Exercise - How fair is your team?

This exercise can be a self-reflection exercise by a team leader, or a team discussion.

As a team discuss (or as a team leader, reflect on) one of the following and then spend time working out how the situation could be improved:

• How would you recognise 'fairness' in any team? How well does your team actually match up to these criteria? Can you think of specific examples of unfairness, or actions that have improved the fairness in your team?
• Fairness at work is sometimes thought of as 'who gets asked to do what?'. Who has been allocated tasks recently - from interesting new projects to taking the notes at meetings. Is there an 'unfairness' in the way these are distributed (eg males get interesting new projects and females get asked to do the team's support tasks)?
• Who has access to the team leader's time (eg the old hands get access but the newbies don't)?

If the situation needs improving, what needs to be done? Agree actions and review in two months' time.