Feeling connected to your colleagues sure seems challenging in these special times. Working from home means missing all the breaks at the coffee machine, eating at home alone or with your family and thus missing opportunities to connect with your team mates. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us work from home full-time, and therefore miss this part of the day, and miss all the compliments, encouragements and ideas that come with it.

At ML6, we planned a team day hoping to see each other in real life, but given the recent surge in infections we chose to guarantee everyone’s safety and cancelled the team day. We took this as an opportunity to get creative and launched the idea of a virtual team day 2.0.

The Agenda

A perfect team day is a day with both time to think about strategy, to get everyone aligned, and to have fun with your colleagues to create connectivity and trust. We decided we could do both, all from our own homes, connected trough Google Meet. Take a look at our agenda:

Activities

We came up with several exciting team activities that we could do in an online call in a team with more than 50 people. From sports, to cooking, to online games, our day had it all.
The day started with a sport session where we did some office chair stretching and workout. We all spend many hours behind a desk, which can result into back or neck pains. So this workout was not only fun but also very valuable for everyone’s health. And to spice things up a bit, the second half of the session we had a pilates instructor join the call to give a pilates workshop. My abs are still feeling it.

‍

‍

What better activity to do from your own home than a cooking workshop? Everyone has all the equipment and enough space, which could be hard if you put more than 50 people into the same room. We sent out a shopping list beforehand, and also sent out a home-made spice mix (made by Koen our kitchen guru) for a delicious curry. Who knew (almost) everyone could make a top-notch home-made curry?

‍

‍

In the afternoon, we also made time to do some online games, in smaller groups. We made random teams of 4, to allow people of different teams to get to know each other better. We played a nice virtual escape room, which required some good collaboration of the team (virtual teambuilding, yes it exists!). And last but not least we played some good old pictionary.

Tips

• Plan enough breaks and provide variation within one session. You can also encourage your team to go outside for 10 minutes during the break. This really helps to recharge your batteries and get ready for the next activity. ????
• Send your colleagues a gift. We sent everyone a delicious cocktail package from Cocktail Maison to give the day an extra fancy touch and at the same time we supported local catering initiatives. ????
• Organise sessions in smaller teams. Nothing is more annoying than being in a call where 5 people try to talk at the same time. Solution? Only invite 4 people at once in a call. ????
• Make sure everyone is comfortable throughout the day. Changing up the place you sit helps to make the day enjoyable. Why not follow a strategy session from your comfy sofa or do some sports in the garden? ????
• Ask colleagues to take ownership of different parts of the day to create enough variation and really make it a team effort. Do you have a cooking expert? Time for him to show off his skills. ????

I had a great day, better than one can expect given the circumstances. Definitely would recommend! A big thanks to the whole team that helped make this day a great succes.

‍