There is no doubt that collaborative working provides countless benefits to a company. From avoiding personal friction between co-workers to achieving goals by combining the strengths of different people, it is an approach that every corporation should consider. However, it is not enough to implement it, it must also be measured. This is where the evaluation dynamics.
The evaluation dynamics are a series of processes that, through a series of indicators, The main two aspects that can be measured are:
- How well or how badly something is being implemented. In this case, they are concerned with the correspondence between what is planned and what is implemented.
- How effective they are being. In this case, they are concerned with whether they are contributing to achieving the objectives expected of them.
As mentioned above, collaborative work is one of the areas in which evaluation dynamics can be used. Below we will see examples of some of them.
Dynamics of evaluation of collaborative work: examples
Before going any further, it is worth remembering that the purpose of collaborative work evaluation exercises is not to promote collaborative work in the company. Their purpose is different: to evaluate and measure the effectiveness of other dynamics that have been created to promote it.
With this in mind, we can highlight the following:
- Surveys. This is one of the dynamics of quantitative evaluation, i.e. the information provided is objective and not subject to individual interpretation by the interviewer and the analyser. An example of this can be found in questions that ask the respondent to rate from 1 to 4 their level of agreement with certain information, with 1 being «strongly disagree» and 4 being «strongly agree». In our case, this information should, of course, refer to collaborative work in the company. In order to ensure that the answers are not conditioned, the surveys should be carried out individually with each employee, without the employee knowing what his or her colleagues are answering. It is possible to make the surveys anonymous in order to avoid conditioned responses, although the company may be interested in knowing the opinion of each individual employee.
- Personal interviews. They are qualitative evaluation dynamics, which means that the information provided by the interviewee, being more open than with surveys, may be subject to subjective interpretations by the interviewer and the analyser. As with surveys, face-to-face interviews should be conducted in such a way that no worker knows the answers of his or her colleagues, in order to avoid conditioning. On the other hand, an important difference between surveys and personal interviews is that the latter can never be anonymous, as the interviewer will always know who gives each answer. If we want to maintain anonymity to avoid conditioning, we can always make it clear to the interviewee that only the interviewer will know that it was the interviewee who gave the answers, as the analyser will be provided with the information without the name of the person.
- Testing. A third possibility is to create a collaborative work environment with the sole purpose of evaluation. For example, you can design cooperative games such as an Escape Room or a gymkhana that deals with one's own work environment to observe how the work group responds to it: whether they collaborate with each other, who leads and who doesn't, how they counterbalance the weaknesses of one person with the strengths of another, etc.
In short, there are different evaluation dynamics that help us to measure how collaborative work is being implemented and developed in the company and, depending on the information provided, to maintain or modify its guidelines.
