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Practical recommendations for team work

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 20 min
Questions
  • What are practical tips for doing team work?

  • What soft skills are valuable when working in teams?

  • How can I apply what I learned in my daily work?

Objectives
  • List a few practical recommendations for doing teamwork

  • Know which soft skills make great teams

Practical recommendations

Discussion: Your practical tips.

Based on your own experience, what would be your top-3 practical tips that you would like to give someone that is new to working in a team? This can be based on experience with formal teams, in pairs, or any other form of collaborative work.

Our tips:

Soft skills

Teams stand or fall with good soft skills of team members.

Discussion: Soft skills.

Which soft skills do you think are important to have when doing teamwork. For example, think about applying the agile frameworks that we learned about, what soft skills are important?

These are some important soft skills needed in teams:

Giving good feedback

Learning from each other is one of the benefits of team work. For this, giving good feedback is vital.

How to give good feedback?

If you want to learn more about giving feedback in a way that is pleasant for others, we recommend that you take a course dedicated to this topic with your whole team. For a first impression, here is a short guide about giving constructive feedback.

Build trust

Trust between team members is important for:

Be inclusive

Inclusivity is when individuals with different identities, backgrounds or other characteristics making them vulnerable for exclusion, are welcomed in a group setting. It is good to be aware of this in a team.

Tips for being inclusive

Team bonding

This may sound trivial, but don’t underestimate the importance of team bonding. It really helps to step out of the formal office setting, and improve the relationships in the team over a drink, doing a sports activity, or solving an escape room together. Engaging in social activities is also one of the best ways to build trust between members.

Wrapping up

Exercise: Wrapping up.

Take a few minutes to write down your thoughts on what you learned about teamwork in this course:

  • What questions do you still have?
  • Whether there are any incremental improvements that can benefit your projects?
  • What’s nice that we learnt but is overkill for your current work?

Key Points

  • Learn from other people’s experiences working in teams.

  • Certain soft skills are vital for teamwork.