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There are clear links between diversity in teams and creativity/innovation, according to this business research.

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Rocío Lorenzo: How diversity makes teams more innovative

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Are diverse companies really more innovative? Rocío Lorenzo and her team surveyed 171 companies to find out -- and the answer was a clear yes. In a talk that will help you build a better, more robust company, Lorenzo dives into the data and explains how your company can start producing fresher, more creative ideas by treating diversity as a competitive advantage.

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This talk looks at temporary teams and how the members can work together effectively in engineering, in healthcare and in animation.

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How to turn a group of strangers into a team

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Business school professor Amy Edmondson studies “teaming,” where people come together quickly (and often temporarily) to solve new, urgent or unusual problems. Recalling stories of teamwork on the fly, such as the incredible rescue of 33 miners trapped half a mile underground in Chile in 2010, Edmondson shares the elements needed to turn a group of strangers into a quick-thinking team that can nimbly respond to challenges.

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All about support for careers and employability at DMU

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Speak to DMU's Careers Team for advice and guidance on employability skills, working whilst at uni, graduate careers and more.

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Listen to a recap of the main points we covered

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You can download or print them to help with note taking

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TO SHARE Working Effectively in Groups Asynchronous 2324

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Good for organising project & research notes and links. You can share a notebook with your group.

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Gather your thoughts, then make them even better

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Microsoft OneNote Digital Note Taking App | Microsoft 365

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Microsoft OneNote has your digital notebook needs covered. With OneNote 2016 we've made our notebook organizer tools even stronger and collaboration easier.

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Great for finding mutually convenient meeting times

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We're bringing Doodle's scheduling power to Microsoft Teams conferencing

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Now add MS teams conferencing links to your invite Doodle Featured in the News Why busy people love Doodle Ready to get started? Start your Doodle - and watch the appointments roll in Start scheduling the smart way Work within your existing tools

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You can meet remotely and work on documents together

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​Want to be the hero on your next call? 🦸

Did you know Skype Bing mashup happened? Here are the results - a unique high-quality background images in your Skype calls! And that's not all, you can now kill time by searching up the image and exploring more about the beautiful scenery and places you see on your background!

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Skype | Stay connected with free video calls worldwide

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Keep in touch with free video chat, messaging & affordable international calls. Create instant online video calls with one click, no download required.

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Great for group messaging

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WhatsApp | Secure and Reliable Free Private Messaging and Calling

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Use WhatsApp Messenger to stay in touch with friends and family. WhatsApp is free and offers simple, secure, reliable messaging and calling, available on phones all over the world.

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You can share task lists and progress on your project between team members

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Keep everything in the same place-even if your team isn't.

Trello 101

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Simple, flexible, and powerful. All it takes are boards, lists, and cards to get a clear view of who's doing what and what needs to get done. Learn more in our guide for getting started.

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Cards

Cards represent tasks and ideas and hold all the information to get the job done. As you make progress, move cards across lists to show their status.

Boards

Trello boards keep tasks organized and work moving forward. In a glance, see everything from "things to do" to "aww yeah, we did it!"

Lists

The different stages of a task. Start as simple as To Do, Doing or Done-or build a workflow custom fit to your team's needs. There's no wrong way to Trello.

Cards

Cards represent tasks and ideas and hold all the information to get the job done. As you make progress, move cards across lists to show their status.

Trello in action

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Join over 2,000,000 teams worldwide that are using Trello to get more done.

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Manage Your Team's Projects From Anywhere | Trello

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Make the impossible, possible with Trello. The ultimate teamwork project management tool. Start up a board in seconds, automate tedious tasks, and collaborate anywhere, even on mobile.

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Great for file sharing

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Free Cloud Storage - Share Files Online | Microsoft OneDrive

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Get Microsoft OneDrive. Sign in for free cloud storage, store photos online and share files across devices with OneDrive personal cloud storage.

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For file sharing

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Store, sync, and share files securely with Dropbox Business, a cloud storage solution loved by employees and trusted by IT teams.

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Interesting article on the value of group work

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Interesting article on the value of group work

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The Guardian

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If you're at university, you'll almost certainly be made to work with your fellow students to complete a group assignment at some point during your course.

Some people get really enthusiastic about group assignments, while others view them with suspicion and dread. Usually what they fear most is the prospect of working with someone who's hugely enthusiastic about group assignments.

But does collaboration benefit our learning? Or is a camel just a horse designed by committee? In other words, is group work actually less efficient and productive than an individual performing a task alone?

As is almost always the case when humans are involved, the truth varies. Assuming there are no particularly irksome or troublemaking individuals upsetting the group harmony, there are some ways working in groups can be helpful when it comes to learning, and other ways in which it may be more of an obstacle. So, here are the pros and cons of teamwork.

Motivation

Humans are, by nature, incredibly social creatures. At a neurological level, we see ourselves as part of a group and worry about the judgment of others. The underlying drive to be part of a group, to be recognised and appreciated by its members, and to achieve high status among them can be a serious motivator when it comes to completing a task.

Performance

Some studies suggest that group assignments do indeed directly improve an individual's ability to learn and perform. "Socially shared cognition" and "transactive memory" are some of the loftier terms used to describe groups working together on an intellectual task. It makes sense that information discussed and delivered by friends and colleagues will be more salient than the same information delivered in a dull lecture while you're struggling to stay awake.

Individual performance can improve if each person is allowed to focus on what they're good at

Division of labour

The idea may be fashionable, particularly in higher education, but there is no decent evidence to support the existence of "learning styles". However, people do excel at different things, whether due to affinity, aptitude, motivation or some other reason.

In group tasks, individual performance can improve if each person is allowed to focus on what they're good at (such as presentation, analysis, research, and so on). Interacting with others who know a specific area better than you can enhance your own grasp of it, if only because they can articulate it in a way that hadn't occurred to you before.

New friends

When supervisors assign group tasks, they usually allocate the groups themselves, rather than leave this up to the students. This means you meet and work with new people in group assignments. For both introverts and extroverts, this can be a plus. Extroverts are likely to enjoy this anyway, while otherwise-reluctant introverts may benefit from this obligation to interact.

As well as learning new skills and knowledge, group assignments could help you make new friends. This is a pleasant experience, and basic associative learning means we are better able to learn things that are paired with a pleasant experiences. On a more complex, "human" level, things we're emotionally engaged with tend to be more stimulating and thus easier to learn and recall.

Group polarisation

There are some very clear drawbacks to group learning, however. And one of them is that the conclusions arrived at by groups can be a lot less cautious than those reached by people working alone.

If you don't feel your contribution is noticed, why bother putting in the effort?

Countless studies have shown the effect of group polarisation, where group decisions tend to be more extreme than individual ones. The subconscious desire for group harmony, together with one-upmanship, can lead to more out-there conclusions than each person would agree to alone.

In group assignments, this can lead to wrong conclusions, which means everyone's marks suffer.

Social loafing

Even if you think you're a conscientious, hardworking type, you may still be prone to social loafing, the tendency for people to put in less effort when working on a task with a group than they would do if alone.

If you don't feel your contribution is noticed, why bother putting in the effort? The feeling that others will pick up the slack can limit your own performance.

Informational influence

While working in groups may improve your understanding and knowledge, there's no guarantee that this knowledge will be correct. Informational social influence is where the groups we're part of impact on what we know - but this could easily be wrong.

If everyone tells you peanuts are nuts and not legumes, you're going to start questioning your own knowledge. If enough people in a group assignment arrive at a wrong conclusion, it could overwhelm your own correct one, which wouldn't happen in an individual assignment.

The trivial matters

Have you ever been in a group where a ridiculous amount of time is spent on minor matters? Whose turn it is to supply the biscuits, what colour the background of the slides should be, and so on? This has been labelled Parkinson's law of triviality, where groups spend far more time on easy-but-unimportant tasks than they do on important-but-complex ones.

The latter are challenging and daunting, and it's harder to show authority or expertise (or even form an opinion) when discussing them. Hence it's annoyingly common to spend hours debating something inconsequential, while the point of the assignment isn't dealt with.

These are just some of the ways in which group assignments can impact on how we learn things, for better or worse. Obviously, it varies tremendously within different contexts, while modern developments, particularly technological ones, are changing things - hopefully for the better. (For example, social loafing is much harder to do in assignments based in online documents, where everyone's individual contribution is tracked and monitored).

So, while it's hard to say with certainty whether a specific group assignment will improve or hinder your learning, they probably are still worth doing. It's rare to encounter an employer or institute that doesn't emphasise "teamwork skills" these days, and in our increasingly interconnected society, learning how to be part of a group is something worth working on, regardless of the task itself.
Dean Burnett discusses how groups affect our thinking and more, in his book The Idiot Brain (Guardian Faber, £12.99). To order a copy for £7.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99. Get involved with the Use your head series by joining the discussion on #useyourhead or pitching your ideas to natalie.gil.casual@theguardian.com

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Does working as a group actually help us learn?

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If you're at university, you'll almost certainly be made to work with your fellow students to complete a group assignment at some point during your course. Some people get really enthusiastic about group assignments, while others view them with suspicion and dread.