Question

1. Did you experience shirking in a team at school or at work?

2. Describe the situation. How did the situation resolve?

3. In your opinion, what measures may help reduce or prevent shirking in the first place?

Answer 1

1.

I had the experience of shirking in the team at work. It happened when a person from another function joined my team, but he was unwilling to do his part of work or responsibilities. It showed that he was shirking at work.

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2.

It happened when there was a need of a person belonging to marketing function to become the part of the team so that project work could get his inputs to complete it as per the expectations of the client. Accordingly, he was also assigned some task to be done and report his work to me. Besides, he had to liaison also as and when required according to the project requirements. But, he unwillingly did his task, but could not report, nor turned up for group meeting. It happened doe few time and it was a clear indication that shirking was taking place at his end.

This situation got resolved by doing one to one counseling of the person, understanding his own issues related to communication and lack of internation with the other team members. Afterwards, there was few informal get together so that everyone including that person knew each other and communication barrier got removed. Afterwards, it showed improvements in his approach and he also shoed willingness to contribute more. It helped us complete the project with higher efficiency meeting all the demands of the client.

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3.

The first measure is the effective communication that should take place to prevent any ambiguity, and doubt towards the role and responsibility for each member of the team. The second measure is to develop a culture where each person knows others and vice versa. It makes people help each other when a problem arises. It reduces the scope of shirking in first place and attitude of helping each other, prevents shirking. The third measure is to set individual rewards along with the collective rewards so that it becomes motivation to everyone to complete their work in beat ways to earn the individual rewards. It will make people avoid shirking and focus upon their roles.

So, above are some of the measures to prevent shirking.