Take a minute: facilitating teamworking skills development

Why team working skills

According to the 2025 World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Survey, employers are placing growing importance on a broad range of skills such as resilience, flexibility, leadership and social influence - highlighting how much workplaces rely on people who can collaborate and adapt. To prepare students to be competitive and succeed in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world, we need to support them in building strong teamwork and people skills. In higher education, students often get a group task, and the group is assessed solely on the output – a presentation, report or similar. This approach tells us little about their teamworking skills and group dynamics. It neither supports the development of teamworking skills nor help students to overcome well-documented challenges such as free-riding, ineffective communication, low motivation, dominant group members, and lack of engagement (Davies, 2009; Popov et al., 2012; Watkins, 2004).

In this blog, we share our experience and results of a research project on groupwork in two courses on Corporate Finance (one undergraduate and one postgraduate) in the spring term of 2025 – focusing on the use of meeting minutes to support accountability, reduce free riding, and help students organise and track their work. Each group had to solve a data case of an investment decision over a three-week period and present their findings in a recorded video.

How did we introduce minute-keeping

To support the development of teamworking skills, we introduced keeping agendas and minutes of meetings as a key component of work organisation and assessment. Meeting minutes provide a concise record of important discussion points and help team-members remember agreed action points, track progress, and hold each other accountable.

Minutes were required to be submitted within one day via a provided MS Form template. Each record begins with the group number, date and time, meeting duration, and members present. The agenda section is structured to capture what was discussed and decided for each item, including any differing views, as well as individual contributions and progress updates from each team member. The template also required groups to specify tasks for each member before the next meeting, including clear action points, assigned names, deadlines, and required steps. Finally, a section for other observations and notes allows the group to document any additional issues, agreements, or the date of the next meeting, ensuring a complete and transparent record of each meeting.  Overall, the design aimed to enable effective teamwork and accountability.

How do students organise their meetings, take minutes, and what did we learn?

Students were randomly assigned to groups of four - mirroring real-life situations in which individuals rarely choose their teammates.   In total there were 20 groups in the undergraduate and 62 groups in the postgraduate course. Of these, 54 groups (11 undergraduate and 43 postgraduate groups) gave their explicit consent to participate in the research project. The assignment was similar in both courses.

Due to the strong incentive to follow good practices and work on a visible online platform, students actively engaged in the online chats, group meetings, and minute keeping.  They also completed a self-and-peer-evaluation form after submitting their assignment. Overall, 51 out of 54 groups (94.4%) filled out at least one minute template. Students reported that, on average, 97% of the group members were present at meetings. The average number of meetings per group was 3.8, ranging from 1 to 7 meetings over three weeks, with an average duration of 82 minutes. On average, students wrote 162 words in the open-end sections, namely on the agenda, tasks, and other observations. However, there was substantial variation:  the average word count per group ranged from 34 to 668 words across meetings (see Figure 1 for overview).

Figure 1: Overview of the project and findings

In the self-and-peer evaluation form, students were asked about the usefulness of minutes of meetings. Most students found keeping minutes of meeting useful for keeping track of distribution and progress of their work, time management, as well as keeping everyone accountable for their, tasks (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Benefits of the use of minutes of meeting (%) (multiple answers possible)

 In summary, for students, meeting minutes proved to be a valuable tool for structuring and scaffolding student work. They supported effective time management, progress tracking, reduced free-riding, and strengthened accountability. By clearly distributing tasks, minutes ensured that responsibilities were shared transparently. Students particularly benefited from the structured format of the minutes template.

For lecturers, minutes provide useful insights into group dynamics and allow observation of students’ development of key teamwork skills such as time management, collaboration, and equal contribution. Instructors can also use minutes to intervene if there is a lack of activity or problems in the interaction of students in a group, helping to prevent late or unfinished work, and to identify potential challenges or personal circumstances at an early stage. We therefore recommend incorporating meeting minutes as a standard tool for supporting effective group work and for assessing teamworking skills.

In a broader research project, we are currently studying how various aspects of groupwork are related to the group performance, measured by the assignment grade. In particular, concerning group meetings, we observe a modest positive correlation between the number of meetings and the final grade: a correlation coefficient of 0.24, significant at the 10 percent level, which becomes stronger if we look at the tails of the grade distribution. We plan to explore this further.

References

Davies, W. M. (2009). Groupwork as a form of assessment: Common problems and recommended solutions. Higher education, 58, 563-584.

Popov, V., Brinkman, D., Biemans, H. J., Mulder, M., Kuznetsov, A., & Noroozi, O. (2012). Multicultural student group work in higher education: An explorative case study on challenges as perceived by students. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 36(2), 302-317.

Watkins, R. (2004). Groupwork and assessment: The handbook for economics lecturers. Economics Network, Available at: http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/handbook/printable/groupwork.pdf.