Assignment
You have just been given an assignment to put together a plan for a collaborative team. Review Table 2.1 and use it as a guideline to develop your team. You will want to avoid or minimize the risk of dysfunctional aspects while focusing on the team maintenance roles and the task oriented roles.
TABLE 2.1 Team Roles-Functional and Dysfunctional
Dysfunctional: Self-Oriented Roles
Functional: Team-Maintenance Roles
Functional: Task-Oriented Roles
Controlling: Dominating others by exhibitingsuperiority or authority
Withdrawing: Retiring from the team either bybecoming silent or by refusing to deal with aparticular aspect of the team's work
Attention seeking: Calling attention to oneselfand demanding recognition from others
Diverting: Focusing the team's discussion ontopics of interest to the individual rather thanon those relevant to the task
Encouraging: Drawing out other membersby showing verbal and nonverbal support,praise, or agreement
Harmonizing: Reconciling differencesamong team members through mediationor by using humor to relieve tension
Compromising: Offering to yield on a pointin the interest of reaching a mutuallyacceptable decision
Initiating: Getting the team started ona line of inquiry
Information giving or seeking:Offering (or seeking) informationrelevant to questions facing the team
Coordinating: Showing relationshipsamong ideas, clarifying issues,summarizing what the team has done
Procedure setting: Suggesting decision-making procedures that will move the team toward a goal
What techniques and technology will you use to help the team? The Collaborating on Communication Efforts section in the attached Chapter 2 ( Bovee, C. L., & Thill, J. V. (2016). Business communication today (13th ed.).
Your essay should be 150 to 200 words and formatted according to APA style guidelines.
2 LEARNING OBJECTIVE
Offer guidelines for collaborative communication, identify major collaboration technologies, and explain how to give constructive feedback.
2.2 Collaborating on Communication Efforts
When a team collaborates on reports, websites, presentations, and other communication projects, the collective energy and expertise of the various members can produce results that transcend what each individual could do alone.25 However, collaborating on team messages requires special effort and planning.
GUIDELINES FOR COLLABORATIVE WRITING
In any collaborative effort, team members coming from different backgrounds may have different work habits or priorities: A technical expert may focus on accuracy and scientific standards, an editor may be more concerned about organization and coherence, and a manager may focus on schedules, cost, and corporate goals. In addition, team members differ in writing styles, work habits, and personality traits.
MOBILE APPS
Freedcamp is a free collaboration and project management system.
To collaborate effectively, everyone must be flexible and open to other opinions, focusing on team objectives rather than on individual priorities.26 Successful writers know that most ideas can be expressed in many ways, so they avoid the "my way is best" attitude. The following guidelines will help you collaborate more successfully:27
Successful collaboration on writing projects requires a number of steps, from selecting the right partners and agreeing on project goals to establishing clear processes and avoiding writing as a group.
Select collaborators carefully. Whenever possible, choose a combination of people who together have the experience, information, and talent needed for each project.
Agree on project goals before you start. Starting without a clear idea of what the team hopes to accomplish inevitably leads to frustration and wasted time.
Give your team time to bond before diving in. If people haven't had the opportunity to work together before, make sure they can get to know each other before being asked to collaborate.
Clarify individual responsibilities. Because members will be depending on each other, make sure individual responsibilities are clear.
Establish clear processes. Make sure everyone knows how the work will be managed from start to finish.
Avoid composing as a group. The actual composition is the only part of developing team messages that does not usually benefit from group participation. Brainstorming the wording of short pieces of text, particularly headlines, slogans, and other high-visibility elements, can be an effective way to stimulate creative word choices. However, for longer projects, it is usually more efficient to plan, research, and outline together but assign the task of writing to one person or divide larger projects among multiple writers. If you divide the writing, try to have one person do a final revision pass to ensure a consistent style.
Make sure tools and techniques are ready and compatible across the team. Even minor details such as different versions of software can delay projects.
Check to see how things are going along the way. Don't assume that everything is working just because you don't hear anything negative.
TECHNOLOGIES FOR COLLABORATIVE WRITING
A variety of tools and systems are available to help writers collaborate on everything from short documents to entire websites. The simplest tools are software features such as commenting (which lets colleagues write comments in a document without modifying the document text) and change tracking (which lets one or more writers propose changes to the text while keeping everyone's edits separate and reversible). The widely used Adobe Acrobat electronic document system (PDF files) also has group review and commenting features, including the option for live collaboration.
A wide variety of collaboration tools now exist to help professionals work on reports, presentations, and other communication efforts.
Collaboration Systems
Writing for websites often involves the use of a content management system, which organizes and controls website content and can include features that help team members work together on webpages and other documents. These tools range from simple blogging systems on up to enterprise systems that manage web content across an entire corporation. Many systems include workflow features that control how pages or documents can be created, edited, and published.
In contrast to the formal controls of a content management system, a wiki, from the Hawaiian word for quick, is a website that allows anyone with access to add new material and edit existing material. Public wikis (Wikipedia is the best known of these) allow any registered user to edit pages; private wikis are accessible only with permission. A key benefit of wikis is the freedom to post new or revised material without prior approval. Chapter 8 offers guidelines for effective wiki collaboration.
Wiki benefits include simple operation and the ability to post new or revised material instantly without a formal review process.
Teams and other work groups can also take advantage of a set of broader technologies often referred to as groupware or collaboration platforms. These technologies let people communicate, share files, review previous message threads, work on documents simultaneously, and connect using social networking tools. These systems help companies capture and share knowledge from multiple experts, bringing greater insights to bear on tough challenges.28 Collaboration systems often take advantage of cloud computing, a somewhat vague term that refers to "on-demand" capabilities delivered over the Internet, rather than through conventional on-site software.29
Shared workspaces are online "virtual offices" that give everyone on a team access to the same set of resources and information (see Figure 2.2 on the next page). You may see some of these workspaces referred to as intranets (restricted-access websites that are open to employees only) or extranets (restricted sites that are available to employees and to outside parties by invitation only). Many intranets have now evolved into social networking systems that include a variety of communication and collaboration tools, from microblogging to video clip libraries. For example, the performance troupe Blue Man Group uses a social intranet to help its 500 employees plan, stage, and promote shows all over the world.30
Social Networks and Virtual Communities
Social networking technologies are redefining teamwork and team communication by helping erase the constraints of geographic and organization boundaries. Some companies use social networks to form virtual communities or communities of practice that link employees with similar professional interests throughout the company and sometimes with customers and suppliers as well.
A community of practice links professionals with similar job interests; a key benefit is accumulating long-term organizational knowledge.
Figure 2.2 Shared Workspaces
Images
Shared workspaces give employees instant access to all the files they need.
The huge advantage that social networking brings to these team efforts is in identifying the best people to collaborate on each problem or project, no matter where they are around the world or what their official roles are in the organization. Such communities are similar to teams in many respects, but one major difference is in the responsibility for accumulating organizational knowledge over the long term. For example, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer has a number of permanent product-safety communities that provide specialized advice on drug safety issues to researchers throughout the organization.31
Internal social networks help companies assemble the best resources for a given task, regardless of where the employees are located.
Social networking can also help a company maintain a sense of community even as it grows beyond the size that normally permits a lot of daily interaction. At the online retailer Zappos, fostering a supportive work environment is the company's top priority. To encourage the sense of community among its expanding workforce, Zappos uses social networking tools to track employee connections and encourage workers to reach out and build relationships.
Collaboration via Mobile Devices
Mobile devices add another layer of options for collaborative writing and other communication projects, particularly when used with cloud computing. Today's mobile systems can do virtually everything that fixed-web collaboration systems can do, from writing on virtual whiteboards to sharing photos, videos, and other multimedia files.33 Mobility lets workers participate in online brainstorming sessions, seminars, and other formal or informal events from wherever they happen to be at the time. This flexibility can be particularly helpful during the review and production stages of major projects, when deadlines are looming and decisions and revisions need to be made quickly.
Collaboration apps for mobile devices support nearly all the features of computer-based platforms.
An important aspect of mobile collaboration and mobile communication in general is unified communication, which integrates such capabilities as voice and video calling, voice and video conferencing, instant messaging, and real-time collaboration software into a single system. By minimizing or eliminating the need to manage multiple communication systems and devices, unified communication promises to improve response times, productivity, and collaboration efforts.
REAL-TIME UPDATES
Images LEARN MORE BY READING THIS ARTIC
The benefits of mobile collaboration
Going mobile helps teams get work faster and more effectively. Under "Students," click on "Learn More."
GIVING-AND RESPONDING TO-CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK
Aside from processes and tools, collaborative communication often involves giving and receiving feedback about writing efforts. Constructive feedback, sometimes called constructive criticism, focuses on the process and outcomes of communication, not on the people involved (see Table 2.2). In contrast, destructive feedback delivers criticism with no guidance to stimulate im-provement.35 For example, "This proposal is a confusing mess, and you failed to convince me of anything" is destructive feedback. The goal is to be more constructive: "Your proposal could be more effective with a clearer description of the manufacturing process and a well-organized explanation of why the positives outweigh the negatives." When giving feedback, avoid personal attacks and give the person clear guidelines for improvement.
When you give writing feedback, make it constructive by focusing on how the material can be improved.
TABLE 2.2 Giving Constructive Feedback
How to Be Constructive
Explanation
Think through your suggested changes carefully.
Many business documents must illustrate complex relationships between ideas and other information, so isolated and superficial edits can do more harm than good.
Discuss improvements rather than flaws.
Instead of saying "this is confusing," for instance, explain how the writing can be improved to make it clearer.
Focus on controllable behavior.
The writer may not have control over every variable that affected the quality of the message, so focus on those aspects the writer can control.
Be specific.
Comments such as "I don't get this" or "Make this clearer" don't give the writer much direction.
Keep feedback impersonal.
Focus comments on the message, not on the person who created it.
Verify understanding.
If in doubt, ask for confirmation from the recipient to make sure that the person understood your feedback.
Time your feedback carefully.
Respond in a timely fashion so that the writer will have sufficient time to implement the changes you suggest.
Highlight any limitations your feedback may have.
If you didn't have time to give the document a thorough edit, or if you're not an expert in some aspect of the content, let the writer know so that he or she can handle your comments appropriately.
When you receive constructive feedback, resist the understandable urge to defend your work or deny the validity of the feedback. Remaining open to criticism isn't easy when you've invested lots of time and energy in a project, but good feedback provides a valuable opportunity to learn and to improve the quality of your work.
When you receive constructive feedback on your writing, keep your emotions in check and view it as an opportunity to improve.