Corporate Events And Group Work: Key Skills And Recommendations

Brief description of the different types of corporate events and how organisations can use these events to enhance their business profile.
Identification of key personal skills that were demonstrated/developed whilst working as a group. The examples could include time management, organization, communication etc.
Identification of personal role within group and interaction within a team, effective communication or communication issues within the group, approach to the resolution of problems.
Reflect on ethical issues that may have arisen during the planning of your corporate event.
Reflect on the outcome/success of the group work. 
Provide suggestions/recommendations for future events.

Communication Skills

Employees as well as students in the present world of globalization, are required to work in groups collaboratively in order to cope up with the problem of present work culture as well as the dynamic environment associated with it (Galegher, Kraut and Egido 2014).The process, requires a certain level of tolerance as well as coordination that leads to an increase in experience.

The key skills, that were built during the presentation at GSM are as follows-

• The presentation generated a range of various perspectives as well as solutions of the problems.
• The experience provided a chance to work in a complex and large project rather than just working individually (Hertz-Lazarowitz et al. 2013).
• The presentation enabled us to incorporate different points of views as the group consisted of members belonging to diverse backgrounds. Their opinions, as a matter of fact enriched the presentation.
• The experience, enabled us to work in a structured manner which will help us in our future work.

The presentation was beneficial for the students as well. It is often seen in a classroom that some students are unable to express their opinions. Here, during the course of the presentation, they were provided a chance to express their personal opinion about the matter and at the same time they were encouraged to ask questions and listen attentively. Many of them were encouraged to overcome their inhibitions and start conversations in a group.

The adequate skills for the management of healthy climate was imparted to all the individuals (Cheng et al. 2014). Each of them was required to inculcate in themselves feelings like trust, respect, support, knowledge of responsibilities, openness and others for the better performance of the group.

The assignment that our group completed was on merged school business. The main purpose of this assignment was to analyze the case study as well as finding out the complexities of the merger. Some recommendations on the strategies and the practices were also made to the management.

Communication is an important part of any process, be it a business or our social life. The preparation of our presentation also required us to communicate in an effective manner so that all the instructions, goals, objectives as well as the requirements of the presentation be made clear to all the participating members(Newsome, Waldo and Gruszka 2012). There were some members in the group who were very dominant as well as extrovert at the same time there were also members who were very soft-spoken as well as introvert. Balancing the communication between these two varied groups of people was really a challenge, but we effectively overcame it during the course of our working together and it would also be fair to say that by the end an effective communication was established among the members of the group.

In this presentation, I was one of the group members and at the same time, I was assigned the responsibility of leading the group. The initial stage was the formation of the group. Initially the members were selected and tacks of the was decided (Cohen and Lotan 2014).Although most of us knew each other, we still had a ritual ceremony where we were required to introduce ourselves and our qualifications as well as the things that we are good at doing. The group members were selected on the basis of the qualities of the individuals and I was assigned the leadership of my group. Each group, was then assigned their individual tasks. I, being the leader of the group was assigned the responsibility of making the process of communication easier and smoother (Dobao 2012).

Group Formation

The effective performance of a team requires the leader to understand the team as well as the goals that the team needs to achieve properly. There were many ideas that I wanted to implement for the better performance of my team. Personally, I am of the opinion that a team works best if every member of the team contributes to the group task. The expectations that I had from the team as well as the goals that the group needed to achieve was made clear to every member of the team. Each member of the team was assigned tasks as per the capabilities of the person and also opinions were taken from the entire team as to the ways through which the presentation could be made more better (Shernoff et al. 2014).

Through the presentation, we learnt and took part in collaborative work. Each member of the team showed equal commitment and even during the process of task allocation, the team members proactively took the onus on themselves and divided the tasks among themselves based on their capabilities. During the course of the presentation, there were some misunderstandings, but the team dealt with those in proper and matured manner. The team members were ready to help the other members with their tasks and they even felt comfortable working with one another. The process of regular and effective communication also helped in the achievement of the desired results.

There were some problems that I faced during the presentation. The major problem was the fact that the students were from different backgrounds and as a result they had different opinions on different matters (Harrison and Rouse 2014). The result was that it was taking a longer time for us to reach at any particular decisions as different people had different opinions. It was also noticed that some of the members of the group were very dominant and as a result the members of the group who were soft spoken or introvert were not getting the chance to voice their opinions (Remesal and Colomina 2013). Lastly, it was also seen that most of the members of the team wanted to do some easy and less time consuming tasks and thus some problems were faced by me during the process of task allocation(Cruickshank,  Chen and Warren 2012).

I tried to discuss these problems in an open way. The members of the group must understand that the institution has arranged such tasks for increasing the collaborating mentality among the students so that they do not face problems in future (Tsay and Brady 2012).The required key skills, to be built through this task included listening properly to others, allowing others to speak, waiting for our turn to speak as well as tolerance.

Understanding and Managing Groups

We even came up with some recommendation to improve our performance in the future. Firstly, in order to avoid delays we must follow the structure or the framework provided strictly. Secondly, the team members must find a way to move along together. This could be done by the use of various resources and means at our disposal(Grau and Whitebread 2012). Thirdly, the process of spending a few moments on the diverse opinions put forward, is also effective and dominant people can be discouraged by the effective use of humour. The introvert people can be encouraged to participate through the use of non-verbal means. The ethical issues, must also be carefully taken into consideration.

The different corporate events that the companies or the organisations arrange to enhance their business profile as well as their brand image are seminars and conferences, trade shows, appreciation events, incentive programs, executive retreats, company or organisation milestones, team building events and others.

Conclusion

Therefore, it becomes apparent from the above discussion that each member of the group learnt a lot from the presentation. During the time of working together, there were various situations, which tested our decision-making procedure. However, we were successful in handling all the pressure situations as well as the expectations.

References

Cheng, X., Li, Y., Sun, J. and Zhu, X., 2014, January. Easy collaboration process support system design for student collaborative group work: a case study. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 453-462). IEEE.

Cohen, E.G. and Lotan, R.A., 2014. Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom Third Edition. Teachers College Press.

Cruickshank, K., Chen, H. and Warren, S., 2012. Increasing international and domestic student interaction through group work: A case study from the humanities. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(6), pp.797-810.

Dobao, A.F., 2012. Collaborative writing tasks in the L2 classroom: Comparing group, pair, and individual work. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21(1), pp.40-58.

Galegher, J., Kraut, R.E. and Egido, C., 2014. Intellectual teamwork: Social and technological foundations of cooperative work. Psychology Press.

Grau, V. and Whitebread, D., 2012. Self and social regulation of learning during collaborative activities in the classroom: The interplay of individual and group cognition. Learning and Instruction, 22(6), pp.401-412.

Harrison, S.H. and Rouse, E.D., 2014. Let's dance! Elastic coordination in creative group work: A qualitative study of modern dancers. Academy of Management Journal, 57(5), pp.1256-1283.

Hertz-Lazarowitz, R., Kagan, S., Sharan, S., Slavin, R. and Webb, C. eds., 2013. Learning to cooperate, cooperating to learn. Springer Science & Business Media.

Newsome, S., Waldo, M. and Gruszka, C., 2012. Mindfulness group work: Preventing stress and increasing self-compassion among helping professionals in training. The Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 37(4), pp.297-311.

Remesal, A. and Colomina, R., 2013. Social presence and online collaborative small group work: A socioconstructivist account. Computers & Education, 60(1), pp.357-367.

Shernoff, D.J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Schneider, B. and Shernoff, E.S., 2014. Student engagement in high school classrooms from the perspective of flow theory. In Applications of Flow in Human Development and Education (pp. 475-494). Springer Netherlands.

Tsay, M. and Brady, M., 2012. A case study of cooperative learning and communication pedagogy: Does working in teams make a difference?. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(2), pp.78-89.