ENGLISH TEAMWORK:

The cereal killers + the French Froggies and the

German potato present:

OUR SURVEY RESULTS

The teammembers:

(Maximilien de Waubert, Louis Belpaire, Marine Stiev, Romain Gallice, Guillaume Lunel, Sarah Bettan, Alexandre Perrin and Jessica Garbers)

Objectives

ESCE is a school that I personally chose for the promise I was made to leave 5 times in five years.

This is an international business school, and we have the chance to work with international students coming from all over the world almost all our student life. Most of us who haven’t already experienced the life abroad will soon during the Erasmus program. In this globalizing world, being flexible and international is one of the most important commercial advantages. Adapt to other cultures, learn different ways of thinking, manage different points of view of all over the planet seem to be part one of the major lessons this school wants to teach us.

What you wanted to find and why :

How do different cultures affect teamwork?

This question seems important to us because this year we have a direct relation with Erasmus students more than ever (especially German ones, like in our team). Students from ESCE have a lot of teamwork to do in different subjects and we wanted to find out

how they live/feel the multicultural teamwork.

Furthermore, we are very likely going to work abroad so we will soon be asked to work with

different nationalities again. We wanted to list what were for students the main advantages to

work with foreign students and what were the consequences on the work and efficiency.

Moreover we wanted to collect information on how students feel about working with foreign students psychologically (do they have prejudices ? are they enthusiast ?)

Methodology

For our survey I used a new tool which is provided by Google Docs. I then created a special website for the survey.

It was temporary and 50 people answered to the survey in only 3 days.
The strategy was simple; as we wanted to target students I used a very efficient power of diffusion of social networks.
The only problem was that google gives a very complicated URL linked to the survey. It would have been very complicated to post it on facebook because it was very long and would not have been user friendly.
So I turned the complicated URL into a simple one, using a URL shortener (bit.ly) so that people could send the link to their friends easily.

Before

After

In average, the people who were surveyed were about 22 years old.
55% of them were males and 45% were females.

Report your findings

Description of the findings

To begin with, it is important to mention that our team will only describe and present 10 questions and the results. However, these questions will represent the most important findings and are sometimes surprisingly explicit.

Even though we knew that our survey was exclusively completed by ESCE students (age between 18-25) we also needed to consider the fact that the questions concerned different nationalities. As a consequence we wanted to discover the different cultural backgrounds of the responding students. The first bar chart shows that 56% of the respondents are French and 36% are German. Participants from other nationalities were not really numerous.

Gazing the second graph, a pie chart, it becomes clear that the majority of the students, which have already worked in multicultural teams, were rather satisfied with the result. Only 12% of the participants didn’t seem to enjoy working in international teams.

Next, we thought it would be interesting to find out the main raisons for the success of multicultural teamwork and of course the raisons for its failure.

Satisfied teamworkers replied that more creativity (61%), other ideas (61%) and a good organisation (41%) predominantly contributed to the group’s achievements.

On the other hand, the failure of international teams is blamed on a lack of organisation (58%), different expectations towards the result (42%) and a lack of communication (32%). People may select more than one checkbox so the percentages may add up to more than 100%.

The following questions and answers confirm the findings above. The bar chart indicates that culture and language (36%) and creative ideas (38%) represent the most affective contributions of foreign teammembers.

Observing the subsequently pie chart, we can determine that difficult communication within internationally composed teams influenced their work sometimes (64%). Nevertheless, even 32% of the respondents feel that communication didn’t slow their work down at all.

Besides, our team was curious to discover how the respondents perceive the working zeal of other nationalities. The bar charts show a surprisingly explicit trend on the questions whether students from a certain country are rather fastidious or not. As we can see, German students (46%) seem to be more demanding than others. But also Chinese students (21%) appear to be rather diligent. The other way around, the majority of the respondents believe that French (41%) and Spanish (39%) students are particularly “lazy”.

Taking a look at the following pie chart, we can examine the necessity for teammembers to adapt to other habits. After all, 33% of the participants answered that they had to adapt consequently to cultures. In spite of this, even 60% of the students are of the opinion that they are used to work with foreign students and are therefore very flexible and don’t mind making compromises such as adapting to other habits.

In the end, our team needed to come across if teamwork with international teammembers was to a certain extent perceived in a positive or negative way.

Regarding the results of last two pie charts, a clear positive trend is evident.

69% of our respondents assume that they learned a lot from international teamwork for future projects. As a consequence, even 72% of all participants prefer working in multicultural groups.

Did the respondents’ answers correspond to our expectations?

Many answers corresponded to our expectations.

First, the majority of our target group likes working in multicultural teams which seems to be normal as they are in an international business school. They are more aware to other cultures.

Then, this kind of teamwork brings creativity because we use different ways to understand and to see a topic so that students deal differently with the topic, using their own culture to build and answer (to) the subject. Sometimes, working with students from other parts of the world helps them to organize the work. For example, according to our survey, German people are very well organised so that it is easier to work with them than to work with students coming from the south of Europe. So, we can clearly see that our survey confirmed many prejudices what was quite expected. For instance, according to students from the ESCE, German people are efficient while French and Spanish students are lazy and disorganised. We cannot say that all those prejudices are true. Yet, students think that some of myths from other nations are.

Nevertheless, some answers did not correspond to our expectations.

First, our target group told us trough the survey that they did not have to change their habits to be integrated in a multicultural team. So, we can deduce that students are very flexible. Even if they see that the organisation in international teams works differently, participants don’t need to make too many efforts to adapt themselves to other people.

We previously said that, most of the time, students like working in multicultural teams.  However, a significant part of them would rather prefer working in homogenous groups (20%). As we are in an international business school and all of us are likely to work in an international department in the future, this is not something we expected. The fact that many of our respondents are in second year and don’t clearly see their career goals for the moment might be an explanation for this trend.

Conclusions we can draw from our findings.

First of all, students like working in multicultural teams depending on the nationality of the team members. For instance, studious ones like working with Germans as they are very well organised and when everyone respects the rules, the work is going to be fine and will bring a good mark. Lazy students do not really appreciate working with them because they set deadlines that everybody has to respect.

Generally speaking, it should help every team to try to see a topic from different points of view. As a result, multicultural teamwork brings creativity, efficiency, cultural wealth and organization. In the end, our target is very flexible, as they did not have to change their habits a lot to work efficiently in multicultural teams.

Conclusions about our teamwork

ANALYSIS OF THE TEAM DYNAMICS THAT TOOK PLACE

Teamwork is a never-ending lesson : after working on a 4 people team, we had to learn how to manage a group of 8.

Team Dynamics are the unseen forces that operate in a team and can strongly influence the team and its work.

In our group, we identified for example : team roles, tools and technology, methodologies and personality styles

To manage our team dynamics, it was very important to look for the “natural forces” at play and then, to determine whether they were acting for good or ill. We finally make interventions and create an adapted organization to make their effects more positive.

For example, the impact of a friendship : the friends communicate a lot together… to cause the other four people to feel excluded. We reorganized the groups and give to each one an appropriate role to launch a new dynamics.

GOALS OF OUR NEW TEAM

The goals become the foundation of the team’s vision, motivate and provide the team with direction.

We were all conscious that our main goal was to realize the best survey and presentation as possible, to obtain the best mark.

As described earlier, we reorganized both teams in a single entity to engender a new group spirit. We redefined the roles, the methodology and we set up a constant communication.

The team is relaxed with a sense of purpose, and everyone has access to the same information, we  make conscientious decisions.  We know what is expected and become more proficient thus increasing satisfaction and level of trust : when one succeeds, the entire team succeeds.

Who did what and why?

Basically we worked as a team. We all decided what was our common goal and what should the survey be about. Each of us wrote different questions. As a team we also carried out the survey (we sent the survey to the people we knew or to other students from ESCE or elsewhere…). Individually, Louis posted the survey on the Internet (because of he’s I.T. skills), Jessica and Alexandre selected the questions that would be asked and also checked grammar and spelling…

Was the survey successful or not?

Yes: we had enough answers to determine different trends. We also had different points of view from different nationalities.

No: we didn’t have enough answers from other nationalities than French and German.

Was teamwork essential for the success of the survey?

Teamwork helped a lot because each member had different skills and ideas. As a team it was easier to realise this task then as an individual. Moreover, we had more ideas of possible questions for the survey. Our cultural differences helped for the success of the survey (especially for this subject: teamwork efficiency in multicultural teams).

However, we had a few problems. First of all, we had to work in a bigger team than usual. Therefore, we had communication problems. In each of the two groups, we had to adapt our way of working because we where not used to work with the other one.

Conclusion of the presentation

We would like to conclude by emphasizing again that it’s possible to say that different cultures in teams seem to contribute a lot to team’s efficiency through different ideas and habits. It also means for every member to adapt to other habits and working methods and especially to overcome problems such as communication. As for our team, communication and organization were the main problems, which let suffer the quality of our result. But in the end, everybody was satisfied.

The cereal killers is the first group we interwied and seems to be a very strong one. No problems to meet them after the class. They all answered to our questions with enthusiasm.

They met twice to do their presentation, and when we heard them, the meetings seem very cool, friendly and with a lot of work to (like we could see). They met around spaghetti and wine but could also do a very interesting job. That is maybe their strong point: knowing when they can have fun but knowing too when it’s time to work! When we asked them if there is a good atmosphere in team, they answered “there is not better”.

What make them strong too, is that they complete each other. Louis is concerned as the best in I.T work, Alexandre and Guillaume are better in languages, and Marine is here to manage them.

Although they made a very good presentation, they had some issues with the work. The week the team had to present, they had a lot of work to do, particularly for Louis who takes care of the blog too. Moreover, their presentation has been reported twice, so they had to rehearse their presentation and take care of next one with the survey. That’s why they were overcharged for a while.

But finally, though it was reported twice, their presentation was very interesting and well structured.

The team’s name   “strong heart” was hard to find. At the beginning of the group we were very enthousiastic to do the fundraiser. That’s why we wanted to call the group “Coeur rouge” in reference to “la Croix rouge”. But we needed an English name so we took as a base “heart” to find a group name really strong, which encourage people to hope. Our name is now “strong heart”. As our team name we want our group to be strong, and we are full of hope.

Our team:

BAGHLANI Elias

ENGINTALAY Axel

MACHERAS Joséphine

THOMAS Morgane

Calendar

Meet the parents

As their predecessors (TFFATGP) for this role play task, the Strong Heart team had the greatest difficulties to find a play, especially with four characters. They first thought at Friends but it was too common and the other team had already done How I met Your Mother. That’s why they finally managed to find a movie corresponding to their needs: Meet the parents.

This comedy, originally with Ben Stiller, relates in a funny way the difficult relations than can exist with family-in-law. Gaylord “Greg” Focker (a.k.a. Axel E.), a nurse, is in couple with Pam Byrnes (Morgane T.), a schoolteacher. The main character plans to propose his girlfriend but decides first to meet his love’s parents, Jack (Elias B.) and Dina Byrnes (Josephine M.), to ask for their approval, following the example of Pam’s sister case. Gaylord wants to make everything perfect, but this is without knowing the strange personalities of his future parents-in-law, in particular Jack’s, an ex-CIA agent.

To be able to present us their work, the members of the team gathered on lunchtime, as they have no common free moment on their timetable, and so they could rehearse five times this way, after learning their texts. The good atmosphere in the group, as well as the absence of “bad pressure”, permits them to be very efficient when they see each other.

As TFFATGP did a great job, “we were afraid to play after them, they put the bar very high” but they were happy about what they did afterwards. Elias, who admires and identifies himself to Robert De Niro (Jack), was particularly glad and proud of themselves!

It is true the task was difficult after the presentation of the TFFATGP team, even more with regard to the difficulty of the exercise, but Strong Heart succeeded in filling their objective by giving the best of themselves, perfectly knowing the script, choosing good and funny scenes, and interpreting their characters very well.

Video coming soon

Interviewed by the big fish team

How I met your mother

“Haaaave you met Ted?”

For this task the TFFATGP Team decided to play an extract from How I Met Your Mother, the TV show created by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays. This serie relies on a kind of Friends-thing. Ted Mosby (a.k.a. Romain G.) tells his children about how he met their mother. And so in each episode we learn a part of this story, through Ted’s past life with his friends: Marshall (Maximilien de W. de G.), one of his best buddies, Lily (Jessica G.), this one’s wife, Robin (Sahra B.) and Barney (Romain G.), Ted’s second best friend.

In this episode, the main character is in love with a girl named Victoria (Sahra B.).

For this presentation, the Team played almost the whole episode, and every one could judge of the amazing work they had done to prepare this. All the students could appreciate the quality of the show, the humor (even without knowing the serie) and over all the involvement of the members of the group.

To reach this result, they prepared at lunch time, during the week-end and some evenings, which represents around 5 hours of work and rehearsal of the play. The main difficulty they met was to found the good play. They looked at all TV shows they knew, to find one with 4 characters, in the same place; and then to find what was the funniest episode.

“We were much more comfortable knowing that we play very funny characters with laughing easily. At the beginning we were afraid to play, but it allows us to feel more confident in an oral presentation. Indeed, we were less stressed than at our 1rt presentation Creating Teams.”

And it’s true. What we saw was impressive and really funny. They were concentrated, knowing their texts very well. I think we can speak in the name of all the Glorious Bastards: Congratulations, good job TFFATGP!

Our opinion on our Marketing Campaign presentation:
by We R the World team

Interview by the french froggies and the german potato :

Marketing Campaign – We are the World

The « We are the World » describe themselves as a working group, trying to have good results, to increase their experience and performance despite all their different skills and personalities. Thinking that “The Belbin Personality Test” corresponds obviously to everybody’s role, they always try to manage and organize the different ways of thinking and working.

Indeed, they really believe in teamwork to share ideas or opinions, work efficiently and compare their activities with real experience in companies: increasing their capabilities to adapt with others and communicate.

About their oral, “We are the World” choose a meeting presentation to show their creativity and attract student’s attention.

Marketing campaign contains different parts which have been distributed between all the members: their work was “pretty well organized despite a lack of activity and detail about the marketing study”. They realized that, each day, they learned how to manage their different points of view, to respect others choices and be patient.

To conclude, the team “We are the World” really enjoys the experience and is proud of the cohesion which was installed in the group. Maybe not the best product presentation, but a great state of mind.

Everybody could see the very strong group spirit of this team during their presentation. Without any surprise, they told us that they were happy about the group atmosphere. They even get along too much together as it was sometimes hard to realize effective (too much chatting). This may be the main problem they had to face and leaded to a lack of group concentration. There was also a little problem of mailing.
The multicultural aspect of their group was definitely not a problem during their talks and works.
To realize their team working, they met each week at Tuesday lunch, during one hour and a half, which was enough for them. They had good times, and when the discussion was turning into chatting, a member always knew how to bring it back to the main points.
Finally, they are happy of their performance and they were pleased to have good feedbacks from the other students and from the teacher.

Interviewed by the french froggies and the german potato

Team: Cereal Killers

We have met the Cereal Killers and asked them a few question…

Did the results of the „Belbin Personality Test“ really correspond to everybody’s role in the team later on?

Most of them did. The main problem was that 3 members out of 4 were creative (there were to many creative’s in the class) so there was no real leader. Sometimes we were speaking at the same time.

Are you satisfied with your work?

Yes we are. We think that we succeeded in making an efficient ad about a simple product We were told by a few students that Cerebrum was not really a new idea in the energy drink market.

In your eyes, was the other team better than yours? What could you have done better?

The other team chose to organize their marketing campaign through a meeting between different members of a company. We think that it was a good idea. However for us, our ad was more efficient (shorter, non aggressive muskies) and technically not comparable. We could have introduced our product better by training more: some members of the group forgot a few elements during the presentation.

What did you learn from this work?

First, we learnt how to work together, because we didn’t know each other before or badly. Secondly, we learnt how to invent a marketing strategy, starting from scratch in English.

Do you think that working in a team really increased your efficiency or was it rather a restrain?

We really think that working in a team really increased our efficiency because every members of the team ad several skills useful for the marketing campaign. Furthermore, being a group helped us to have a lot more ideas than when we are alone, which is essential for a creative project like this one.

Last question (and please be honest): would you describe your team as a “working group”, “pseudo-team”, “potential team”, “real team”, or a “high-performance team”. Why?

We would describe our team as a “real team” because being tighter allowed us to make much better than each of us individually however there was a lack of leading in this team that’s why we are not (yet) a “high performance team”.

All in all, we though that the two marketing campaigns where both very impressive. Although the Cereal Killer team made the difference with an amazing video for their campaign ad !