Keeping Your Teams Engaged And Connected In Times Of Social Distancing
As we’re all adapting to our new work from home routine, the biggest thing we’re missing is basic human interaction – at lunch with our colleagues, at client meetings, and of course our daily face time with the team in the office.
According to Forbes, work relationships are key when it comes to employee well-being. As humans, we desire engagement and connection with other people. Our work relationships (or lack thereof) can influence our stress levels, productivity, and general happiness, this can have a ripple effect on our work performance as well as our health.
While we can’t see each other every day, we’ve come up with a few fun ways to catch up every week. Our weekly team catch-up allows us to socialise while also learning something new through virtual Drink Talk Learn parties and virtual Kahoot quizzes.
Drink, Talk, and Learn parties gained popularity a few years back – originally an in-person party game, but in the time of COVID-19, we’ve managed to translate the ritual to Zoom. The guidelines to participate are simple:
Teams are selected randomly to allow for different interactions and engagement weekly
Each team prepares a five minute, three slide maximum presentation about a topic of interest
Topics can be anything, but ideally not COVID-19 related (because let’s face it, we need a break), and something interesting that might be little known to the team
Everyone joins the session with a beverage of their choice and each team takes turns presenting about their chosen topic
Through this weekly event, we’ve learned a few fun facts including:
Emojis were first invented in Japan in 1988; in Japanese “e” means picture and “moji” means character. Emoji = picture character.
Mickey Mouse was originally known as Mortimer Mouse, until Walt Disney’s wife Lillian convinced him to change the name.
Around 1,500 people work at Area 51 – the highly classified United States Air Force (USAF) facility in Nevada – but anyone who tries to sneak on to the property can be shot dead on the spot.
“Bubble tea” is actually a reference to the milk froth that forms when the drink is shaken, not the chewy pearls in the drink that resemble bubbles.
When Sir Stamford Raffles arrived in Singapore on 18 January 1819, there were only 1,000 people living on the island
We also switch things up with our quiz games, an opportunity to test our general knowledge. We use Kahoot, a game-based learning platform where users can create interactive multiple-choice quizzes that are easily accessible via web browsers or the app through the steps below:
Sign up and create a multiple choice quiz via https://kahoot.com/ on any topic, in any language!
Once the quiz has been created, you are ready to host and share a live game in person or remotely.
Time to play! Join a Kahoot via https://kahoot.it/ or via the app and enter the Game PIN provided by the host and get ready to answer questions on your device.
At Accela, we value strong employee relationships and a good work environment. Thus in times of social distancing, it has become even more important to maintain these strong relationships among colleagues to reduce stress and increase happiness in these uncertain times.