Collaborative Work Practice in Terms of Effective Communication - Research Paper Example

 Introduction This paper deals with a detail study on capable collaborative working. It consists of two important areas of social study which are collaborative work practice and service environment. Critical appraisal of collaborative work practice and critical evaluation of service environment are the two main objective of this study. The paper will focus on improvement of service environment through major development on collaborative working practice. Inter-professional capability framework will be used to develop collaborative work practice in service environment with a specific example of service work environment. Therefore, feasibility of improvement with facilitator needs to be checked. A collaborative work practice is a new and advanced way of work. Through collaborative practice critical conflicts and issues can be resolved in a mutually agreed and respectful process. Collaborative practice leads to solution of conflicts in an efficient way. It is better than transforming the decision making power over to third part advisors who have limited knowledge and involvement in the actual work (Rivas, 2010). Therefore, both service providers and the users of service need to have collaborative approach regarding any issues and conflicts in the service. Collaborative work practice is conducted through collaborative work practice and collaborative work environment. Collaborative work practice is advanced working systems followed by mainly service organizations to understand the requirements of services required by the customers and develop service design based on their requirements so that they get maximum output from service and enjoy higher level of satisfaction (CPCAL, 2012). Service environment refers to all natural or inducted external conditions where materiel items are subjected throughout their whole life cycle. The main objective of a service environment is to provide service in proposed time. Waiting time is one of the main perceptive parameter to evaluate efficiency of service environment. Therefore, improvement of facilitator is very important to avoid negative perception of the customers regarding service quality in terms of waiting time. Short waiting time is generally perceived by too long by the customers of service which lead overall downgrading the service quality. Therefore, service providers need o be capable enough to provide service in time through collaborative work practice with the customers (Baker & Cameron, 1996). Critical appraisal of your own and others' performance as a collaborative worker Collaborative practice is basically a work system in which some efforts are made to create proper strategies, structure and the policies. Collaborative work stands for a proper team work in the organizations. In order to increase the skills and knowledge about the job a proper evaluation is mandatory. It will help to increase the individual’s work performance. Basically working with team members always has an advantage. People in a team work always share their experience, skills and efforts to the team members. As a result this collaborative work increases the knowledge of every individual in a team. This collaborative work helps the people to concentrate on a specific task. As a result the specific job can be done by the very much self-directed way. A positive attitude can be framed by this teamwork. It increases the self confidence of people. The different ideas of different people actually can get the work done very easily. The collaborative work also leads to consume the effective time. By group work people can exclusively use time throughout the job. As a result the job can get done within the given deadline. The advantage of time management is the entire team does not have to compromise because of anyone’s procrastination. Another advantage of collaborative work is the work which is done by the team contains with a sear quality. This high quality job actually reflects in the output of any job. A good team work can make the individual a good leader. This leadership quality will help people to any critical job get done. By this team work problem solving ability increases too. As a result a high quality collaborative capacity will allow more accurate work. The strengths of collaborative work are good time management, focus on job, strong competency, increase in self confidence and positive attitude etc. in the other hand there are some limitations too. In every organization there is different rank of post. There is higher post as well as lower post. In many cases it is feasible that the lower rank people are more qualified than the superiors still that person is told how to do and what to do. Everybody can not be known to each other in an organization. So the people do not have that interest to share their views and knowledge with the strangers. These are the major advantages and limitations of the collaborative work. Critically reflect on your development as a capable inter-professional worker and apply principles of learner autonomy to your personal and professional development This collaborative work practice increases few core competencies in people such as self management, workload management, effective information handling and good inter-professional working. The inter-professionalism basically is a process by which an individual can develop the ways of practising and finally able to give a proper solution to its clients. It contains the continuous interaction and sharing of values and knowledge between the team members. Inter-professional work needs some unique characteristics like code of conduct, values and ways of working. The inter-professional working reveals the inter-professional discussion, team working and collaborative working. This will help to achieve the client’s incorporated care (AACOM, 2011). A capable inter-professional worker can actively work with the team members. This capability is a proper example of positive inter-professional team working. As in collaborative work an individual has to work inter-professionally in a team with the significant colleagues. This facilitate the self-sufficiency and moreover the empowerment of the individuals as well as the communities. Moreover in the inter-professional working every individual has to co-operate or consult with his or her inter-professional team member. This inter-professional working has some benefits. It helps to gather the proper information. It helps to find the opportunities in the particular workplace. The aptitude domains and exact competencies are being associated with them. A quality inter-professional practice has direct application for the health and education areas. This work concept determines that the service to the client will be more effective than the cumulative performance. The major findings of the inter-profession work are to confirm the feedback based on the knowledge findings, to elaborate the implementation of the specific knowledge and lastly to determine the synergies (Turloir & Stefansdottir, 2011). The learner autonomy helps to make a rapid discussion and sharing of views within a team. Moreover it allows the team members as well as the individuals to learn the co-operation strategy within the team. The learner autonomy helps in the participation of individual member of a specific group, because the threats within it are lesser. It is important for the new members because it increases the self confidence and positive attitude. It is also important for the experienced member because by sharing views and knowledge people can know about learners. Critically evaluate the service environment in terms of its potential to promote positive outcomes for all stakeholders through effective collaborative practice Collaborative service environment has better potential to provide service and customer satisfaction. By introducing a collaborative work practice, business creates such a scenario where the people are doing their assigned job and also they are being cross-trained. People are ready to exchange their skills. Interest to take part is an important factor of the collaborative work environment. A manager can promote this typical scenario by creating a need to share the extra percentage than what the people have assigned to do. It is a major part in a time when there are not so much resources. Understanding the involvement among the colleagues reflects the light on the characteristics of the team members. Within the collaborative services there are different types of interaction related with people and services. One is service to service interaction which indicates the interaction between the two services. Another interaction is service to human interaction which determines the interaction between a human being and a service. Moreover human to human interaction is also there. It determines the interaction between to human beings. For each specific interaction the interaction mining is formulated in various levels. In order to offer both metrics and interactions the collection of information of collaborative services is essential. The information which is provided by the interaction is gigantic. The information ranges from low level to high level and from high level to low level. In order to provide this information to service and context management the interaction mining serves the languages for the web access. When people work in a collaborative environment, during some period of time few team members will be under tremendous pressure. Justify approaches taken in enhancing service user and carer centred practice In global business environment, one dramatic development has changed the landscape of competitive global business environment. This is major development of emerging service sector which has changed because rethinking of marketing myopia i.e. businesses shifted from product oriented or product driven market to information based service market. There have been dramatic changes in the service environment worldwide in many areas of it. This industry has been developing every year by implementing newly invented advanced methods by the researchers. Many advanced approaches have been invented for efficient way to provide to service to customers in a competitive environment of service industry. Two most important areas of service businesses are new service development and enhancing existing service in many areas to ensure high quality service (WHO, 2010). The overall service industry has been growing due to major improvements in both of these areas. Therefore, businesses need to have proper understanding of actual service need of the target customers and they also need to find the gap between the existing services offered in the market and the actual demand of the users of existing services. The main objective is to enhance the service quality in both the ways i.e. developing new service or enhancing the exiting processes. But, it is more important to focus on the enhancing the existing service rather than developing new service every time conflicts found in an existing service (Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons, 1999). For this purpose, radical changes and modification in one important area of a service are needed for overall enhancement of service. This important area of a service is service delivery process which has highly impact of time management. Major changes in this area of service should lead to incremental improvement in the overall service packages offered to the customers and this change should meet the customers’ expectation from the service provider. Many conceptual theories and efficient models have been developed by the researchers and industry experts which can be implemented to identify the conflicts of an existing service package and modification required based on the present conflicts and issues in the service process. To identify approaches needed for enhancing service two areas related to service need to be discussed. One is service user involvement i.e. collaborative work practice through high extent of involvement of the users of service and second is improvement in service process. To enhance a specific service package, improvement required in three main areas of service in theoretical as well as practice. These are service innovation, service design and service development. These are very much interrelated to each other and improvement in each areas need to overall enhancement of the selected service package. It has been proven by the researches of the empirical researchers that improvement in service innovation lead to overall development and enhance in service process. But, academic literature in service innovation recommended that there need to be further improvement in service process development to generate better outcome from the service process and higher customers satisfaction. Ultimately, new generation of service processes need to be faster so that users do not need to wait for availing service (NHS, 2005). Therefore, effective time management is very much important in service development process. Service improvement is an ongoing endeavour of an existing or already launched service. The service provider needs to have continuous focus on the new trend of similar service in the market and also need to work collaboratively with the users. The ultimate objective of this strategy is to identify the changing trend of requirement of the users and their issues regarding the service in terms of efficiency of the service provider. One popular effective tool is used for service improvement. The name of this sustainability toolkit is PDSA tool. Figure 1: PDSA Cycle (Source: NHS) PDSA Cycle is an effective service improvement tool used in service organizations. It provides inter-professional capability framework for developing plan, implementing the plan, studying the result of implementation and lastly proceeding with the plan in case of improvement or change of plan in case no improvement. PDSA cycle is used in small scale to achieve to test effectiveness of a plan for implementing changes in a whole systems or departments or organizations. Service user involvement is another is another important way to enhance service in carer centred practice. In this type of service, service process need o be according to the customised need of the service users. Therefore, a collaborative work practice leads to fulfilment of interest of both the parties i.e. the service providers and the users. In case of products, the customers’ participation in production process and its delivery is very minimal whereas in case services, the users of a specific service like Play Bus Service, the users of this service participates in the service delivery systems (Truong, 2008). Therefore, the users are active part of the service process. For this reason, involvement of the users in development of the service they are using is very much necessary and the service provider need to consider the users recommendation or feedback at every steps of service development process. This lead to an advanced collaborative work practice which lead to better output from service and overall enhancement of the service package. Production service by the service provider and consumption of service occurs simultaneously and therefore, involvement of the service users is very much important in service development process. The presence of service users in the service delivery systems lead to source of variation from the established service standards. Simultaneous process of production and consumption of service needs more collaborative effort from the both the service provider and the service user. Therefore, MDT meeting or multidisciplinary team meeting between the service providers and the service users would be effective for better decision making regarding service development and finding required changes in the service design (SCIE, 2010). Multidisciplinary team meeting is highly practiced in healthcare organizations to provide tailored healthcare service through personal counselling with the patients. Collaborative work practice is also necessary in the systems as one employee might not identify the conflict in the service process. Therefore, effective training is necessary to the employees. Therefore, to conclude this view, it can be said that users involvement is necessary in service design but in minimised extent to standardised and faster service delivery. For example, passengers in flights are allowed to involve in choosing music and food by their won but their activities are standardised to enhance overall standard of the service. Time management is one of the most common issues in service like Play Bus Service. Play Bus Service provides sports session with community support team for teenagers. In this case, time management is the main conflicts in this service. The users of this service have high involvement in the service process and activity of one user has huge impact on the overall community tam. The main problem is communication among the community team member to attend play bus session. Therefore, effective communication among the team members need to be devolved with the help of advanced and highly used technology. The service improvement process needs to be established in this system and this can be done through implementing mobile text message service to all the team community members. The service provider team of Play Bus need to communicate with the all the members of community team through SMS before play bus session. The team members need to also inform to the pay bus team whether they are attending or not attending any particular session. Therefore, by implementing this, the play bus team will be confirmed about the number of attending users in a particular session and they need to wait for the rest who are not coming. Play Bus Service must need to determine business policies and core values. The user of this service is mainly the children who attend play bus sessions. Therefore, the Play Bus team needs to ensure safeguarding the children at their Play Bus sessions. Parents need to be ensured by the Play Bus team about efficiency in safeguarding the children. This can be done by showing inter-professional capability among the team members to the parents. The professionalism, collaborative work practice and confidence in providing quality service lead to overall improvement or enhancement of the service. Conclusion From the above timeline it can be seen that, by implementing collaborative work practice in terms of effective communication among the service users and the service provider, the overall output of the service can be changed and improved. Therefore, by this way, involvement of the users in service process lead to enhancement of service quality in terms faster service delivery in a standardised and systematic way. The paradigm of service process in service industry has been changing from the traditional conceptual service process of service transaction. From the overall study, it has been found that, collaborative work practice in service is highly important for enhancement of service quality and faster delivery of service. Therefore, service providers should be capable to develop collaborative service environment. References AACOM. (2011). Core Competencies for Inter-professional Collaborative Practice. [Pdf]. Available at: https://www.aamc.org/download/186750/data/core_competencies.pdf. [Accessed on 03 December, 2012]. Baker, J. & Cameron, M. (1996). The Effects of the Service Environment on Affect and Consumer Perception of Waiting Time: An Integrative Review and Research Propositions. [Pdf]. Available at: http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1177%2F0092070396244005. [Accessed on 03 December, 2012]. CPCAL. (2012). What is Collaborative Practice? [online]. 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Improvement leaders guide: improvement, knowledge and skills. Payne, M. (2000). Teamwork in multiprofessional care. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Peck, E. and Dickinson, H. (2008) Managing and leading in inter-agency settings. Bristol: Policy. Tourse, R. & Mooney, J. (1999). Collaborative practice: school and human service partnerships. Praeger. Appendix Process Map (PDSA cycle) Read More