Supporting a busy colleague can provide strong AO Working Together evidence when you show how you balanced their needs with your own responsibilities. The AA / AO Civil Service interview guide includes questions and sample answers that keep the focus on practical teamwork. Use it before your interview so the structure and evidence are ready when the panel begins probing.
Question
“Tell me about a time when you supported a colleague who was struggling with their workload.”
What Is Being Looked For
The panel wants to hear that you noticed a genuine need, communicated with the colleague and agreed useful support. At AO level, this can involve sharing tasks, explaining a process or helping the team meet a service target. Your answer should also show that you remained responsible for your own work.
Use B-STAR to explain why teamwork matters to you and give enough context for the pressure to make sense. The action section should describe how you found out what help was needed rather than making assumptions. Explain how you agreed priorities and kept the right person informed.
A strong answer avoids presenting the colleague as incapable. Focus on the temporary workload issue and the way you worked together. The panel should see respect, reliability and a shared commitment to the result.
Finish with the outcome for the team and the customer or service. Where your support helped the colleague learn a task, explain that briefly without taking credit for all of their work.
A useful preparation check is to separate support from rescue. Your answer should show that you helped the colleague and protected the team result while leaving ownership clear. This makes the teamwork sound respectful and sustainable.
Example Answer
I believe good teamwork means paying attention to the pressure on other people and offering support in a way that keeps responsibilities clear.
While working in an administration team, a colleague returned from leave to a large number of customer emails. Several had response deadlines that day. I had completed the urgent part of my own queue and could see that the team risked missing its service target.
I asked my colleague which messages needed immediate attention and whether there were any cases they needed to retain personally. We sorted the queue by deadline and complexity. I agreed to take the routine address-change requests while they handled the cases that required their earlier knowledge. I told the team supervisor what we had agreed and confirmed that my own priority work was complete.
I followed the standard checks for each request and recorded every update in the case system. When I found one message that appeared routine but included a complaint, I returned it to my colleague with a clear note rather than answering outside my authority. We checked progress halfway through the afternoon and moved one further simple case to my queue.
Every urgent email received a response within the service target. My own work remained up to date, and my colleague was able to focus on the complex cases without rushing them. We later used the same approach during another period of high demand.
Use a real example where support was agreed and the shared result is clear. The AA / AO Civil Service interview guide contains further Working Together questions and sample answers before you finalise your preparation.
