I've got five great team building activities that really work in inspiring and motivating hybrid and remote working teams.
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How do we motivate and engage teams that are working remotely or even in a hybrid context, and take things away from the day-to-day, so the team meetings or the one-to-ones that you're already running?
Well, I've got five great team building activities that really work, and I've tried them in my LTT team.
The first is "the six word story". This links why you exist – your purpose and your passion – and allows the team to come up with that directly, but it has to be really succinct. It's real fun and can take 10 or 15 minutes, but you come out with six words that sums up you as a team.
The second is stinky fish. Now, we've used that most recently with a big team of people that didn't really know each other. And you might start that when you're forming a team.
So with stinky fish, it's really thinking about the worst thing that could possibly happen. And it's allowing everybody to have their say. You can pull themes together and you can really start to go back from "if that's the worst thing that's going to happen, how do we alleviate that?" It becomes an exercise that really drives trust and psychological safety, and enables people to get things out in the open from the start.
The third is "guess whose life is it?" And this is a really cool exercise. And this enables you to get people to send two pictures of their life. They can't include themselves, but fundamentally you then put them up on a presentation and you ask people to guess whose life it is.
What's fantastic about this exercise is it enables people to really tell you the story behind those pictures. So you get to understand the inner self, the true person at the core, in your team.
And the fourth is "one thing that's not on your CV", and it gives people an opportunity to open up on things that they do in their personal life. So when I've run this exercise before, we found that one person had been a concert pianist. It's amazing what comes out, and it's really simple. Because most of the time, we're really focused on the role that people play, rather than the person that sits behind it.
And the fifth and final is using work-based personality tests. Now that could be DiSC, it could be Insights... and they're great because they're really colourful, and meaningful. Even something like 16 Personalities is a great way of understanding all the different people within your team. They're deeper and they take longer, whereas the exercises that I talked about before are really quick and easy to operate and facilitate.
So there are my five brilliant exercises that you can use within your team to drive motivation and engagement. Enjoy them, and let me know how you get on. Have you tried any of those exercises? Are there other ones that you want to share? Please leave your comments below, we'd love to hear from you.
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