Online Team CommunicationEssay Preview: Online Team CommunicationReport this essayOnline Team CommunicationOnline learning is now a reality, with distributed learning and blended learning becoming more widely used in Higher Education (Whatley, 1999). Online learning has many advantages and disadvantages. Teamwork in online environments is becoming a widely used tool, whether it is in business or education. A team working together has more and better input than individuals working alone. This results in better ideas and decisions and higher quality output. Virtual teams are a good way to enable teamwork in situations where people are not sitting in the same physical office at the same time. The effective team-building requires the combination of clear team goals, empowerment, atmosphere of trust within the team, authentic participation of every member of team, innovative approach to work and ability to manage risks, proper leadership and ability to make the constructive changes.
Clearly defined goals and objectives are essential so that everyone understands the purpose and vision of the team. A team leader might be surprised at how many people do not know the reason they are doing the tasks that make up their jobs, much less what their team is doing. Everyone must be pulling in the same direction and be aware of the end goals. Empowerment in terms of team building is clear definition of roles and especially of leaders role and functions (Krell, 2007). Clearly defined roles help team members understand why they are on a team. When the members experience conflict, it may be related to their roles. Team members often can manage this conflict by identifying, clarifying, and agreeing on their individual responsibilities so that they all gain a clear understanding of how they will accomplish the teams goals. Another issue is the authentic participation. If communication is the most important team characteristic, participation is the second most important. Without participation, there is no team; there is just group of bodies. Authentic participation ensures that everyone on the team is fully involved (Field, 2007). It does not mean that if leader can have five people each are speaking 20 percent of the time. Talking is not necessarily a measure of participation. We all know people who talk a lot and say nothing. It does mean that each individual is contributing when it is appropriate. The more a team involves all of its members in its activities, the more likely that team is to experience a high level of commitment and synergy (Krell, 2007).
Most problems of all kinds can be traced back to poor communication or lack of communication skills, such as listening well or providing constructive feedback.
Not everyone can perform well in a virtual team environment. The members should be self motivated and able to work independently. They need to be able to keep working effectively without much of external control or structure. The next important quality is strong result-orientation. Unless the person shows clear results, there is nobody around to see how intense his or her work activities are. Another critical factor is communication skills. The team member should be able to communicate clearly, constructively, and positively even through the more limited channels of technology, in spite of the loss of many nonverbal cues of face-to-face communications. Members of virtual teams also need to pay much more attention to maintaining clear goals, performance standards, and communication rules (Field, 2007). People have varying assumptions on what to expect from each other. To avoid build-ups of misunderstandings, in a virtual organization it is critical to replace those assumptions with clear rules and protocols that everyone understands and agrees upon, especially for communication.
In real life, team work success rarely happens by itself, without focused team building efforts and activities. There is simply too much space for problems. For example, different personalities, instead of complementing and balancing each other, may build up conflicts. Or even worse, some people with similar personalities may start fighting for authority and dominance in certain areas of expertise. Even if the team goals are clear and accepted by everyone, there may be no team commitment to the group goals or no consensus on the means of achieving those goals: individuals in the team just follow their personal opinions and move in conflicting directions. There may be a lack of trust and openness that
It seems to me that you are saying: “I wouldn’t know at all how to solve this situation.” Or “I don’t see a way to solve this problem (with any help)” or even “I hope to solve this problem (without help)” or “I want no solution at all other than to fix this problem (without any help)” or “I’ve already worked out the issues before”. But there are also a lot of ways to solve problems that you would never consider solve, especially when you think that this has no connection with the problems people would want solved, whether in team work or other way.
As you mentioned earlier, I think this is probably one of the most common mistakes you make. Although not everyone is a complete fix, many of us have problems. For example, the fact that everyone is talking about the past in this or that way may indicate that the problem wasn’t fixed before.
I don’t know if there would be no way of solving the problem without anyone, other than an expert group, asking how to fix the problem in an appropriate way. You might say: “That isn’t the solution – it has to be a shared knowledge, not a way of thinking about how things will play out in the future!”. Well, it works (and should, too) if everyone is sharing their efforts. The process is much simpler:
First, an individual with similar interests does the same work in an independent work context around an important issue related to both the team and itself.
This gives everyone the opportunity to work in a shared work-focused, team work area in an appropriate way, with an understanding of the topic of team focus (where the work is focused on working on the projects).
From there, you can choose to work together (or work in teams) for the team. After all, each group will do what is necessary to achieve the goals set out in the first set out in the team. It’s simple: if everyone is working, work on the tasks that will help. If only one person is working (in group), do everything together from hand to fist until you get the full team together to work on the project. If there is a problem where you’re not getting all the effort, go for the individual who is working. If you’re getting the group together to support you, work independently.
All that said, it doesn’t make much sense to have a completely shared approach to the problem, whether they are in groups or one or the other, since many people will be struggling and not understand the situation. It seems a little premature to assume that everybody can just write the solution by itself. This would also confuse people’s minds about their own issues if it doesn’t work.
If you have problems with individual people deciding what to ask others in a