Team Brief Guidelines - Businessballs

TEAM BRIEF GUIDELINESTHE BENEFITS OF TEAM BRIEFING• Team briefing provides a channel for delivering clearmessages and encouraging open communication• Timely face-to-face communication prevents rumour andthe grapevine from gaining credibility• It’s a great form of two-way communication - it’s not justabout informing people, but listening and responding toquestions and concerns• It enables questions and suggestions to be fed back fromstaff to the top• It develops greater awareness and involvement at all levels• Briefing develops a shared sense of mission, vision,collective aims and reasons why we’re here• Successful team briefing ensures that there is lessmisunderstanding within your team and other parts of theUniversity• It ensures that staff are kept up to date on performance,results, progress and policy changesTEAM BRIEFING CALENDARTeam Briefing processinitiated:Monday 1 SeptemberMonday 6 OctoberMonday 3 NovemberMonday 1 DecemberMonday 2 FebruaryMonday 2 MarchMonday 6 AprilMonday 11 MayMonday 1 JuneMonday 6 JulyCascades/Team Briefingscompleted by:Friday 5 SeptemberFriday 10 OctoberFriday 7 NovemberFriday 5 DecemberFriday 6 FebruaryFriday 6 MarchFriday 10 AprilFriday 15 MayFriday 5 JuneFriday 10 JulyTHE TEAM BRIEFING PROCESSAs of March 2008, a new system of team briefing for allstaff within the University’s administration, is beingintroduced.The team briefing process will begin on the first Monday ofeach month (where Bank Holidays fall on a Monday thebriefing will take place on the next available working day).On these dates (outlined in the Team Briefing Calendar), theRegistrar will meet with his team of direct reports and give averbal Core Brief. Where it is felt necessary to support thiswith a written document, bullet points will be madeavailable.Each of the Registrar’s direct reports must nominate adeputy who can attend this verbal Core Brief session if theythemselves are unable to attend.Those managers who have received the Registrar’s verbalCore Brief should then be in a position to deliver their ownteam brief to their team of direct reports. This team briefingshould include the points from the Registrar’s Core Brief(around 30% of the content of the briefing), however themajority of the briefing should consist of local informationie: information relating to each specific function/area ofwork.These managers should then brief their own teams, againincluding the information from the Core Brief and the localbrief which they have received, and again adding anyfurther local information which they feel may be ofrelevance to their own individual team.The cascade of briefings should continue down all relevantlevels of management until all teams have received a faceto-faceteam briefing.In areas with large staff numbers it may be necessary formanagers to brief their deputies/supervisors within theseteams and ask them to continue the information cascade.In these cases deputies/supervisors should be given the teambrief produced by their manager ie: they will not be requiredto generate their own team brief.To ensure that all administrative staff receive the informationin a timely manner, all briefings should be delivered withinfive working days of the initiation of the cascade. See theTeam Briefing Calendar for further details.If you are a manager/supervisor and are unsure whether youhave a responsibility for delivering a team briefing, pleasediscuss this with your line manager. This will ensure that thecorrect cascade of information is established from theoutset.2