1. Pyracle’s interpersonal collaboration
During the High Performance Collaborations
course I have enhanced my knowledge on communicating with parties in a digital
or virtual environment. In the project there was an evening group as well as a
morning group. Before diving into the collaboration between the virtual teams,
I want to shortly elaborate the communication in my own team, because the
east-west differences are very interesting to elaborate.
Within my own team, team Pyracle, we had a
communication method that developed quite organically. We didn't agree on any
specific structure or discussed the way to communicate. We had two major
methods of communication.
a.
Face-to-face
The
face-to-face contact was mostly during class. We discussed certain work,
milestones, topics or urgencies during or after class. Since we only shared
this specific class, it was the most convenient time to meet. Additionally, it
was most effective. Every comment or communication triggers an immediate response
and therefore makes it a very efficient as well as effective way of
communicating. Personally, I preferred discussions and decisions based on
face-to-face contact, because there is a smaller chance of dissonance in
communication. Misunderstanding due to differences in communication styles,
which is very common between the western (direct) and eastern (indirect)
culture can be recognized easier in a face-to-face context.
b.
E-mail
Contact
between face-to-face meetings was done via e-mail. We had regular e-mailing
contact regarding the statuses of upcoming milestones or deadlines. These forms
of communication are simple and easy but I sometimes feared friction due to an
overkill of e-mail. It can clutter up the e-mail inbox and every missing
information triggers a sequence of at least two new emails (a question and an
answer). Additionally, in our group there were 3 people involved in the
e-mailing which causes a great flow of e-mails quite quickly.
Using these two major methods of
communication, I am very satisfied with how our group function in
communication. The group consists of 1 German and 1 Dutch male and 1 Chinese
girl. The cultural differences brings along differences in communication
styles, direct vs. indirect, content-focused versus context-focused etcetera.
However, I realized quite quickly that our Chinese girl understood our direct
method of communication quite easily and wasn’t deterred by our direct way of
saying things. Additionally, we did adjust our way of communicating at times
towards a more subtle and indirect way. This also developed in an organic way,
it was a matter of trial and error. To conclude, I am very satisfied with the
way we worked and how we overcame the communication gap between the east-west
communication styles.
2. Inter-team collaboration practices
Between the virtual teams there was a
different way of communication because we got the assignment not to meet in
person. The opportunity to make mistakes in the process encouraged me to live
up to this request and not to meet. Similar as in the first chapter, I will
start with elaborating the major methods of communication used in this
collaboration.
a.
E-mail
As
explain within my Pyracle team, these forms of communication are simple and
easy but I sometimes feared friction due to an overkill of e-mail. It can
clutter up the e-mail inbox and every missing information triggers a sequence
of at least two new emails (a question and an answer). However, since this was
a collaboration between groups in implied communication between 6 people
instead of only 3. So the amount of e-mails coming in the inbox is quite large
and the potential of misunderstandings become even greater. I prefer meeting in
person due to the efficiency and effectiveness, but since this was not possible
I decided to just try and organize the e-mail traffic myself. We e-mailed
several times starting at around week 7 of the course.
b.
Skype
Next
to the e-mail contact we had on a weekly basis, we decided to have some less
frequent Skype meeting to discuss some important topics in a more efficient and
effective way. It is quite difficult to have a meeting via Skype with several
people, because you cannot see when someone wants to speak (body language) and
many times two people speak at the same time (delay in sound). To narrow down
the chances of chaos, a girl came up with the suggestion to pick a leader. I
took this task as leader and chaired the Skype meeting, providing everyone with
a clear schedule and giving people the turn to talk. This created some
structure in the meetings and enabled us to use our time in the best possible
way. There have been a few Skype meetings starting in week 9 on a 1 or 2 weekly
basis.
I believe the team functioned quite alright
looking at the circumstances. In the beginning some e-mails were sent but there wasn't really a response, also not from me. Mainly because my focus wasn't on
this end project yet and I had other priorities at that moment. However, after the
mailing traffic got up to speed, the communication became better, more frequent
and shaped towards a joint goal (getting the project finished).
Therefore, I can conclude that I am quite satisfied with the way we
coordinated the collaboration. However, it cannot beat the power of
face-to-face (or interpersonal) collaboration because there are many aspects
of communication involved that are only recognizable in direct interpersonal
communication. Examples are, body language, facial expressions and emotions.
Decisions among the two groups were not
really made in an organic way. It didn't just happen, but we actively
decided based on a request by one or more group members. The example given
earlier, about choosing a leader, shows this. A girl from the evening group
suggested to choose a collaboration leader to coordinate the collaboration.
This is an example of an active decision.
In the collaboration within the group there
have also been some minor conflicts. However, the word conflict might
suggest an escalation of a situation that led to emotional or personal fight.
Therefore, I’d first like to define the word conflict as: ‘’a situation where the execution did not go
as planned’’.
Conflict 1: In the e-mailing contact we noticed that one person hadn’t responded to
a single e-mail after two weeks. Therefore, we decided to try and actively
involve this person into the e-mailing conversation. I had the personal e-mail
address of this person and I sent him an e-mail to ask if we could use his
personal e-mail address (which he/she checks daily) so he/she could participate
more in the e-mailing traffic. It was not avoided because we want all group
members to have a share in creating the end product. Eventually this solved the
issue.
Conflict 2: After a silent period of e-mails there was a certain flood of e-mails
following and I perceived it as cluttering up. In order to prevent the e-mail
from cluttering up I decided to send summarizing e-mails every now and then.
Additionally, I sometimes e-mailed only one specific person to make sure I
wouldn’t get a whole lot of responses.
Conflict 3: I, as well as theory, am very much in favor of meeting face-to-face
periodically. It facilitates to interact on an interpersonal and social level
and it efficiently enables the collaborating parties to discover potential
issues (Lynne et al, 2000). Therefore, I would’ve wanted to meet in person to
make the collaboration work better. However, this was not allowed based on the
restriction of the assignment. I believe that this could have improved the
collaboration to a significant extent.
In my opinion, the fact that we only used
technology hampered our collaboration severely. I am an advocate of
interpersonal contact and meeting face-to-face. That is the most efficient,
and above all most natural way of communicating for people. The following
disadvantages were very recognizable in this collaboration due to the use of
technology:
1.
Response time was very high
2.
Equal involvement was very difficult to manage
3.
Workload was higher, because the e-mail traffic has to be managed
4.
More inefficient and ineffective as opposed to personal contact
Still, technology also facilitates some
aspects of teamwork. The biggest advantage is that it gives you some time
to respond. Even though it is can be a disadvantage, it also has a positive
side. In case of a very challenging technical question I found that the e-mail
gave me time to search for information before responding to the question. This
enabled me to give a better response than I could give when I was expected to
answer immediately (as in face-to-face sometimes). Also, I could choose the
best time for me to respond. Still, the pitfall here is that you postpone
your respond and frustrate other partners in the collaboration. To sum up,
advantages are:
1.
Higher quality response
2.
Managing your time
3. Inter-team collaboration processes
Regarding the process of the team, it must say
that it started of quite slow. Since it is a forced collaboration, not a
purposely chosen one, the start might be somewhat strange. Who e-mails
first? Shall I do it, or shall I wait for someone else? Eventually, someone
from the evening class sent an introductory e-mail and broke the ice. A few
weeks later we had quite some email traffic generated.
The group came together first via Skype. This
meeting was quite good, but it could be better. I was hoping to hear each
other’s voices and meet in person. However, there was a preference of some team
members to not use the voice/video function. We didn’t make any specific
commitments in this meeting. However, we did divide several tasks among both
teams and made a commitment to finish these tasks with high quality standards.
However, this was not formally agreed upon. It is more of an expected
commitment when you divide the tasks.
I, personally, made a commitment to this
group to be the leader of both teams and to coordinate the collaboration.
In addition, I committed myself to delivering quality work. I am in an exchange
student situation where I could even afford not to pass a single course. Still,
I am motivated to pass my courses and, more important, to help others pass
there courses. In other words, without directly communicating it to
other I committed myself to do my utmost best to deliver a contribution to get
a good end-product. The commitment I expect in return is an equal amount of
effort they put in it. Similar to my commitment, this was not actively
communicated.
I was very surprised by the professional
attitude of all the individual team members in the group. To be very honest, I
had a high expectation of the evening students because they have (just like me)
working experience and are there more familiar with the effective working and
planning. However, in comparison they did not particularly perform better than
the people from the morning class. I did notice a different in strengths,
evening students were more practical and morning students more theoretical.
I did not face any concerns in the
collaboration within the group. I believe from an early stage in our contact
we came up with concrete and good ideas for this project. This made it much
easier to decide what topic to choose and how we were going to design the
paper. There has not been a moment where I doubted if we were going to get this
group project to a positive ending. In the very beginning, however, I did have
some concerns on the e-mailing contact. Because after the first e-mail by one
of the evening class student, we didn't really get any communication traffic
going. However, here I decided to wait for an organic development of the
communication instead of immediately showing concern in the early stage of the
collaboration. I feared this to be of bad influence on the development of the
collaboration.
So to sum up, how well did we work together
and how successful have we been? First, I must say that I haven’t
experienced a collaboration yet where I didn’t get to meet the people in person
with whom I worked with to create a paper. So it is difficult to determine
how well we collaborated. Therefore, I use my personal feeling to judge it and
that feeling is positive. We did a good job and came up with a very creative
community concept without encountering major issues in collaboration. Based
on these observations I think we can call the whole collaboration a success.
Additionally, I am satisfied with the end result of the project. It turned out
to be better than I expected in the beginning.
To conclude, I’d like to show my appreciation
to all my team members for their efforts into making this course into a
success.
References:
Lynne
M. M., Manville B. & Carole E. A. (2000), what makes a virtual organization
work? p. 19-21, Sloan management review.
