Human Practices

Communication: How to make or break a team

Since several members of our team are volunteers with experience in planning events and organizing people, we knew from the start that communication and the work environment would either make or break our team and, therefore, the success of this project. Our student leader, Beyza, did an amazing job managing different tasks, keeping track of important dates, and providing an overall view of our timeline and progress.

Our small eight-person team decided early on that we wanted to have clear communication and an efficient way to share all our results and documents. To achieve this, we utilized our university resources to create a network with various levels for sharing timelines, important dates, and documents. We also held weekly meetings during which we discussed important issues and the week's agenda, including meetings and collaborations with other teams. Accessibility was particularly crucial for these meetings. Since Laura, the manager of our social media accounts, was not available in person for several months, we opted for efficient online meetings.

The planning of wet lab experiments and the execution of these experiments soon became the focus of our meetings. Since we are a small eight-person team, nearly everyone acquired the necessary safety training to work on our project and familiarize themselves with the lab spaces we were provided. Detailed safety standards that we maintained can be found in our safety documentation.

In the end we created a realxed and productive enviorment were all of us were able to contribute to the project.