Baking a cake without a recipe: The study of teamwork processes - Part 3

By Dr Georgia Hay

I don’t know about you, but my favourite cake recipes are the ones where you dump all of the ingredients into a bowl at once. One step wonders! No need to carefully flick back and forth between the bowl and the recipe to check which step you’re at… only to find that you should have saved half of the butter for the end to make a glaze.

Unfortunately, getting multidisciplinary teams to work together effectively often requires something like a recipe.

Starting with the right ingredients is important: having the right people in the room (and the right number of people), with the tools and time needed to tackle the task at hand.

However, I’m sure you’d agree that simply getting all the experts in the room does not guarantee that they’ll be able to solve the problem – let alone get on the same page about what the problem is in the first place. Sometimes it might even seem like everyone’s speaking different languages. And then the inevitable conflict ensues. Disagreement, confusion, frustration. An ineffective and unhappy team.

In this case, the order that the team ‘ingredients’ are put into the ‘bowl’ matters; as does the way in which they are combined.

In this case, a recipe is needed. A process for establishing a shared understanding or ‘mental model’, and for combining the group’s expertise in the right way, allowing individuals to build on each other’s ideas and suggestions – to achieve, as a team, what they could not have achieved alone.

Unfortunately, academic researchers have tended to only measure the ingredients of effective teams.

Yet, in order to fully understand how to facilitate team effectiveness, especially in multidisciplinary teams, we need to understand the recipe that they use. In research, we call these recipes team processes.

However, it’s a lot easier to measure the team ingredients. The ingredients are measured before the teams start working (e.g., surveying each team member on their personality and knowledge), and then the performance of the team is measured upon task completion.

Measuring team processes requires looking at everything the team does – every interaction, every comment, every non-verbal signal – between the when they start working and when they stop. Eeep.

To make measuring team processes a whole lot easier, and to advance the science of team processes, we developed the Communication Analysis Tool (CAT). While it’s not a magic algorithm that measures team processes completely autonomously, it substantially reduces the time and effort required, and it completely customisable to the context of interest. Also, you can offer the team immediate feedback on their behaviours and interactions – or use CAT to produce a report at a later time.

But don’t take my word for it, check out what some of our users have to say!

Melissa Twemlow, who studied the effectiveness of Scrum meetings in Agile Teams:

Sofia Schlamp, who studied gender dynamics in team meetings:

Still not sure if you could use CAT in your work? Stay tuned for the next post in this series, where we will give other examples of how CAT can be used, including videos from our very own ‘CAT lovers!’

For further detail on the functionality and history of CAT, and how to access it, click here.

For the original Curtin University media release on CAT, click here.

WFH challenges and opportunities

Published in Business News on 7 October 2020

In the third instalment of the WFH Series, Business News explores how managers can ensure their teams are mentally healthy and productive.

THE sudden shift to Demote working during the COVID-19 shutdown caught many unprepared.

Apart from the need to set up a home office, adapt to online video meetings and homeschool children, the immediacy of the change challenged the way many people dealt with their mental health.

The Thrive at Work at Home study, which surveyed more than 1,100 people in May and April, found 39 per cent of people working from home most days of the week reported experiencing 'high' or very high' psychlogical distress.

This is compared to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which recorded 13 per cent of Australians experienced the same symptoms in 2018 and 12 per cent in 2014-15.

The Thrive at Work at Home study found psychological distress was correlated to financial strain, a lack of trust on behalf of supervisors, having work closely monitored, and IT issues.

Curtin University Future of Work Institute Research Fellow and Thrive at Work at Home study Author Caroline Knight said the lack of clarity around future employment was also a factor in the levels of distress respondents reported.

"We found there were certain things like... technology hassles were quite highly correlated [with stress], and also workhome interference, poor communication." she said.

"[D]uring COVID, of course, job insecurity was a big issue, which was making people very uncertain as to whether they would have jobs." Dr Knight said loneliness and the lack of socialisation was another reason some people found remote working difficult.

Managing teams

University of Western Australia lecturer of applied psychology, Laura Fruhen. told Business News managers could play a part in ensuring their teams were mentally healthy by providing clear instructions and refraining from micromanaging.

"One of the best ways of managing people is setting them clear goals," Dr Fruhen said.

"There's really not much benefit in monitoring performance electronically or how long someone sits at a desk; we know that actually undermines performance and mental health."

Of employee respondents to the Thrive at Work at Home study, more than 30 per cent reported feeling their manager doubted their ability and/or knowledge to undertake the tasks required when working from home.

On the other side of the equation, Dr Knight said, about 30 per cent of managers said they didn't entirely trust their employees to do their job properly from home.

"Around 24 per cent doubted the ability of their employees to do their work and around 27 per cent said they thought the performance of remote workers was usually lower than people who worked in an office setting." she said.

This is despite 33.7 per cent of employee respondents saying they felt as productive at home, and 37.5 per cent feeling more productive. Less than a third, 28 per cent, said they were less productive.

Dr Knight said it was important not to monitor employees too much, but check in to make sure they were doing okay.

"[Things like] asking employees, 'What would help you?" she said.

"Is it that there is some technology that they particularly need? Are there any troubles they are having? \"Or is it that they need a bit more flexibility around work-home interface boundaries and work hours?"

Managers also needed to make sure employees knew exactly what they had to do, Dr Knight said.

"People don't perhaps have a great clarity about what roles they are doing or what job they have to do and what the priorities are." she said.

"I think that can create a lot of ambiguity and distress."

New direction

Several months after lockdowa life in WA is slowly returning to some sort of normality in the suburbs and the city, with workers coming back to the CBD.

Perth office property managers told Business News in September that people were returning to their offices, but a number of people were still working from home some days.

Dexus said tenancies in its Perth buildings were 27 per cent down on preCOVID-19 levels and Perron Group buildings were 40 per cent down.

Dr Knight said while the study had turned up issues around increased stress levels and an overall struggle for some people to adapt to working from home, most respondents strongly indicated a preference to continue with the practice on occasion.

"In fact, 90 per cent of people said they would like to continue working from home after the pandemic at least some of the time," she said. 'I do think things have changed and they probably won't go back to how they were. "I think now that we have these technologies developing quite fast around virtual working, I think it's likely to continue."

"Most people like to have a bit of both, they would like to be in the office sometimes and be at home sometimes."

International companies including Facebook and JPMorgan have already implemented permanent work-from-home strategies.

Dr Fruhen said working from home sometimes had benefits, including allowing people autonomy over their work.

"Being able to make your own decisions, determine your own schedule a bit more, have more flexibility around how you go about completing your work is actually really positive for people." she said.

However. Dr Fruhen said it was important to maintain connections with people in the office while working at home.

"We have Zoom calls, we have team channels, all those technologies we can use to connect with people, but sometimes I think it takes a little bit more effort than just bumping into someone in the hallway, so it's important to keep that in mind," she said.

Dr Fruhen said people also had to be aware of the need to maintain the balance between work and home life.

'It's really important to set boundaries, to stick to certain work hours or make it very clear to yourself with certain signals that this is now work." she said.

If you have a desk, you sit at that desk and this is where you work, and also at the end of the day you leave that desk and then you are finished.

"Likewise, if you don't have a desk and you work at the kitchen table, put stuff in a box when you finish so you have that signal very clearly that Now I'm finished and this is now my time off, because otherwise you would be constantly reminded and possibly dragged back into your work."

Researchers from Harvard Business School and New York University analysed data collected from people working at 21,278 companies across Europe, the US and Israel in March 2020 and found people worked an average 48 minutes more when working from home than in the office.

Staff development

If everybody worked from home at some time, Dr Knight said, employees could potentially miss out on opportunities.

"I think if you are not in the office, sometimes it could be that you aren't always in the forefront of people's minds when they are thinking of things or opportunities." she said.

'If you are not aware of that then there's potential chat you could lose out unless you are putting yourself forward for things."

This could be particularly difficult for young staff, Dr Knight said, who hadn't had the opportunity to build connections with their colleagues.

'I think for younger people, if they are trying to get on in their careers and move up the ladder, or trying to develop their skills, they probably don't already have those networks created, so it's probably more important for them to be mixing with people and building those networks and building trust higher up the hierarchy |so] they are more likely to be promoted," she said.

"It's quite possible to work from home and actually overcome these things, being very strategic and making sure you connect with the right people, making sure that you are seen in some way."

ICT-enabled Work Experiences through the Lens of Work Design - Bin Wang, PhD Completion

Bin Wang has received the excellent news that PhD thesis has been passed with two “A” recommendations from the examiners. Both examiners have indicated that Bin's thesis is deserving of a letter of commendation from the Chancellor of the University.

Bin started his PhD in 2018 at the Centre for Transformative Work Design, funded by the Centre's International PhD Scholarship. Bin was supervised by Professor Sharon Parker and Dr Yukun Liu.

In his thesis entitled “Thrive in a Digital Age: Understanding ICT-enabled Work Experiences through the Lens of Work Design”, Bin aims to understand the intertwined relationships among technology, human beings, and work.

Bin says:

“Departing from the plethora of superficial debates on whether technology is good or bad, what has been omitted, yet is more important, is a comprehensive understanding on how technology influences workers, how it interacts with other factors in influencing workers, and what workers can do to thrive in the current and future digital eras."

"In other words, humans are not just passive recipients of technological changes. We, therefore, need move to a more proactive and less deterministic stance (Parker & Grote, 2020) which allows humans and technologies work in harmony."

To address the overarching research goal, Bin, from the perspective of work design, conducted three studies (3 articles). Article 1 presents an interdisciplinary review of ICT use at work and found that ICT use affects employees through shaping three key aspects of work design: job demands, job autonomy, and the relational aspects of work. Articles 2 focused on a newly emerged form of ICT, social media use at work, and found that the day-to-day use of social media at work was positively associated with perceptions of social connectedness, which was further positively associated with life satisfaction and task performance. Bin and his co-authors also found that the relationship between daily social media use at work and perceived social connectedness was stronger for employees with higher, rather than lower, workloads. Article 3 investigated the major challenges that people are struggling with in ICT-enabled work, and how work design could help workers thrive in a digital age. Article 1 has been published in Academy of Management Annals; and Article 3 has been accepted by Applied Psychology: An International Review.

In sum, this thesis reveals the effectiveness of the work design perspective in integrating the relationships among technology, human beings, and work in the current digital era. Implications from this research contribute to building a harmonious relationship between human beings and technologies in ICT-enabled work.

Bin explains:

“Technology is ever advancing and rapidly, which means that findings from the current research may lose some contextual relevance and may need to be updated in the future. Yet one basic tenet of work design theories will be unchanged. Humans should always be placed at the center of the technological and social systems at work, regardless of what and how technologies are used. In light of this, I am confident that future technologies will not prevent or limit us in any way from thriving in our digitalized work. Human beings will strive to obtain the needed knowledge, abilities, and skills to embrace any changes brought by new technologies or new ways of working, as we always do,”

Both examiners comments on Bin's thesis are as follows:

Examiner 1:

“After reviewing this thesis, it is my opinion that it (this thesis) contributes original and substantial knowledge to our understanding of information communication technologies and the nature of an employee’s job and experiences. In addition to the excellent literature review, it pursues interesting research questions that are well articulated and gathers and analyses new data. Moreover, it uses multilevel modelling and advanced analytical approaches to conduct statistical analyses of the data. By developing new conceptual and designing studies to test them, this thesis moves beyond existing knowledge in this area.”

Examiner 2:

“The candidate has provided a comprehensive, state-of-the-art literature review. The work of this candidate is excellent and impressive. I would even consider going for the judicium cum laude (with honor) if I was part of the supervising team. High quality writing (reads like a novel), advanced statistical skills, multiple methods and research designs. Very good.”

Reference list

Wang, B., Liu, Y., & Parker, S. K. 2020. How does the use of information communication technology affect individuals? A work design perspective. Academy of Management Annals, 14(2): 695–725.

Wang, B., Liu, Y., Qian, J. Parker, S.K. Accepted. Achieving effective remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic: A work design perspective. Applied Psychology: An International Review.