Team Building: Create Engaging Events for Hybrid Teams

1. Introduction: I think it's really important to think about the whole team when we're trying to build high-performing teams and get to that peak performance level. We need to make sure that every single individual is on track, on the same page, working together effectively. Team dynamics is really important and team-building is a really, really good way to figure out what are those team dynamics, what's going to work well in the real world, and what do we need to focus on maybe a little bit more. That's why I'm really passionate about team-building being something that leads to peak performance. I'm Abigail Ireland and I'm a peak performance strategist. I run a leadership and training consultancy called Understanding Performance and we focus on optimizing team and executive performance looking at, essentially, the mind, human performance, and business productivity. Today's session is all about building effective team-building practices or activities in a hybrid world, in particular, in 2022, and we're going to be covering a framework, so a set of tools that you can take away and a checklist to help you to build activities that have maximum impact. I'm hoping that when you leave this class, you feel a lot more confident about spending your time and resources and energy effectively building a team-building activity that's going to have impact, that's going to go far beyond just the day that you run the activity. It's going to have an impact on how the team operates on a longer-term basis. Really, basically, it's about that confidence in knowing that you've done everything you can to make it as effective as possible. Thank you for tuning into this Skillshare for Teams session recorded with participation from the Skillshare Community. Something to know, this session was recorded live and I got to interact with the audience as I was working. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: For those of you who don't know me, I'm Ellen McKay Lorenzo, and I lead our sales business development and customer success team here at Skillshare. We sometimes refer to ourselves as Skillshare for Teams or Enterprise, and we're super glad you're able to be here today. Today's webinar will focus on building effective activities for hybrid teams, which is very timely topic, and we'll be working with Abby Ireland on this. She's one of our amazing Skillshare teachers, and we're so so happy to have her with us. Abby, a little bit about her, she's the founder of Understanding Performance, a leadership and training consultancy, perfect for this topic. She specializes in peak performance for executives and teams using a methodology that combines mindset, human performance, business methodology. Abby has worked with major organizations and trained thousands and thousands of folks all over the world, so we're really honored to have Abby with us today. Well, thank you, Ellen. I'm really excited to be here today. I can see people coming in from the US and Canada and the UK as well. Some of them are in the UK, which is exciting. What I do is, as you said, I focus on peak performance, so that's my specialty. Everything is around mindset, starting with the mind and then human performance, the physiology aspects, so nutrition, fitness, exercise, sleep, all those things that impact human performance. Then finally, how do we do business effectively, so how do we create high-performing teams of high performing individuals. Combining that altogether and training, coaching, workshops, all sorts of things that I do with companies all over the world. It's really great to be here today with you. What are we doing today? Can you walk us through a little bit about what we're going to be experiencing in the next hour? Yeah, sure. I would love it, as you said, for it to be interactive because otherwise it's just me talking to my webcam and going through the exercises. We will be going through an activity, so we'll be demoing one team-building activity that you can do yourselves, but I'll be sharing with you a framework that you can use so that you really create team-building activities that have impact in the future. Because a lot of the time, we're quite reactive with it, so I think it's really important, especially this year, to get on the front foot a little bit more. You answered this already, but just to double-click, how does doing an exercise like this help all of us? Yeah, I guess I did. In terms of the last couple of years, it's been a difficult time, and we've been very reactive in terms of how we've been setting up our teams, working remotely, and then we have people in the office, people who were working from home, and we're in this hybrid transition phase now, so this exercise is going to be really helpful for you to really proactively think about what's going to be important, what's going to be a useful use of people's time. We're spending a lot of time in computers already. We want to make sure that everyone's getting the most out of that, so really, having an impact in those interactions with our teams. What materials do you think we'll need to be able to participate? Probably, we will be sharing a worksheet with everyone, so it's editable, so that will be useful if you want to use that as we go through the session, and pen and paper, probably. If people want to make notes as they go along, that's always useful or an iPad, whatever you use to do your note-taking, but that's all you need and yourselves. 3. Why Team Building: Everyone, just to make you aware, as Alan said, we are talking about team-building best practices. That means figuring out what is it that's going to be useful for you to make sure that you get the most out of those team-building activities. I'm going to be taking you through a few different things over the next 30 minutes or so. The first thing we're going to do is looking at building. Why is it important, why bother doing it. Is there a reason why we need to even make the effort to spend time planning a team-building activity? As I said, a lot of the time, we just go into doing trivia or some quick win. But we don't really put a lot of thought into exactly what activity do we want to do and why. I'm going to give you some reasons why it's important. We're then going to look at what I call the Teams Formula, which is a formula for success to ensure that you get the best experience possible for your teams, you plan this team-building activity as well as possible, and you consider all the criteria that you need. You'll have a checklist in your handout as well that you'll be able to refer back to in the future. Then we're going to go into actually putting it into practice. I'll do a little demo and show you an example. But please do think about any other activity that you want to go through yourselves. You don't have to use the example we're sharing, is just to give you an idea of how you can bring the formula to life. Team-building, why do we need to bother with it? What are the reasons why it's useful? There are obviously emotional reasons. Reasons for our mental health, reasons for our teams to obviously getting together more. But also there is a great business case for team-building. I'll talk about that in a minute as well. But you can see on screen there are a few different elements of why team building is important. First one, obviously it strengthens relationships. You all want to get closer to your team members. Hopefully you want to get to know each other a little bit better. That's not always easy when we've been in the situation we've been in in the last couple of years. If we do a really great activity, it's going to help to strengthen those relationships. As a result of strengthening relationships, that also can tend to lead to trust developing even more. Study upon study shows that when teams have that trust as a foundation, it means that they tend to become high-performing as well. Because they know that they can rely on each other, they share experiences. If there were any challenges, they're happy to put their hand up and speak up about those challenges. Question each other, know they can count on each other. Building trust is going to be one element that comes out of a team-building activity that works because we get to understand each other a little bit more. Nurturing team dynamics. One of the things that I always look at is how are people working together, how does that manifest in a fun activity such as team building, but also how is this going to manifest in the way that we work together when we're working on projects, and initiatives, and all those things that we do in the workplace on a day-to-day basis. A team-building activity is a really nice, safe space for you to understand and assess your team members, and think about what are the strengths, what are the things that people do well, what are the pain points that people have, the things that maybe people struggle with, what do we need to maybe focus on a little bit more with individuals. It's a really good activity, a safe environment to determine those things and bring them into the workplace. As we go through these everyone, please do feel free to share in the chatbox. I would love it to be interactive as much as possible. But please do share in the chatbox if any one of these 10 elements on screen you feel "Yeah, you know what, that would be great. Well I need more of that in my team." Whether you are part of a team or whether you're leading a team, are there any elements that you think you maybe would like to see more of in your teams over the course of 2022? The fourth one, promoting creativity and innovation. Again, if we have trust, if we have people who are open to collaborating, they get along with each other. Essentially we can challenge each other more effectively, and that means that we're able to come up with better ideas, because we challenge each other. Because we feel happy having healthy conflict. All of that leads to better innovation over time. Then we've got collaboration. That's again that no-brainer. Claudia, thank you for sharing yours there about injecting fun into work. Jumping to number 8, as Claudia mentions. It's really important to be able to have fun. A lot of the time over the last couple of years we've been so busy, we blur those boundaries between work and non-work, our personal lives. It's really hard to remember to have a little bit of fun. Setting up regular team-building activities as well means that people have something to look forward to. Whether it's virtual, whether it's in the office if you ever go back [LAUGHTER] at some point where everyone's together, or in a hybrid way. It's also about boosting engagement, morale, motivation. It's about everyone feeling excited, being part of a team and having that team spirit. Inclusivity, really important one. I talk a lot about the challenges that can come up with hybrid working, or some people working remotely, some people working in the office. We can always end up with new cliques that form. We have the cliques of people who were in the office. Then you've got the people who were in silos working remotely, they don't know what's going on in the office. Having regular team-building activities obviously means that we make sure that everyone has an ability to come together, hear from each other, level playing field, and that proximity bias that comes up from people being insight in mind in the office, versus those who were out of sight, maybe dissipates. We want to encourage inclusivity as much as possible. Louisa, thank you for sharing your point as well in the chat about boosting engagement, and morale, and motivation. Again, love that everyone is focused on this, because if we don't have happy humans, we don't have high performance. Going to that point about there being a business case around this. It really is about raising productivity and amplifying performance at the end of the day. Studies have shown, and one study in particular was done in association. It was a collaboration between Oxford University and BT, British Telecom, for those of you who don't know. Some of you in the UK would have heard of British Telecom. Most of you I would assume. But there was a collaboration that was done between British Telecom and Oxford University looking at call center stuff. What they found, every day they had to go in, or during the course of this study, they had to go in and click once a week on a emoji panel showing smiley face, or a sad face, or a indifferent face. There were five different emojis and they had to select which one related to their mood every single week. What they found was that the happiest individuals were also the most productive. When people were happy, they were 13 percent more productive as a result. Now there could be some two-way thing going on. If you're protected, you're feeling satisfied, you're therefore happy. But equally, if you're happy you're more likely to be able to focus, have energy, and get things done. Injecting fun into work, making people feel good, boosting that morale means that we're going to get morale to people as well in a very positive way. There are all the reasons. There will be more. If you can think of any more reasons why team-building has been useful for you, for your team, again, please do share into the chatbox. Dylan has just shared as well the link to the study, which is brilliant. Thank you, Dylan. 4. The Teams Formula: We're going to go through the Teams Formula. Now this is the formula that I pulled together to make us aware of what we need to consider when we are going through a team-building exercise. As I said, most of the time we just go out, let's do trivia night, let's do quiz nights, let's just do another coffee catch-up, let's do painting offense if it's in the real world. But do we consider the criteria that's important to us? The team's formula is, together, energizing, accountability, meaningful, and safe. They are the five elements that fall into this formula. Now, the first piece together seems obvious, but we need each other to succeed, that is the key point here. When we're talking about creating a really effective team-building exercise or activity, it's got to be something that every single person has to play a part of or it won't work. If you think about a football team or a soccer team or any sports team, every single person plays a role, and this ties into accountability as well. But every single person plays a role so that the whole game gels together, it's not that we're all doing a separate task, and it's ring-fence from everyone else, every single row blends into each other's roles, so in order to succeed with the activity, we all need each other. Working in silos a lot of the time this happens, for example, in the real world if you were going to do a voluntary activity where you were refurbishing a garden or a house or something like that to support a charity or something else, fantastic, and it's very rewarding because you're all doing something where it contributes towards the look of the garden at the end or the look of the house. But if you've had an activity where one of you is in a bathroom, one of you is doing something else, on your own, someone else was doing something else, which was not actually connected to the other person very mutually exclusive, it can feel like even though we're doing something together, we're not really together, I don't feel like I'm working with you on this. That sense of togetherness is the number one piece that we need to keep in mind. Second piece goes back to that point on happy teams and energy. Thinking about doing an activity that makes people feel excited, motivated so much so that they wanted to come back and do it again. They can't wait for the next team-building activity. They're thinking, when is it going to happen? Let's do this more often, loved it, and you want to think how do you want people to go away after the activity? Do you want them to be smiling? Do you want them to be really uplifted, inspired, energized for the next day? What is it that you want people to feel? In fact everyone, this is something else that you can think about and put into the chat. Think about what you want people to feel at the end of that activity, so whatever you have in mind as we go through this whole exercise today, either think about a team-building activity that you have in mind, does it tick all these boxes? Or think about an activity you've done in the past and think, is anything missing there that you could consider in the future? Thinking about energizing, what do you want people to feel? Have a little think, and share in the chat. Maybe one word for an emotion that you want your team to feel after that activity. I'm going to go on to accountability. Now as we mentioned, you have the handout, the worksheet for today's session, all of this is in there, so it's just adding a little bit more information for you now so that you can take some notes and get a bit more contexts. But accountability, one of the key elements of high-performing teams, people recognizing that they all play a role. Again, going back to the sports team, if one person is missing, one person may be given a red card and they go off the pitch, it means that the team maybe can't work as well, maybe we lose the game because that one person who is a critical player is no longer there. We tend to see especially in the virtual world, people will go off-camera, they're not really there, they're multitasking, doing something else, we want a team-building activity where everyone shows up, and if someone's missing we notice it. We want a team-building activity where people know that they have a role to play, and they take it whilst we're having fun, they take it seriously. Accountability is critical to have a really successful activity that has impact. Because we don't just want an activity that we do it today and that's it, we want an activity that has long, far-reaching impact over the course of the year. Then meaningful, some of you may be thinking, why does it have to be meaningful? We just want to have fun. Now, meaningful it could mean this activity the reason I'm doing it is because I want my team to have a bit of fun, because we've gone through a difficult period, or maybe it's meaningful because you're bringing people together for a reason, because they haven't met face to face before, and so you're thinking about why you would bring people on board for this activity, it's going to be because of things like that. Meaningful can also be connecting it to the team strategy, the company strategy, to the values, and we're going to talk about that later on. But think about what the impact is of the activity that you're doing and how you can make that come to life in the activity. Think about the positive impact that it's going to have on your work, the team dynamics, everything else over the course of 2022. Then finally, we have this piece here which is all about safety. Safety can be physical safety, as I mentioned earlier psychological safety. Psychological safety, that first piece is everyone feeling comfortable doing the activity, getting involved, it's not going to be awkward or feel embarrassing for anyone, everyone's excited about the activity. Now, you may have to ask people for ideas, what do they want to do? Do a bit of a poll, having some brainstorming so that people can actually vote on activity perhaps. But the most important thing here is that, people don't feel that they're going to be humiliated or something else as a result of that team-building activity. In terms of physical safety as well, some of you may have done things outdoors and bungee jumping, I don't know all things that could be crazy team activities, but you also got to recognize, what is going to be comfortable for people from that perspective? Is everyone going to feel that they want to do the activity or are people going to come up with excuses to opt out? Things like karaoke you could do virtually, you could do some quiz or something. Some things people will feel embarrassed about it, I don't really want to do this, it's not my scene. Find out what works for people, and what's going to make everyone feel as safe as possible. 5. Building Your Team Checklist: Some of you will be probably experts at thinking about all of this stuff already. This is really a refresh, but if you don't think about this stuff, please do have a consideration about what would be useful. At the top there first thing, time zones, does anyone here have teams that are spread over time zones by any chance? If you do just put a yes into the chat box. Just curious to know. Thank you, Claudia. If we have teams that are spread over time zones, sometimes we put something in, and it's great for us, but it might not be great for someone else. It might not work so well with someone else's schedule. We might need to do one team-building activity. Maybe we need to do a couple of activities, spread over different days so that it's fair for everyone, perhaps depending on what time zone they're in. Typically, what I see happening is a lot of things are driven by head office time zones. Sometimes people who work in subsidiaries, who were in teams, are missing out on team-building, on collaboration, on getting to know people in other parts of the business, and we really want to be conscious of this, and making sure that we're not making people feel excluded. Other thing in terms of time of day, obviously is about, is it morning, is it going to be in the afternoon? If anyone has any thoughts on best time of day for team-building, please do share that in the chats as well. But some of us may be thinking of which breakfast team-building activity, maybe a lunchtime team-building activity. Maybe it's late afternoon when everyone's in that zone off, not really being fully focused on work, at 3:00 PM time. We're thinking about it being after work, perhaps. Will that accommodate everyone if people have maybe kids, elderly parents, is it inclusive for all? Second piece, think about the duration. What kind of team-building activity do you want to actually present to your team? Is it going to be an immersive experience like a whole day or two days? Again, remembering if this is remote, people are going to be on the computer. Do people want to be on a computer for a very long period of time? I've done team-building activities virtually before, where it's been maybe two days of virtual, which is great because of the circumstances we're in. But it is a long time for people to be on the computer nonstop, pretty much. I've also done team-building activities that are literally 30 minutes. The one we're going to go through today is going to be quite a nice short, snappy one. But you can also expand the duration. Think about this. What is the experience? What is going to be useful based on how busy people are at work? Think about all that stuff as well. In terms of the date, and the day of the week, do you consider that? Do you do it on a Friday, but maybe there were some people who don't work Fridays. Do you need to do a vote to determine what day of the week everyone is going to be in? Is it going to be the day of week that's more suitable for you, or is it the day of the week that's most suitable for the majority of your team? Think about how you can also circulate this throughout the year to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to get involved at different points. Then we have the participants. I know this sounds obvious when we think about who are we going to be inviting to the team-building activities, obviously it's going to be our team. But I just want you to remember there are sometimes people who you might want to invite who are outside of your direct team. It could be business partners, maybe the finance business partner, the HR business partner. It could be someone who works very closely with your team but isn't a direct part of your team, and it's a really nice way to show that you appreciate that person as well, and you value them in the work that they do, because you want them to be part of that activity. It's always nice to extend the invitation if you can. Location. Clearly remotely, virtual is going to work best. But there may be opportunities for in-person or maybe you might try a hybrid model. I have not successfully seen or done a hybrid model of team-building because you got people again altogether in person. They're going to be side conversations happening, and then you've got people who are just on a computer, so I think it's quite difficult. I almost feel it could be all or nothing. But if you have ever experienced a great hybrid team-building, please do share. But otherwise, remote environment, yeah, we're going to be on a platform such as Zoom or Teams or Google or whatever you use. Then we've got accessibility. This goes down to the practicalities as well. I'm talking about the ability for every person to be able to contribute. Obviously there are things like, does everyone have access to a computer, the internet? I'm hoping they do if they work in your team. But also things like, if people have maybe certain disabilities, or hearing impairments, or visual impairments, is the activity going to be something that everyone can contribute to in some way? Have we considered all of the different nuances, situations, that we need to keep in mind? A simple one that I've seen more of in the last few months is neurodiversity. People finding it difficult when there's so much information on screen that it's quite overwhelming. Thinking about that, how can you make sure that your activity considers every person, if people are opting out, perhaps find out more, is it genuinely because they can't make the event, or is it because they actually are making excuses because they don't feel comfortable in some way? Simple things you can do, put on closed captions, the transcripts so that people can see the words at the bottom, the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Even more useful for people who maybe speak English as a second language, or aren't as fluent in whatever language that you are doing the activity. Think about all of those things too. Then the final thing we've already covered it is the teams formula, because this is just a checklist. You can very easily go through each of these points and check that you are doing all of these things. But the last thing is, have you considered each element of the teams formula? We covered that so I'm not going to go through that again. But you can always go back and revisit the recording later to just look at that. 6. Practicing a Team Activity: But what we're going to do now, everyone, is we're going to practice. We're going to practice what I've very creatively not called the vital values challenge. You all have a worksheet which has been dropped to you in the chat box earlier on. It is editable, but I believe you need to save it down before you can actually edit it. You might want to open it up, save it down somewhere on your desktop or in a file and then you can always open it up. If you haven't got the worksheet in front of you, you can always just use pen and paper as that makes it easier for you, but you can use the worksheet later on to go through a team-building activity yourselves in more depth. We're going to get started on the vital values challenge. This one I have integrated Skillshare's values into because that's what it was going to be quite useful to see how we could do this in practice. Now this is just a quick team-building activity. As I said, you don't need to do this exact one yourself. I just wanted to give you an idea of something that you could do. I'm just going to flick over. The first step is that you need to bring your team together. This aligns with the first T of the teams formula, together. You clearly need to have your team together in order to do this activity. What you would do is bring a team together on zoom or whatever platform you use and you don't have your own scorecard ready. Over the next 10, 15 minutes or so, we'll be showing you the scorecard as well as I work through it so you can work along with me. If you don't want to do this particular activity, think about a different activity where you can apply the teams formula and the checklist. But if you do want to do this activity with me, it's a good test of your knowledge of your own company and what you remember about your own values. Bring your team together, get your scorecard ready. I'm hoping you will have it ready so you can let me know in the chat by putting a yes in there but otherwise, I'm just going to assume that you already. This is what the scorecard looks like. You've got five columns. I've identified columns that I think are the most important. You might add more to this. Maybe not, but these are the ones that I think are going to be the most useful for this particular activity. We've got the five elements. The second step is we're going to write down our company or team values. Now, as I said, I've used Skillshare for this. Hopefully you will remember your team's values, but if you don't remember them, it's a good time to recognize that because the whole point of this activity is that it's going to be meaningful so it aligns with the M in the teams formula. We want to make sure that the activity has some alignment to what we do at work. What better way than to make sure that we align with our values. I'm going to talk and write at the same time and I can't do that. Transparency. Transparency, my first value on there, then I have impact. As I'm doing this, everyone, please do write down yours. Write down your values. You can share your values in the chat if you want to as well. Whatever works for you. But these are Skillshare's values. We've got transparency, impact, community and curiosity. All of your team would come together. They might have the values written down already. If you want, you can have more rows here, so you don't need to just be restricted to four column, four rows or five rows. You can have more depending on how many times these values are going to have manifested. What I would suggest as well is get everyone to put their cameras on during this activity. Reason being, I know that we have Zoom fatigue and people get tired having cameras on too often but we want to make sure that everyone's here, everyone's accountable, everyone recognizes that they are part of the activity. If people put the cameras off, they could be multitasking, doing other things. They're not really going to be as engaged. You want to get everyone to put the cameras on, make them aware in advance so they know that they've had to brush their hair and do their makeup or to get out of their pajamas, whatever it is. Basically you want everyone to be present fully and committed to the activity. The next thing we want to do is think about over the last, it could be the last two weeks, it could be the last month. You could do this activity every single month. Brainstorm how you put your values to life. So every single person will have this sheet and leaving the cameras on, everyone can have 10 minutes or 15 minutes. You could even do 20 minutes. It's basically as long or short as you want. You could even do five minutes. This entire vital values activity could literally be a 20 to 30 minutes touch point with your team once a month. But brainstorm how you brought the values to life. If you think about that, with Skillshare, we've got some examples in here. First one being held a project retro to share learnings broadly that aligns to transparency. With impact, it could be about re-prioritizing projects to better support clients needs. Community, the example maybe two weeks ago, I sought diverse perspectives whilst designing a new feature for the community, for our stakeholders or our customers. Then curiosity, maybe last week or yesterday, I put my hand up and I asked a question during a town hall about something that I was curious about. I can see, Leondre, you've written about curiosity in the chat there. Your example could be coming into here, curiosity. I was curious about this thing and I asked a question. What we do, on your scorecard, you go through each one of these. You have the timer on. Make it a bit competitive for your team maybe so put a timer on so that people can see it counting down perhaps on the screen, and give everyone quiet time for 10 minutes or five minutes or 15 minutes to come up with as many examples as possible for all of these values. Now, you could focus on one value a month or it could be all the values and just have as many examples as possible. Whatever you think is going to work for you. And the good thing about this is we have introverts and extroverts, right? I don't know if anyone's an introvert here, anyone's an extrovert, you can, again, share in the chat. If you would like to share, what is your preference? Maybe you are an ambivert. But we all have preferences for what team-building activity we would do. If we do something that encourages and invites and engages everyone, it's going to be, again, more inclusive. So we have, for example, the introverts. Those people are the ones who are going to prefer the quiet time to do things. We then have the extroverts, people who are going to want to talk about these things. By doing this piece first we speak to the introverts and by doing the next piece, we speak to the extroverts. We go in here, put an example down, thinking about something that we could do. Holding a project retro to share team learnings. We held, let me just write review meeting [NOISE]. Leondress is an ambivert. Thank you for sharing Leondress. Impact. We have re-prioritized projects. I sat down yesterday, for example, and I did a re-prioritization exercise. Excuse my handwriting everyone. I'm forcing diagonally for some reason. Community, we have maybe a forum that we lead. So lead forum to understand more about what our customers needs. A customer forum, perhaps. That was something that we did in the last month or weak. Then curiosity, engage and ask questions. So asked a question during town hall, for example. Now, as are saying everyone, you have an opportunity to do this with me or you can do it on your own later on, but it's a nice little activity that you can do. The next thing we need to do after we've brainstormed, we had a lot of time to think about all the things we've done, is consider if other team members were involved. This is important because it feeds into the fact that we want to be speaking to others, collaborating, working with other people. We might say, well, the review meeting I had, there were five of us involved in that actual activity. We've got all the names on screen. I was involved, Amanda, Ben, Reena, and Ryan. We were all part of that project so we had that little review retro meeting to talk about our learnings and battling to transparency because we were completely open and honest with each other about what went well and what we could have done even better. There were five of us in that meeting. I'm not going to write down all the names just because it would take me forever. Impact. That particular example of re-prioritization, that was between me and another team member. When you're going through this exercise, think about who else in your team was involved. This is about showing teamwork, but also giving examples of when we've been working on our unknown things. By going through this exercise, you're going to really understand and see a pattern as to yourself. Are you more for a siloed worker, do you work on your own very much or do you collaborate with others a lot in terms of the work you do? You're going to be able to notice, what do you need to do more of? What do you need to maybe do less of over the coming year in order to really bring that team spirit into the way that you operate. Impact, re-prioritization exercise was me and Ryan. Then the customer forum, there were three of us involves me, Jian, Roberto. Again, everyone, if you are happy to do this alongside with me or maybe do it afterwards, you probably don't have time to think at the same time as me talking you through this. Curiosity, engaging in often questions. Well, that was just me on my own. I thought about things I needed to do and I did it. Now, there's a column here for date as well, so you can provide the evidence of when you did that activity. The next thing you need to do is give yourself points. Now this is where it gets a bit fun. I think it's fun. [LAUGHTER] If you were the only one involved in an activity, you give yourself one point. If you and another team member were involved, you give yourself two points. If you add two or more people were involved, you give yourself three points. According to this activity, we've got three points for the first one because five of us were involved. Two points for the second activity, three points for the third, and one point for the fourth. In total, we score ourselves, I've got three plus two plus three plus one. I've got nine points in total. Hopefully you'll have more than that. A way to create even more competitiveness in this is to set a standard. What is the score that you're looking for from your team overall? The important thing here as well is once you've got your score, everyone shares with each other. This is where the accountability comes in. We can't do it if not everyone shares. Everyone shares. You can talk about what you've got on screen, you can celebrate all those great successes, examples of when you brought values to life. But what you want to do most importantly is recognize that the more we celebrate success, the more likely we are to want to do this again. 7. Formulating Prize Ideas: We need to do something fun as a result of us putting in the work to do this activity for us to then go, well, you know what? There was a reward from that activity. What's going to happen next time? I want to do the same thing again. That's where we get to this example of something you can do to set prizes perhaps to your team. You can do this spin the wheel of prizes. You can do this in a few different ways. You can have a few options of different prizes for everyone getting involved and having done this activity. For example, you could have everyone gets a book or everyone gets a meal delivered to their house, so you can all have a virtual lunch or dinner together, a hamper or basket, perhaps maybe a half day off work. I don't know if you would offer that to your teams. But think about the different prizes that you could showcase to your team. Then maybe the person with the highest score gets to choose the prize or maybe you get a different person every month to pick a prize. Or maybe you put all the prizes into a virtual bucket or something and pick a prize out so it's by chance. But you really want to get people excited about thinking there's going to be a reward for us getting involved in this team building activity on a month-to-month basis. Once you've done that, you're going to notice people thinking are having fun. I get some twists, some control over what I'm going to choose as an activity or a prize. I'm excited about coming in back into this next month. One thing I forgot everyone was make sure that the only way you get a prize for your team is if everyone who had got involved. If one person in the team did not get involved in the team activity, they didn't bother doing their scorecard , everyone forfeits. It makes it a bit more accountability built into it that way. That is it everyone. Remember the teams acronym here just to keep you on track. Remember it's about everyone being together. In this activity, the vital value is one, everyone's together. It's about making it energizing, making it fun, not too serious. You want everyone to be enjoying the activity and for it to feel safe. Everyone has a role to play. If people are not there, and they don't join in and participate and you feel that's happening, then everyone doesn't get to enjoy the rewards. Everyone has a role to play. They all have to do the scorecard. It's meaningful because it's linked to the values of the business. 8. Q&A: We'd like to hear from you all and we have some questions to start out, but please feel free to put any questions you have in the chat for Abby, and we'll have about 10 minutes or so of Q&A. Just to start out, Abby, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be? To just get involved, I think sometimes we're too worried about we're going to look stupid and all sorts of other things and as I said, we do want it to be safe, but just get stuck in and really emphasize the team piece is about everyone getting on with each other and having fun, not taking themselves too seriously. I think I'd focus on that. Makes a lot of sense. On the team-building continuing that train, can you tell us about the best team-building activity you've been a part of and maybe the worst or among the worst, and what made the best stand out and what made the worst not a great experience? It's a good question, Ellen. I've had been through quite a lot of different ones over the years and obviously, most of them would have been face-to-face, but we haven't obviously got that opportunity at the moment. The best ones were where it was completely outside of the office, somewhere in with open-air, somewhere where we could be with other people and do something which was just really rewarding as well. Things that are really rewarding where you're helping to transform something in some way. But otherwise, I've also done online escape rooms and things like that, which are quite fun as well because it almost feels when you're transported to a breakout room or something that it is a different environment. Worst one. It's not the worst, but it was most awkward one I think was where when I was very early in my career, we had to go into a room with the team and there was an armchair facing the window. You had to sit in the armchair so you couldn't see anyone. Then everyone else in the room had to talk about you , it was behind your back. They had to talk about you. What I think your strengths are? What are your weaknesses? I remember mine was that someone said all this good stuff and then they said, but Abby is a bit sensitive and I was like, "I'm not sensitive, " sitting in my armchair getting sensitive. It was a good learning, but it was hard, that fly on the wall kind of thing. That does sound challenging and that visual very stands out. Switching gears to managers who are with us today. Just what would your advice be to them as they're trying to build momentum, as they create team-building activities, and just trying to make sure that they're offering variety? What would be your advice there? Yeah. I think people, especially because we haven't had control over any sense of feeling in control over the last couple of years. The most important thing is to not just go, "We're going to do this." Not just go, "We're going to listen to the loudest people and what they want to do is a team-building activity." I think first thing to do is to maybe come up with some ideas, but also involve the team in coming up with those ideas. From that, we can either do them all over the course of the year. Everyone's ideas get to come to life or get people in the team to almost facilitate each activity every month. It's not just the leader's job to do it. Giving people that accountability and empowerment is the first thing I would do, I think. 9. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Abby, this was amazing, so actionable. I can't wait to put all this into practice. For those of you on the call, please feel free to check out also Abby's courses on Skillshare. She has a library of them and they're great content to add to this. So thank you again for joining us and we'll see you on Skillshare soon. Thanks everyone. [MUSIC]