My article in the online portal of Thrive : https://thriveglobal.in/stories/seven-team-building-exercises-to-try-out-as-you-work-from-home/
Seven Team Building Exercises to Try Out as You Work from Home: Unusual situations call for unusual strategies, here are some suggestions to beat the lockdown blues and ace wfh challenges.
With almost the entire workforce into the Work from Home Mode, it has given us the opportunity to look at new ways of effective work patterns. This has also necessitated the Human Resource team to look at Training and Developmental activities from a different perspective. Apart from functional training it is equally important to keep employees motivated, focussed and working in an integrated way. The below listed team building activities can be practise for this lock-in period. Each of these activities have an impact on the collective consciousness, keeping the professional, physical and emotional wellbeing and development of our employees.
1. Online webinars, where the training sessions are focused on self-development topics. This helps the employees to deliberate on functional and self-developmental topics keeping them oriented and absorbed. Joint sessions on self-development topics is an important stimulant to culture farming, embedding shared values and behavior patterns.
2. Case study discussion: Online case studies discussions help finetune skill sets and at the same time open up different joint perspectives to common issues impacting business strategy. Case studies can be for specific groups based on the business function and processes. This helps a lot in arriving at a joint strategy and approach going forward
3. Fitness challenges: Work from home totally disrupts the daily routine that has been followed for years. There is a paradigm shift in the physical routine bringing about reduced mobility. Physical fitness being a precursor to emotional and professional agility is an important aspect that can get ignored. WhatsApp groups of fitness enthusiasts wherein staff put in workout-from-home fitness videos. Encourage your team to use Fitness Apps and conduct fitness challenges where all staff members can put up targets and share the results. A sense of healthy competition is a good motivation factor resulting in a fit organisation.
4. Online snap polls and surveys: Snap polls and surveys on strategy, policies, customers. and more, help staff synergy towards shared vision and common organisational goals. The results are shared transparently and best suggestions, appreciated and acknowledged in the group. When these suggestions get implemented on the ground there is a sense of common shared accomplishment.
5. Book clubs and debates: E-discussions and debates on specific topics which are industry related, social, philosophical, spiritual encourage exchange of diverse views and flow of thoughts. Book club is a group of reading enthusiasts who discuss and deliberate on books read by them. They also give inputs for the digital library for posting interesting videos and books.
6. Cook-offs: Work from Home has brought out the unknown skills of people. There is plenty of time and room for carrying out cooking and culinary experiments. Exchanging notes/ photos on dishes prepared brings in common non-work specific grounds and breaking barriers among team members.
7. Music clubs: Exchange music notes, e-Antakshari… passions and art forms bring out the inner core of people. Music clubs where people e-post their own songs or some good numbers on WhatsApp groups or having e-sessions of music enthusiasts helps collective re-energising and de-stressing. Common hobbies and passions bring in a special bonding amongst people.