www.fastcompany.com: If you thought you and your coworkers had trouble expressing themselves and sharing constructively before you scattered to your home offices to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, get ready for a full-on communication breakdown.
4 comments:
I think this is a pretty relevant article for right now, considering we have a pretty big team project for Susan's class that I am having a hard time with. My group is really great, and we are doing everything in our power to have effective communication and regular meetings. It's working out as well as it possibly could given these circumstances, but if I'm being honest, it's still pretty frustrating. It has required a lot more effort on our parts than I feel like it would've if we were in person. I am actually really impressed with our ability to schedule meetings considering our greatly different timezones (almost everyone is in a different timezone), but I did want some more tips to maybe make things easier. A lot of these tips involved the manager/boss/whoever stepping up to the plate and taking their leadership to the next level. It made me realize maybe why I'm a little overwhelmed; it's because our team actually doesn't have a stage manager! I can't help but wonder how much MORE productive we could be if we had a designated person organizing everything rather than whoever is up to it in that moment. I'm someone who really likes consistency, and that has been a big obstacle for me! To combat this and split up the work fairly and evenly, everyone cycles through the duty of the stage manager weekly. I'll make sure to keep these tips in mind when it's my turn.
I would just like to take a moment to appreciate the opening paragraph of this article, which is what got me to read it before I had fully processed the title. It made me chuckle and then sigh heavily as I thought about our current situation. Without dealing with teamwork, I am already so much more overwhelmed by the work I have had to do in the last few weeks just because of the difference in my environment. It is so much easier to find other things to do at home, and my family is a constant source of distraction or even more projects to do. And the issues this article mentions with communication and confusion between platforms has been an unfortunate reality of my time in remote learning. Between my main email and school account, not to mention the individual Google Drive account, I feel like I spend twice as much time as I used to trying to track down things that would normally have just been stored in my backpack. Though we are all trying to make the best of this situation, I am not a person who can effectively function in this format of learning and communication and I can't wait to get back to my regular preferred learning environment.
I think that this article addresses a huge elephant in the room right now that we have to work in teams from so far away, and talks about the fact that group projects now feel really individual. I really feel that. Especially when working on our 2023 rube (woohoo), it was super prevalent that everyone was doing it separately, and then we just wanted it to come back together at the end. It ended up working, but it is not as great as working in a dynamic group in person, making decisions together, feeling like a part of something bigger. It is all very unsatisfying. In working in groups for imaginarium, it is really hard to stay focused on coming together as a team to create something. The division that exists already because we are split up into disciplines is really making it hard to do things together rather than finish what we have due and sending it to the group after. It is so hard to prevent. But zoom really helps! And so does trying really hard to communicate!
This article mentions “water-cooler conversations” and “coffee breaks where creative conversation and solutions can bloom”. Whenever people ask me how online group projects have worked for me, especially ones in artistic settings, this is usually the subject of my response. Looking back at my experience as a creative, the best ideas seldom come to me when I am sitting in a meeting that was created for the fostering of great ideas. It is usually when I am standing in line to order my lunch or walking with a friend to grab a coffee. It just comes out in conversation. There is little pressure; I am just talking to a peer about the hypothetical realm of my creativity, and something plausible and fitting tends to come from that casual banter. These virtual meetings almost feel forced, but it is good that these studies have found that it is possible to communicate candidly on screen. I agree, but I just question if our creative brainstorming has been undercut.
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