After engaging with the first three weeks’ course content: (a) If you are currently involved in a virtual team, how would you recommend that its communication be enhanced? (b) If you are not on a virtual team at the moment – if leadership directed your team to “go virtual” on the first workday of next month, how would you recommend establishing effective communication? What would your strategies and mechanisms look like? In either case, provide some detail on the outcomes you anticipate. Try to recall your experiences in groups and teams from the past. How were they formed? How were they made effective (or not)? What elements of this week’s readings and videos particularly resonated for you in these areas? If you were forming a team, how would you start? What course elements would you draw from? What outcomes do you think you would realize? Solidly link your reflections and plans to specific elements we examined across Weeks 3 and 7 of our course. NOTE: It is critical that you include significant detail in the Action Plan part of this the look ahead!
This RAPP is a reflection on what you are experiencing with regard to the research, theories, concepts, and content exposed in the various course elements. It will highlight your engagement with the core topics of creativity.
Solution
RAPP (REFLECTION AND ACTION PLAN PAPER)
Nowadays, Effective communication in virtual settings has become a real challenge for organizations. To enhance the effectiveness of the virtual platform I would like to highlight the following areas. The first and foremost area to be focused on is the technological compatibility, accessibility, and availability of the communication tools by all the team members. Next, I would like to work on, the proper distribution of the job responsibilities among the team members via email, and messages and check for the responses from the team members to confirm, whether the message was received and interpreted the same way it was meant to be. After that, I will recommend making a checklist of the work progress of all the team members, and updating it daily to the official group so that not only the assigned employee but also the other team members will stay updated with the team’s progress. A small and frequent team meeting will be conducted to keep all the members in the loop (Cheng et al. 2021, p.534).
Working remotely gave birth to many advantages and disadvantages simultaneously. One of the major issues, which I would like to focus on was the lack of coordination among the team members. Recalling an experience, I would like to share an incident.
A one-month survey on the topic “most preferred multivitamin brand among working Americans women” was given to a ten-member team. Everyone was advised to work collaboratively. Their major role was to collect at least 2000 data from the respondent prepare a report on that topic and undergo statistical comparison. After the completion of the one month, it was very disappointing to find that the target was not fulfilled accordingly, and the outcome was not at all satisfactory. The probable factors might be miscommunication, mismanagement, improper leadership, lack of work progress record .and improper supervision.
To get resolved this problem, this week’s videos and reading were a great help to me. I can resonate with the finding which I have learned from this course. Firstly, I would like to do a thorough study of the strategies adopted for the project. Then will check the loopholes where the problem arises and will make a list of all the causative factors responsible for the project’s failure.
To overcome these problems the strategies and agenda I would like to adopt is to make a checklist of problems, plans, and progress (Darics & Cristina, 2019, p.245). The problems which the team members were facing while working on a virtual platform should be enlisted. Proper solutions should be provided to them by conducting a group discussion and brainstorming. For the plan section, I will make a contract with a four-point mission goal, responsibilities, work progress record, norms, and deadlines and will distribute this to each of the team members. Everyone will sign the contract and is advised to maintain the updated record of this checklist. These checklists are also advised to share in the online groups of the team members so that not only the assigned person for that particular job but also the other team members can stay updated with the work progress. To check their performance, proper supervision should be done. In office settings, the physical presence of the team leader and the boss always proved to be helpful to enhance the performance of the team members but in virtual platforms, sluggish work performance is very common. To resolve this problem short and frequent meetings to track their accomplishment will also be recommended. Sometimes within the virtual team, individuals get impersonal. They do their work according to their time and convenience, which eventually creates a problem for the other team members, as the availability of everyone is not always possible over digital media. To enhance team collaboration, a roaster of the meeting can be provided to everyone in advance for their presence. Using video conferencing tools, like Google workspace, and google Meet can make the collaboration more transparent. This installation and utilization of this advanced software are highly recommended for effective team collaboration. Another important area I would like to focus in building trust, rapport, and tuning among the team members. In a remote working scenario, nonverbal communications like touch, sight, and contact are not possible among the team members, as a result, it reduces the performance of the members as a team. Studies have shown that having five-minute non-official conservation over the phone before proceeding to an official task can help to make the bonding of the team stronger. Identification of the weak areas of the employees and providing remedies to those problems is highly recommended in a virtual setting.
References:
Cheng, X., Bao, Y., Yu, X., & Shen, Y. (2021). Trust and Group Efficiency in Multinational Virtual Team Collaboration: A Longitudinal Study. Group Decision and Negotiation, 30(3), 529-551.
Darics, E., & Cristina Gatti, M. (2019). Talking a team into being in online workplace collaborations: The discourse of virtual work. Discourse Studies, 21(3), 237-257.
