[Weekly Conversations] How do you team build? 🧩

With COVID, we definitely don't do as much team building as we once did.  But I think we are shifting to do more hybrid / live events.  We've have all sorts of events from Holiday celebrations, to annual summer events (like mini fun olympics) or large company outings  - hope we get to bring those back soon!! 

Our team is still working hybrid but we do once a month "beer o'clock". If that day falls when everybody is at the office, we'd go out for a dinner  and drinks and NOT talk about work. Just pure fun and getting to know our team outside work. If that day falls when we all work from home, we do teams meeting at 4pm with our favorite beverage. :)

With COVID, our team in 2021 did virtual events (Olympics, Escape room, etc...). Most of our team is international, so this summer we are starting a virtual Happy Hour to help build out team connections. We are still mainly remote as our company is shifting to utilize office spaces as a collaboration space. We are starting to hold more in person meetings for major activities in our projects, so more team bonding will start to occur in person.

Our company is hosting regional activities/parties - in-person events, and mix of in-person + virtual event. 
Each team manages smaller events or informal meetings - which is not like in-person IMHO. It's more challenging to do in person for some teams that are spread out around different regions, and when you are a global company. 

We have monthly zooms (camera on!) to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries but within our larger team, we have several small teams. The smaller teams also have activities with the teams. For example, we actually looked at a central location, all within a few hours of our locations and will be meeting in person. We are planning an activity and lunch.

Thank you for sharing everyone! It's a challenge for global companies to organize team-building activities in person for all, but I think the regional meetings are a great idea. We recently had a Wrike camp for Wrikers based in Prague and it was so much fun to see my colleagues in person 🏕

Recently, some employees outside a business unit that routinely makes off-site visits were invited to tag along. The sole purpose of this was for those outside of this business unit to see the scope of this outside work and get to meet community members that we aid. The group then shared their experiences with the company in a hybrid meeting over lunch. 

It feels like my team is informally building our team just by working together. We do occasionally organize a social function, recently having a team dinner at The Melting Pot. I know it's important to get together as a team and do some team-building activities or just have fun, but it's challenging to find the time to do those things.

During Stay-at-Home we had a few really fun team-building activities over Zoom. 

We had a musical group work with us to write lyrics about our company. In between stanza writing, we did a bit of music trivia and they made up songs on the fly based on things we said. Finally, they put our words to music and sang it for us. They later edited it in the studio and sent us a final version. It was surprisingly bonding and we sang the song for a while. We have a bunch of new people now, so we may have to teach them, or do it again!

We also did a little mini-terrarium building workshop with succulents and mini figures like gnomes or dinosaurs. That was hilarious too. The company sent us the parts and we put them together at our desks on camera. Big mess, lots of laughs.

Oh wow! This sounds really cool Kelly R, thank you for sharing it's definitely inspirational for me 👀