What are good initial team-building exercises?

Getting to know one’s team is a critical phase in all group projects where students work together for an extended period of time. To ensure that the team can actually  

• Tiimiin tutustuminen kriittinen vaihe kaikissa yhtään laajemmissa ryhmäprojekteissa.  
• Tutustuminen käynnistää luottamuksen rakentamisen, joka on kriittistä  
• The selected exercises should encourage each individual to share their strengths, working styles, and expectations, while also highlighting the collective goals and values of the team.  
• In practice, team building exercises come in many forms, and can include anything from personal storytelling to problem-solving challenges or games, to just providing icebreaking discussion topics.  
• Regardless of the what the specific exercise is, it's important to ensure that these activities are inclusive, engaging, and relevant to the team's purpose, setting a positive and cooperative tone for the project ahead. 

This text is for test purposes.

Team agreement assignment 

Short description 

Team agreement is a document in which student teams defines their key working principles and practices. Team agreement is usually used as homework exercise, but can be adapted to teaching session, presuming there is enough time available.  Team agreement typically defines how the team aims to organize their work, communicate, do decisions, resolve conflicts as well as meeting schedules and other relevant practical matters. As a whole, it encourages the team to discuss and align on expectations, desires and practicalities related to collaboration during the project. While it does not by itself ensure great team dynamics, it does help teams to get started well. It can also provide a written benchmark against which team performance can be reflected at later stages of the course.  

How to motivate use of this method to students 

• In every team there are individuals with different working styles, schedules, needs, and desires. Discussing these in the beginning is crucial and team agreement can bring structure in this discussion.  
• Research has found that to foster good collaboration, teams should spend enough time to get to know each other and build trust in the beginning of the project, rather than jump straight into doing project related tasks. Team agreement is one way to help in this process.  

Potential challenges and how to avoid them: 

• If instructions for forming the team agreement are unclear, the whole exercise can feel very frustrating and focus of the discussion might veer into what the team agreement should contain, rather than actually talking about desired working principles. Because of this, it is recommended that teams are provided with a simple team agreement template, with guiding questions to facilitate the conversation.  
• For the team agreement to be actually useful, it is important that working principles outlined in the document are defined specifically enough. For example, if the team decides to assign somebody as a project manager or meeting secratery it would be a good idea to try to define what those roles actually include. Same applies to more abstract goals like ensuring that everybody is included in the decision making. It is important to encourage the teams to think about how such goals can achieved in practice and write that down.  

Suitable especially when: 

• The project spans several periods as in sustained teamwork and coordination outlining shared work practices is particularly important.   
• Project teams include students from several disciplines. In such cases there is higher likelihood for variety in preferred working and collaboration styles, and here team agreements can help in aligning diverse perspectives and methodologies.