Capsim Announces TeamMATE - The Ultimate Interactive Team Assessment Tool

Measuring the size of a team may be easy – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo suggests the ‘two pizza rule’, if you need more than two pizzas to feed it, the team is too big – but measuring the effectiveness of teamwork has been notoriously difficult, until now.

Chicago, Illinois – August 06, 2014

With TeamMATE® from Capsim Management Simulations, the effectiveness of any team, working on any project, can be monitored, assessed and improved while the team is in action.

“Most approaches to measuring teamwork have been unsystematic and highly variable,” according to Dr Erich Dierdorf, professor of Organizational Development from DePaul University in Chicago. “In the worst scenarios, teamwork skills are not assessed until the project is over, so people don’t get the critical feedback necessary to improve their teamwork competencies.”

TeamMATE is an online instrument, developed by Dr Dierdorf in conjunction with Capsim, that not only assesses individuals and teams on teamwork skills, but provides feedback so they can improve team functionality in real time.

According to Harvard Business School’s Amy C Edmonson, “more and more people in nearly every industry now work on teams that vary in duration and have constantly shifting membership.” In response to the trend, academic and training curricula now include interpersonal competencies, and in recruiting, teamwork skills are often as important as technical expertise.

“We have a strong focus on teamwork in the business world and in education,” Dr Dierdorff said, “plus we have more than three decades of research into what makes an effective team. Until now, however, we have not had a reliable instrument to measure and improve teamwork as it’s happening – TeamMATE is that missing piece of the puzzle. It provides specific and actionable information about the strengths and weaknesses of teamwork behaviors at the individual and team levels.”

TeamMATE captures all the essential components of effective teamwork as defined in the research and provides feedback reports for those supervising a team, for the team itself and for each individual.

With TeamMATE, even a team that disagrees about what toppings should go on the pizza, or which brand they should buy, has a tool to help them manage conflict, maintain focus on their goal and provide the data to show how well they did it.