Why work in teams?

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 20 min

Questions

• What are the benefits of working in a team?

• What are downsides of working in a team?

Objectives

• Explain the benefits and downsides of working in a team

Introduction

In this episode we will learn about teams and discuss why you should want to work in a team in the first place. To define a team, it is useful to look at teams in a continuum and think about the difference between a team and just any group of people:

• Any gathering of people: they might not even know or see each other, nor necessarily share common interests.
• Groups: they are aware of each other and may interact, more than a simple gathering of people.
• Working group: a group with at least some common goals.
• Team: a group of people who act together to achieve common goals. Often, a group of individuals first form a working group. Then, they become a team. As opposed to working groups, teams have collective responsibility, leadership, and achievements. Read more about differences between working groups and teams here.

Discussion

Do you work in a working group or a team?

Scrum team

You might have heard of a Scrum team that includes people with different roles. We will learn about it in the episode Introduction to Scrum.

Why work in teams

Discussion

• What do you think are benefits of working in a team?
• What do you think are downsides of working in a team?

Solution

Benefits

• Boost creativity and idea generation
• Learn from each other
• Share the workload of hard complex tasks
• Make use of complementary strengths of employees
• Better decision making
• A review process (where co-workers review each others work) often works better in a team because team members are familiar with the shared work. This increases the quality of the work.
• Humans are highly social animals and in general thrive by regular interaction with others, increasing motivation and productivity
• Increase the bus factor (i.e. when someone falls under a bus, the team can take over)
• Projects do not go on hold when a single employee is away, the team is able to pick up the work
• Shared responsibility and ownership
• Have multiple perspectives on performance from different team members.

Downsides

• Overhead of team meetings, communication and management
• More likely to get into conflicts with colleagues
• Possibility for too much peer pressure or feeling of being overlooked
• Not everything is under your control, so sometimes you have to work on things you do not like or that are initiated by someone else
• Teams can form isolated silos within an organisations
• Harder to measure contribution of individual to team outputs (think about publishing papers)
• You need a set of soft skills to work together successfully, potentially disadvantaging people that have more difficulty to develop these skills
• Leadership issues: leading a team is a difficult skill, which, if practiced badly, can have negative influence on the team members’ work environment
• Differences in number of working hours or work pace can be magnified, which can lead to frustrations

There are many benefits of working in teams, but there are clearly also some downsides. The key is to work together in such a way that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. An Agile way of working can help with this!

Key Points

• If done well, working in a team is fun and productive