Introduction
The success of any project undertaken by a team lies behind effective communication between the team members. As every member need to be aware of his responsibility within the team, it is imperative to ensure that responsibility of every person is well communicated. To realize a project conducted by a team of participants, it is imperative to always update team members on the progress of the project. This can not be achieved without proper communication. This essay aims at analyzing the effectiveness of communication within teamwork (Nash, 2010, para. 2). How members in a team ca learn together and give recommendations on how to enhance communication within teamwork.
Effectiveness of having communication within a team environment
Good and reliable communication within a team environment acts as a motivator. It is the driving force that helps in raising the spirit of every team member. As every member continuously gets updated of the progress made in the project, it makes him or her strive to work towards realization of the project being undertaken. Poor communication in a team environment, leads to development of indifferences between the team members.
This leads to it being hard for members to pool together resources and expertise they have to facilitate in realization of the team’s goals. On the other hand effective communication makes members shun their indifferences and work together to wards realization of their objectives (Nash, 2010, para. 3-5). Communication within a team helps in improving team’s efficiency. This is because it ensures that every member in the team is aware of his or her responsibilities thus ensuring that he or she meets them on time.
Conflicts within teamwork are inevitable. This may result in the project being delayed or not being achieved at all. In this case, as every member in the team has different working schedule, it becomes difficult to communicate or organize for time to hold a group meeting and discuss matters affecting their project. This is due to time conflict where every member is committed to other duties at different time periods making it hard for them to get a time when they are all free (Nash, 2010, para. 6).
How a team learns together
To ensure that team members align all their activities with the team’s objectives, there is need for them to learn together in order to be aware of the target goal and ways of achieving it. Lack of the members to learn together may lead to them coming up with incompatible and conflicting ideas. For instance, in a case where team members have different work schedules, it becomes hard for them to have time to learn together. This may result in these members coming up with conflicting opinions with respect to steps to take in developing the training program. There are different ways through which teams learn together.
Some of these include professional learning community (PLCs) and learning together in the course of action learning. PLC is aimed at ensuring that there is a mutual learning between people working in a specific field within an organization. On the other hand, action learning is implemented by professionals where they implement new working methods in the organization and work together towards improving them when necessary.
In instances where members of a team have no time to meet and share ideas due to variation in their working schedule, teams come up with documents stipulating the objectives of the project being pursued and all the responsibilities of every member of the team (Hills, 2001, pp. 244-257). These documents are then distributed to all members of the team and the leader in the team given the responsibility of monitoring the team members to ensure that each of them works towards realization of the project. The team ensures that there is effective internal communication to help in updating each member of the group on the progress made towards achieving the project.
Recommendations on measures to take to improve the success o the project
The fact that it is hard to organize for joint meeting between the members of the team implies that there is need for establishment of other means of enhancing communication between the members. This is to ensure that each member contribute to the project despite not having time to meet with others. As the leader, one opts to regularly organize for a one-on-one meeting with each member of the group and discuss with him or her on some of the progress and improvements needed.
This will also give the leader an opportunity to know the progress of the member and clarify on areas that he or she has not understood. This will ensure that every member is updated on his or her responsibility towards realization of the project. This will work also as a motivation to the members thus making them work hard towards realization of the project (Veltman & Larison, 2009, pp. 41-43).
As every member is aware of what the project entails and have the outline of what will be done, you can now look for the most accurate time to organize for group meetings Veltman & Larison, 2009, p. 44). This is to give all members an opportunity to meet and share their opinions as well as briefing one another on the progress they have made. This will help in ensuring that the project is realized on time and the developed training program meets all the training requirements.
Reference List
Hills, H. (2001). Team-based learning. Hampshire: Gower Publishing Limited.
Nash, J. J. (2010). Team communication and improving workplace efficiency. Web.
Veltman, L. & Larison, K. (2009). PURE conversation: Enhancing communication and teamwork. Journal of Healthcare and Risk Management, 27(2), pp. 41-44.