committed to moving forward together as a team.
H. Discuss undiscussable issues, ensuring that the team addresses the important but undiscussed issues that are hindering its results and that can only be resolved in a team meeting.
Further, the Harvard Business Review states that a team won’t become more effective unless its participants agree on how each of the above “ground rules” must be employed. As per the review, there are four proven ways in general to use these “ground rules” –
A. Explicitly agree on the ground rules and what each one means because a set of behaviors aren’t a team’s ground rules until everyone on the team agrees to use them. Further, when the team members take time to discuss and develop a common understanding of what the rules mean, the team increases the chance that the rules will be implemented consistently and effectively in different situations.
B. Develop a team mindset that’s congruent with the ground rules because the behaviors a team uses are driven by the mindset (that is, values and assumptions) it operates from. If the team adopts effective ground rules but operates from an ineffective mindset, the ground rules do not work.
C. Agree that everyone is responsible for helping each other use the ground rules because teams are too complex to expect that a formal leader alone can identify every time any team member is acting at odds with a ground rule. Therefore, all the members of a team should share this responsibility, agreeing on how individuals will intervene when they see others not using a ground rule and not expect a formal leader to intervene.
D. Discuss how the team is using the ground rules and how it can improve by taking five minutes at the end of each team meeting to discuss where each member used the ground rules well and where he or she can improve. Additionally, these conversations should not happen informally outside the team meeting, else they might not be that effective.