What Makes Teamwork Efficient?

                                                 Li Shuzheng

                                                31548639

What Makes Teamwork Efficient?

Introduction

Nowadays, teamwork plays more and more important role in improving the efficiency of an organization. The word ‘team’ typically refers to a group of two or more people who work together towards a shared goal or objective (Wilson, 2014:250). Teams have a close relation to both professional and personal lives. Everyone is somehow involved in one or several teams and working in teams has become an inevitable part of your life experience. Teams present us with various forms such as student unions, task forces and city councils. Besides, all of the workplaces are in the high demand for teamworking. By means of teamworking, each of the team members can gain a strong sense of timing,planning and belonging,

Awareness of Time

For every task,there is a time frame, a sort of time limit, so keeping time or not will directly affect the effectiveness of teamwork.In the game of Gridlock,our team totally forgot time management and had no consciousness of time passing until the director started to count down, we were suddenly aware of the time then everyone became worried and joined in pointing the way for the last member so that it turned out to be quite confusing and led to failure.      

Therefore,bear the time frame in mind all the way,because the awareness of time is quite helpful. If you got a good sense of time management, the pace of work would probably in your control, like you can break the whole time into several intervals then set up small goals for each interval.Taking the first interval for example, there are only two possible results for the actions within this period: one is the plan you made works well then you can just go on; the other is the plan does not fit into the situation then you should have a time-out for re-planning and review then make some adjustments the old plan.

Dynamic Planning

Every action should go with a plan, that is to say, before you go ahead for fulfilling the task, you should make a brief plan to set a direction for members to have a start.In the cave game, our team did not rush to find the box, instead, we seven discussed what we were going to do in sequences and drew a plan on it.This “planning goes first” rule contributed to our quick completion of that cave mission.

However, the plan should not be a fixed one, sometimes it should get evolved step by step to fit into every new circumstance appearing in the task.The plan is only to set a general direction for the action at very beginning,and it can not take any possible happenings into consideration so the plan has to be tuned up in response to the actual. Just as what we did in the game of Gridlock, although we did not evolve our plan consciously, we did some adjustments within the process,instead of letting all the members remember the whole lines, we utilised members’strengths to divide the big task into smaller and easy-to-handle ones.