Posted on: July 21st, 2008   By: Qurratulain Akhtar
Under: Zigron Inc

We’ve been working in different teams for long, and have known that there are few factors like motivation, communication, flexibility etc that make better performing teams. But, we never knew the extent which we need all these to be. So ZEDCo [Zigron Education Company] organized an event where we could find this extent.

It was basically a game that we played on July 16, 2008 at Zigron office. The game was comprised of 8 analytical and 8 management related questions. In first round everyone had to answer those questions individually [in 20 minutes], and in second round the same questions were answered by groups of randomly selected individuals [in 10 minutes]. On analyzing the both rounds, we found that the team score was higher than that of individual scores for each team. Later the feedback that we collected from participants [letting them rate the importance of flexibility, communication/coordination, decision making, team leading, motivation and entertaining environment] stated that, we think:

• The most important factors responsible for the success of a team are: Communication/coordination, decision making and motivation.
• And, the next important are flexibility, team leading and entertaining environment.

Highlights from the activity:

• Our Co-CEO, Haris Khan accompanied us in the game on conference call, he was also the part of a team, so we’d a live experience of working globally. We also realized that the most important factor for global teams is communication.
• Teams were randomly grouped, so no one knew that which team he will be in, or who’s gonna be their team members.
• 100% of the participants believed that teams work better than individuals.
• Planning and organizing this activity itself was a team effort, and it won’t have happened ever if the team wasn’t there.

Well, this activity helped us a lot identifying what we need to make good teams. Here’re the activity questionnaire and the answers, try the game in your organization, and find what you need more to build effective teams.