#5: Three practices for team building

Sometimes you work together with your teammates for months or even years and you might not know much about them. What are they passionate about or are they a cat or a dog person? Your colleagues are actually the folks with whom you sometimes spend more time during the week than with your family or friends. So, why should you not care? Why is it helpful to take the time getting to know each other?

15% of employees worldwide and 35% in the US are engaged, thus they feel enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace. So, if we do the math, 85% of today’s worldwide workforce are not engaged. We can start with one of the drivers regarding employee engagement: Relationships. Especially the relationship you have with your manager who should act as a coach than a boss. One of the 12 elements of Gallup’s employee engagement survey is on having a best friend at work. Managers cannot directly influence this but they are able to create an environment where colleagues are able to get to know each other. Furthermore, a global study shows, when employees feel like they are part of at least one team (or ideally more than one team), they are twice as likely to feel more engaged at work. And you guessed it, the list of the benefits of engaged employees is long, from higher productivity to fewer turnover rates. So, let’s get started with some practices for (remote) team building, the following three are the ones which I heavily use in workshops to create an atmosphere of safety and trust.

Stinky Fish: The stinky fish is a fantastic tool to create openness and to talk about anxieties and fears. The stinky fish is a metaphor for your anxieties and fears which will get worse if you are not dealing with them. Draw a fish on a piece of paper or virtual whiteboard and write down your stinky fish individually. Then share your stinky fish with the group. Examples could be “My stinky fish is that I am not sure anymore what the purpose of this team is” or “We are having too many meetings and I feel like I am loosing focus.” Here’s a great Miro version if you are looking for a stinky fish template.

Team Agreements: This was (and still is) a tool which I especially used in the past months of 2020 since our ways of working often times drastically changed. Team agreements help to write down how you would like to work together as a team, it’s a set of activities but also rules the team wants to agree to. As a first step, write down your thoughts on one of the questions, then share them back to the rest of the team. Discuss. Afterwards, vote on the commitments you would like to implement as a team together. Repeat this for every question. Examples for questions could be:

  1. What are the values we would like to live up to in this team?

  2. What are we doing / What are we not doing as a team?

  3. What is our meeting cadence?

  4. What are the communication channels we use?

Emoji Check-in: This practice was especially designed for remote teams. When checking-in or when doing a retro session, use a shared document and simply ask the question “Which emojis represent the last quarter for you?” Then insert your emojis. This question can be used for reflecting on the last quarter but also on the last project, week or actual state of mind. It gives teams a visual representation how everyone is feeling. In the past months this emoji check-in was often quite a rollercoaster ride, representing various emotions, which then enables teams to start an open discussion.

Let’s use the average 90,000 hours of our lives which we spend at work wisely, with people we’re getting to know better and better every day. What are your favorite team building practices? Let me know and contact me on LinkedIn.

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#6: Six types of (virtual) team meetings

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#4: Three facilitation tools for your next virtual meeting