Team-building activities are going to take center stage as the Bay Area business community gets back to work once the COVID-19 emergency passes. Organized group activities help your staff with rebuilding morale, reigniting productivity, and re-forging solid, enduring connections. You will, perhaps, repeat that January kickstart program! And when you add a catered meal to the agenda, the team gets a real chance to re-engage personally with each other. And with and you! They can share both lockdown experiences and plans going forward. That kind of deep relationship building between team members leads to an optimal meeting return-on-investment (ROI).
How will you re-engage Your Team Post-COVID?
We changed the way we worked together during the coronavirus emergency. Remote work exploded, with coworkers marooned at home trying to collaborate via e-mail and conference call. Some of these arrangements may survive the crisis. But getting back into an office and working in-person with a team will return, and fast. You will need to set up an organized program to make that sudden transition a positive and productive move for everyone.
The following five exercises are a few of the activities you could use to re-ignite your team’s engagement and productivity. We offer them just to inspire you. You know your team best, so organize the event to take advantage of their skills and preferences.
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Sneak-a-Peek Memory Game
This game emphasizes improving workplace collaboration skills. Each team is given children’s building blocks. One person from each team uses the blocks to build a structure within a set amount of time (such as 30 seconds). Then, another member sneaks a peek at the structure and must describe it so that the remaining team members can try to replicate it or guess what it is.
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Hold a Board Game Tournament
Using one or more board games, you can organize a tournament. This is a great option for larger groups. To make time for the other items on your event agenda, such as the shared meal, choose games that take less than an hour to complete.
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Offsite Improv Workshop
This type of interactive exercise can take many forms. Find the kind that may complement your company culture. You may do physical improv, like tossing an invisible object from person to person. Or you may choose verbal improvisation, such as debating a topic from different perspectives. Once you complete the activity and break for lunch, you will all have a lot to discuss!
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Spaghetti-Marshmallow Challenge
This is a classic team-building exercise, where each team attempts to build a tower using just marshmallows and raw spaghetti. It is a highly collaborative exercise that encourages creativity as well.
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Tourist for a Day
San Francisco is a destination market for both tourists and business meetings. Yet locals get disconnected from the local sights over time. Why not celebrate our return to work and life by giving your staff a day of being tourists? Break your team into groups, and instruct each group to visit one or two local attractions. After a few hours of sightseeing, you can reconvene at your offices or a local venue for late lunch or early dinner. Each team can then share what they saw and learned about our shared community.
Make the Communal Meal a Team Building Centerpiece with Handheld Catering
Whatever activity you use to get your team reconnected and relearning how to collaborate, that time spent over a lunch or dinner discussing the day, or how you all survived the crisis, will be a critical element of how well the event meets your objective and delivers high ROI.
Call us today at (408) 692-4782, or contact us online.
