Graduate Development Programme Work Based Assignment 1 M3.11 Building Team M3.

30 Understanding the communication process in workplace

Sushil Goswami SAP ID: 01060136 Graduate Mechanical Engineer Tata Steel UK Port Talbot

Trust & Confidentiality

How do you develop & maintain trust at work and why confidentiality is important in building and maintaining trust at work? Trust is important to any organisations performance. In work teams with high trust environments, they work with more effectiveness and the people work harder, better whilst feeling more positive about their workplace. When trust exists in a work team or organisation, the cost of doing business is less and everything else is easier and more comfortable to achieve. The process of building & maintaining trust at work can be summarised in following ways: 1. Establish and maintain integrity & confidentiality Integrity & confidentiality are the foundation of trust in any work team/organisation. In simple words, this means keeping promises & being truthful/honest to your colleagues. At workplace, work colleagues may sometime wish to seek support/advice on issues that they may be facing owing to reasons at home or/and work. In such instances, it is very important to maintain the confidentiality of the conversations that you may have with your work colleague. It may be embarrassing or humiliating for them for if such information becomes public. Confidentiality lays the foundation of open and honest communication in the workplace with the assurance that information will not be shared with those not intended. This goes for the information shared & accessed at workplace relating to the organisation. 2. Treating all colleagues as equal partners Trust is established when even the newest colleague, part-timer or the lowest paid employee feels important and part of the team. Being appreciative towards the actions & achievements of the colleagues is crucial to making them feel as an integral part of the team. This means valuing inputs from all colleagues and encouraging them at all levels to share their ideas to improve business. This also includes listening with an open mind even if you dont ultimately choose to follow a suggestion made by a colleague. This kind of behaviour is equally reciprocated and improves the trust amongst the team. 3. Pushing forward on shared, rather than personal goals Trust is formed when the team has a common goal and they feel that everyone is pulling together to accomplish a shared vision/goal, rather than a series of personal agendas. When teams start achieving goals, the colleagues trust one another.

Team Development
Describe the difference between a group & team using examples from your workplace to illustrate this difference. Briefly describe the stages of an established model of information using the examples from your experience to illustrate the process. According to Katzenbach and Smith, A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, a common approach, for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. A group is just a collection of people with something in common, such as being in the same place or having a shared place. According to Tuckman, there are four key stages that a team goes through, namely:

Forming

Mourning

Performing

Storming

Norming

There is also an additional/final stage termed as Mourning when the team eventually breaks up or a team member or members leaves the team. Forming Stage: 1. People are put together. 2. People are unclear about the goal/goals of the team their roles within it. 3. Important to discuss the purpose of the team & individual roles & responsibilities. For example, when I joined the company as a graduate mechanical engineer, I was allocated to Asset Improvement Team for 12 months long placement by HR. At this stage, I was unaware of the purpose of the team and more importantly my role within it. When I joined the team, the line manager explained the objective of the team and my responsibilities towards it. Storming Stage: 1. Team members test each other & leader. 2. People try to establish themselves by being loud, organising others etc. 3. Important for leader to be assertive & listen to all concerns whilst keeping everyone focussed.

For example, the first risk assessment I attended in relation to the project that I am currently working on exhibited the aforementioned characteristics of storming stage in early days. Team members were unclear about the objective & structure of the risk assessment, often leading to loud arguments and little progress during early days of RA. Norming stage: 1. People start to understand each others skills & personalities. 2. Certain ground rules are established. 3. People start to feel confident. 4. Open challenges take over from loud arguments. During the Norming stage of the team for R.A., the team members established some ground rule with regards to challenging others about their views and opinions. The team members started to recognise & appreciate the skills & personalities of each other. Performing stage: 1. Team starts to perform. 2. Team members start to help & support each other & understand each other a lot better. 3. Team members play to the strengths of their colleagues within the team. The R.A. team during the performing stage started to produce a valid & well-assessed document. The common observation was that team members understood each other a lot better and respected each others opinion while recognising strengths of their colleagues. We felt free to come with new ideas & ways of doing things. Mourning stage: 1. This happens when a team eventually breaks up often due to fulfilment of the team goal. 2. Sense of loss among the team members. After the 3 days long course at Ashorne Hill, the learning group that I was part of, has often expressed a feeling of missing the opportunity afforded to us via this training course which allowed us to sit together and contribute to each others personal & professional development.

Team Roles
Explain the benefits of knowing your team members preferred roles (if possible, you should illustrate this by briefly describing the Belbin Roles of a few your team members). People working in any team-based environment often have two roles: 1. Functional Role 2. Team role While functional role is attributed to ones academic & vocational skills, team role is a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way- Dr Meredith Belbin. The Belbin team role profile indicates how an individual will behaves and operates within a team and concerns their tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way. The nine team roles identified by Belbin are as follows: 1. Action-oriented Roles Shaper, Implementer, and Completer Finisher. 2. People-oriented Roles Co-ordinator, Team Worker and Resource Investigator. 3. Cerebral Roles Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist. Now, the question arises What can be gained by identifying peoples preferred team roles? Knowing peoples preferred team roles makes it easier to work effectively with people when you are given some expectations of their tendencies and preferences. As per Belbins research, a balanced team - one with the greatest chance of developing fully effective working arrangement - would contain a balance of these team roles. Besides, every team goes through a phase of activities during which some team roles are better able to contribute than others. The information provided by identifying team roles is useful at many levels: 1. Self-awareness: Knowledge of ones own team role/roles allow one a unique insight into the perceptions that one holds about himself/herself. It only by knowing ourselves that we have any chance of achieving our full potential & improving ourselves. 2. Tool for effective teams: As mentioned before, team members have two roles within the team: Functional role & Team role. While functional role is concerned with getting the job done, Team role is concerned with the job is done. Knowledge of team members Team roles allows one to draw upon the strengths of each other while managing weaknesses at the same time. 3. Tool for effective team/staff selection: Traditionally, staff selection is based upon functional roles usually defined by an individuals eligibility for the job. However, research shows that a very weak correlation between the eligibility for the job and actual job performance. Selecting team members for a specific job based upon not only functional role but also incorporating Team roles profiles is a proven method of selecting teams with higher performances. Team roles help in deciding the suitability of a potential team member for a particular team. The same applies for staff selection. 4. Tool for career planning: When making career decisions, it is imperative for one to consider his/her natural talents and behavioural tendencies. Belbin profiling enables one to become more self-aware in discovering ones strongest & weakest

team roles. This allows one to work upon his/her blind spots paving way for making better career planning & choices. To illustrate this using an example, a Monitor Evaluator (ME) is someone who is best suited to analyse problems and evaluate ideas and suggestions. He/she would be very good at weighing problems/ideas/suggestions in terms of their pros and cons. Generally, a ME is an unemotional, prudent and serious minded individual who, to many outsiders, may appear as dry, boring or even over-critical. Characteristics like hard-headedness, sound judgement, discretion and clear thinking are MEs strengths but often suffer from weaknesses like lack of imagination and ability to motivate others. They often appear to lack warmth and feelings for others and may be sometimes perceived as hypercritical. In my team, Mr. David Jones (name changed) is a Process Safety Engineer. He is very methodical and likes to follow a certain procedure for any task he does. Whilst working upon the Risk Assessment, I observed that he was usually slow in making decision preferring to think things over. At few occasions, some team members appeared to be a bit frustrated with the pace of RA meeting. However, as the RA was one of the most important parts of the project, D. Jones preferred to get every minute detail right than pacing up the meeting for the sake of just doing it. As an individual he seems to lack the spirit to inspire & motivate others, lacking warmth & feeling for others. I find his demeanour best suited for analysing and evaluating problems and ideas.

Communication Process
Briefly describe two specific communication needs that have arisen within your teamone that requires face-to-face verbal communication and another that requires written communication. For each of these: Identify a communication method you could use to meet the need Use the communication model to plan the most effective way to communicate your message Give at least one advantage and one disadvantage of your chosen communication method I work for asset improvement team as a graduate mechanical engineer. As part of midterm campaign on Blast Furnace 5, I am working on a project to install a new set of equipment & processes. The project requires a contractor to work upon the installation part of the project. Written Communication The project requires me to invite tenders from various contractors for the work. This requires me to communicate with the contractors about the scope of the work and detailed specification of the work. As it is impossible to communicate personally faceto-face with each of the contractor firms, the most plausible & convenient method of communication would be email & telephone conversation. Objective: To invite tenders from contractors. Audience: 4-6 Contractor firms. Medium: Email/telephone conversation. Message: Convey scope of work, detailed specification; arrange a site-visit for contractors. Communicator: As I am tasked with delivery of the project and understand the scope of the work, I would be the apt person to communicate this message. One of the advantages of the email/telephone communication is the ease with which the message is delivered negating the need of inconvenient method of visiting each contractor. However, it fails to convey the personal touch to the message. It lacks the effectiveness of body-language and requires face-to-face site meeting and presentations at later stages. Face-to-face Communication Picking up from where I left in the previous example, the next step after emails would be to arrange a site meeting where a face-to-face communication would facilitate better understanding of the message- scope & detailed specification here. Objective: Accurate tenders as per project requirements. Audience: 4-6 Contractors. Medium: On-site meetings & presentations. Message: Detailed explanation of project Communicator: This time, my line manager would be best suited to explain the finer details of the scope of the work and make sure the contractor understand each and every aspect of work so as to facilitate an accurate tender with justified costs associated to it. One of the advantages of this method is that it conveys the message with a better clarity and employs the use of body language. However, the effectiveness of the delivery of message depends upon the seriousness & attentiveness of the audience too. If the

audience, contractors here, are not attentive or are finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of delivery of message, the message wouldnt be conveyed in its true form and even worse, could be distorted.

Communication Barriers
Identify two possible barriers to the communication process and describe how each barrier could be overcome. Two possible barriers to the communication process are as follows: Psychological Barriers: Factors such as peoples state of mind can affect the effectiveness of message delivery. People tend to feel happier and more receptive to information when the sun shines. At the same time, if someone in the audience has personal problems, this would affect their ability of assimilating the information. A communicator should be aware of these factors. Its best to keep communication events on sunny days and schedule them for morning as people tend to be more active & active in mornings and be aware of the state of mind of his/her audience, if possible. Individual linguistic barrier: The use of difficult & inappropriate words in communication can prevent people from understanding the message properly. Poorly explained or misunderstood can also result in confusion. It is indispensable for a communicator to convey his message in simple words and avoid jargons as much as possible. He/she also needs to make sure the words used in the communication convey the message in its true form without misleading people.

Non-verbal Communication
Using the verbal communication method you identified above describe how you would take account of the influence of non-verbal communication on the receiver/audience. Presentations are going to be an integral part of my work at Asset Improvement Team as they are an important tool to convey message to a large group. A lot of people believe that a good presentation relies on good use of words. However, more than 75% of the meaning of what you communicate is determined not by the words you are speaking by the cues that people pick up on. Mostly, this perception happens at sub-conscious level. Non-Verbal cues may include: 1. Body language: Things like facial expression, eyes, head inclination, posture etc. are part of body language. People tend to respond positively to positive body language, for example, warm handshake, eye-contact. Smiling and looking interested. The skill is in consciously avoiding negative signals and recognising them in other people. If one recognises a negative signal in the audience/receiver then one must decide how to react in a positive manner. 2. Paralanguage: This concerns the use of voice pitch & tone, rate of speech etc. A high pitched voice may be difficult to take seriously and fast-talking can convey nervousness. Some of these are beyond ones control but it helps to speak clearly, slowly and clearly. 3. Environment: Communication can be influenced by factors as the time of the day, weather conditions and even the room temperature. For example, People tend to agree often quickly towards the end of the day as subconsciously, they want to go home. If the room is too hot or too cold, this may distract people making it difficult for them to concentrate on the message conveyed. One must be aware these factors while deciding when, how and where to deliver his/her message.

Feedback
Using one of the examples you have described, explain how will use feedback to check the effectiveness of your communication. As mentioned before, presentations are going to be an integral part of my work at AIT. To check the effectiveness of my communication, it would be a good idea to ask my audience to feedback about the presentations and the effectiveness of delivery. Feedback plays a fundamental role in helping people to become more aware of themselves and their impact on others. It helps people to reinforce/question their decisions whilst helping them to improve their repertoire of behaving and relating. A constructive feedback would mean that people are listening attentively. The best time to ask for feedback is immediately after the event. I would treat the feedback as information and not jump at conclusions or judgements until I have heard what they have to say. Thanking the giver is as important as asking for feedback. We need feedback to develop & grow and it serves as an important tool to improve our individual performance.

Awareness & Information

Identify ways that you & your team could increase your awareness of information in the workplace The awareness of information in the workplace could be improved in following ways: 1. Weekly meetings are great tools to keep everyone informed about the work done by an individual team member or by whole team. 2. Emails, newsletters, memos and internal storyboard are forms of written information sharing which make a workplace more inclusive and keeps its workforce informed of proceedings. 3. Large gatherings & conferences are rare opportunities when top management has a chance to interact with employees of all level. This allows for top managers to reach out and know about the concerns of employees. This makes employees at all level feel part of the company.