Is team work and collaboration a trend in companies nowadays?

Every project needs teamwork and collaboration, and in bigger and more complex projects additional role types exist and more professionals are involved. Those human resources have to be not only co-ordinated but must work as a team with clear (or sometimes not so clear) goals to deliver the desired outputs, product or service for the client. Is this kind of work truly practised nowadays?

Author: Paula Castrillo Ferrer at i3Works Ltd

Every project needs teamwork and collaboration, and in bigger and more complex projects additional role types exist and more professionals are involved. Those human resources have to be not only co-ordinated but must work as a team with clear (or sometimes not so clear) goals to deliver the desired outputs, product or service for the client.

There is no doubt on this. What I am not so sure about is the idea of “real” teamwork and collaboration when we work in a project. Is this kind of work truly practised nowadays? Are we, 21^st century professionals, able to work in teams properly and generate real collaboration when we work in any project, whether it is big or small, long or short?

On one hand, if we look at some emerging trends in the project management industry such as the Agile and Scrum approaches these seem to clearly be going in that direction: a team with specific roles is clearly defined from the beginning of the project and have a very open and collaborative work atmosphere as well as iterative and ongoing meetings to discuss progress.

On the other hand, we all have our own roles in the team and our own tasks to complete. People can often work on their own task independently then slot it into the big picture and call it teamwork. Whilst too many meetings and interruptions are not good for productivity too few are arguably more damaging – leading to misunderstandings, duplications of effort or misalignment to the business aims or vision. There are ways to avoid this way of working, and this brings to attention the importance of personality traits in a team, can you throw any group of people together in a team or do they need to be picked based on the type of people they are?

There are lots of different ways people can be classified: introvert/extrovert, active/passive, assertive/shy, curious, ambitious, creative, perfectionist, charming, enthusiastic… etc, even classifications based on the signs of the Zodiac, and through other systems such as the SDI index or Belbin Team Index (explained in more detail below). It makes sense to look at the members of the team in this way because you need a good mix of personalities to aid group dynamics to get the best out of everyone and enable the project to succeed. According to Belbin’s studies “For a team to be successful it needs to have access to each of the 9 Belbin Team Roles. Typically, most people have two or three Team Roles that they are most comfortable with; a few others that they can manage to cover if they need to; and finally the rest that they prefer not to adopt at all.” (Belbin Associates, 2012 – 2015)

The Belbin Team Role Inventory: there are 9 different types of roles which anticipate a natural behaviour or approach to work. A Team Role is defined as “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way” (Ambler,2005- 2012). In the Belbin test we found those differentiated roles: co-ordinator (leader), implementer (practical, strategic, action person), team worker (cooperative and diplomatic), plant (creative, free-thinker), investigator (enthusiastic, explorer), specialist (in knowledge and skills), shaper (dynamic, overcome obstacles), monitor evaluator (act like a judge, logical thinker) and finally, completer finisher (polishes and perfects).

The SDI Test (Strength Deployment Inventory) is where 7 different kind of roles are identified: red, blue or green people, and different combinations of these.

• Red people tend to be more assertive people, they are good directors and get things done.
• Blue people are more altruistic people, they tend to be nurturing, they are more people’s people.
• Green people are more analytic and autonomous with great analytical skills.

As human beings, we are unique but there are patterns in our natural behaviour. I believe if we identify those, it could help to find the ideal candidates for specifically related roles.

So, what about collaboration tools? I would like to mention at least a few of the long list of existing tools on the market:

• Task Management orientated: Trello, Confluence
• Communication: Skype or Skype for Business, Slack, Yammer, GoToMeeting etc
• Operational: SharePoint, GDrive – where it is easy to share files and for different people to work in a document at the same time
• Project Management: Wrike, Asana, Basecamp, Maevelink

There are hundreds more existing tools, not to mention the Social Media related ones (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)

I wonder how many companies or projects are supposed to work in teams but each member of the team has a task which must be delivered, and they do it and hand it over and that is all: there is no sharing of ideas, no questions to get answered by other colleagues, no different approaches to consider the best possible option, no debate…  I am happy to say loudly and share with you in this article that in my current company teamwork and collaboration is a reality and truly a trend too.

Can you say the same, is team work and collaboration a trend in your company or project environment?

Internet sources:

1. Ambler, S.W. (2005- 2012) Ambysoft inc http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/agileRoles.html accessed 14.11.16
2. Belbin Associates (2012 – 2015) http://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/ accessed 14.11.16
3. G2 Crowd Inc (2016) https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/team-collaboration accessed 14.11.16
4. Capterra (2016) http://www.capterra.com/collaboration-software/ accessed 14.11.16