Achieving team cohesion in charities
Over the past year digital technology has become even more essential to the way organisations work. Charities have had to reimagine not just how they continue to deliver their services in a Covid-19 friendly way, but also how their employees, teams and leaders communicate with one another to make difficult decisions irrespective of location.
Changes and pivots were made in record time in charities but, in many cases, collaborative processes and the interaction between team members suffered as a result. Whether co-located or working as a distributed workforce, groups should not underestimate the importance of making deliberate choices about communication norms and team interactions.
Team learning is a collective process that helps groups to review their approach and avoid repeating mistakes. These behaviours are particularly important during the information sharing, idea generation and evaluation stages of decision making, but have been increasingly difficult during remote working.
As we now attempt to navigate the pathway out of the pandemic, the way we work looks set to change forever. With some employees hoping to return permanently to the office and others looking to establish a hybrid or remote working pattern, it’s so important charities understand how to continuously improve and maintain cohesion amongst teams.
Fostering cohesiveness when remote
Teams with greater interpersonal cohesion are generally more effective and see great investment and growth. However many employees over the past year will have experienced less emotional engagement with their colleagues as a result of remote working, reducing the cohesiveness of the team. Meetings have an important role to play in combating this negative effect.
In addition to agreeing tasks, teams should ringfence part of the meeting for a “virtual check in”. Whether team members are in the office or working remotely, it is important to take time to share any challenges, celebrate success and even discuss non-work related information. Team leaders should encourage cohesion by regularly praising both individual and team performance during meetings.
Overcoming conflict
Cohesiveness is not just about everyone in the charity getting on, it’s also about encouraging the right kind of disagreement. Disagreements are common in groups that have high cognitive diversity and, unless they are managed well, they can get in the way of good decisions. This is especially true if conflict is caused by interpersonal clashes. In contrast, when disagreements stay focused on the task (e.g. having different views on strategy) they can lead to critical discussions that challenge assumptions and enable better decisions.
Group leaders can learn to manage disagreements using cooperative resolution strategies within the team. For example, basing discussions on facts and multiple options rather than reducing down to two opposing ideas. Leaders should look to balance contributions from across the team to maintain a sense of fairness and avoid forcing consensus if possible.
Communication is always key
It’s very common to overestimate what other team members know, or to assume that everybody understands the problems or tasks in the same way, especially when charity teams are working remotely. It can be challenging to balance communicating too much and too little as some team members may feel overwhelmed by too much information, but others feel ‘out of the loop’ without all of the details.
Research suggests that teams with “bursty” communication patterns lead to the best performance. Burstiness is when short intense interactions between group members are broken up by periods with little or no contact in between.
Recognising that not everyone wants to communicate in the same way is important, so negotiating the communication etiquette upfront can help everyone feel heard. Teams should agree when everyone will be offline to allow group members enough time to work without interruptions. Equally, it is key to establish preferred channels and frequency of communication.
Don’t be afraid as a team to adapt your approach according to the task at hand. The team should be well connected and communicating frequently during the information gathering phase of decision making, for example. But when you switch to idea generation, start off with independent working where there is little or no communication between members. This will help your team to come up with a greater variety of options. These methods can be applied to all team members whether they are in the office or working remotely.
Strength in diversity
With remote and hybrid working looking set to stay for many charities, teams will have to continue making important decisions irrespective of where their colleagues are working. While cohesion throughout the team is important, there are a number of other factors charity leads should consider as well such as team diversity, cross-cutting skills and how to operate in an unstable world.
Diversity has been linked to better problem solving and decision making in groups, as well as increased productivity. Diversity may come in different forms, including team members’ demographics, cognitive style or levels of experience and expertise.
Groups made up of solely high status or high performing individuals are less likely to be cohesive. They may find it difficult to collaborate, share information less effectively and struggle to stay focused on the task. Whereas in well constructed mixed ability teams the skills gap can be a powerful motivator for less able members, leading to overall productivity gains for the team.
When it comes to developing a team’s cross-cutting skills, managers should focus on broadly applicable decision making skills. For example, there is training to help individuals cultivate actively open minded thinking (AOMT), probabilistic reasoning, and perspective taking. These three skills increase a group’s collective intelligence and transfer across decision making contexts.
Groups with high cognitive flexibility or AOMT can adapt quickly and make better informed decisions, while perspective taking and the ability to accurately estimate future outcomes help to correct assumptions.
Making more accurate judgments
Finally, when the external world is unstable for charities, like during a financial crisis or political elections, traditional sources of expertise often fail due to overconfidence. Probability and forecasting training can help groups become more aware of their tendency to over or underestimate. This will help them make more accurate judgments about the likelihood of different outcomes.
Other techniques to manage uncertainty include taking a portfolio approach to decisions and using robust decision making (RDM) to identify “no regret” options that yield benefits irrespective of what ends up happening.
The rise in remote and hybrid working will present challenges but a relentless focus on cohesion, communication and other cross-cutting factors will enable teams to truly utilise their collective intelligence and ability.
