All together now: How team-building is changing in the pandemic - Hindustan Times
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All together now: How team-building is changing in the pandemic

Mar 27, 2021 01:29 PM IST

It’s been hard even for the experts to navigate the new anxieties and questions, learn how to tackle the isolation. Here’s a look at new hacks and programmes that they say are starting to work.

At HT’s Mumbai office, the newspapers from a year ago are still on the desks. What was a buzzing newsroom is eerily silent. The security guard comes in to turn the lights on, as he would if one walked into work really early. But then hours go by and no one else does.

 (HT Illustration: Jayachandran)
(HT Illustration: Jayachandran)

Those of us who have returned to our office, one at a time, to pick up things we’d left behind or rescue documents trapped in our hard drives, have felt torn between wanting to stay and will it all back, and wanting to leave because this just isn’t normal.

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They say writing about it helps. It’s the first step to coming to terms with what the individual employee has lost and the changes they must now come to terms with, says performance coach Aditi Surana.

Even productivity coaches and corporate trainers found themselves a bit flummoxed in the early months of the pandemic. No amount of trust exercises and virtual mountain-climbing projects had prepared them for the degree of anxiety and isolation their subjects now faced. Or the questions there weren’t answers to yet.

How do you remain a team when it’s been months since you last met? (Incidentally, some HT offices, including the central newsroom in Delhi, have remained open through the pandemic; some, stuck in intermittently red zones, have remained closed). How do you absorb new members effectively, or train those just starting out?

“I realised that the idea that there was going to be no physical contact and no meeting one another was causing considerable anxiety in itself,” Surana says. “Everything that is happening inside people, all the emotions bottled up, need an outlet. So we’ve been creating programmes based on journaling.”

Writing, especially with pen on paper, can legitimise an issue, and provide clarity, since writing focuses the mind and tunes out distractions too, Surana says. The aim is to allow participants to connect with themselves first, and then help them find effective new ways to connect with one another.

“To keep the journaling focused and solution-oriented, we present one question a day,” Surana says. Often, these have to do with new ways of working and issues people have faced within the new formats. “So we ask questions such as, ‘If I accept this thing that has been annoying me, what would that change on the team?’ People start to approach a problem differently. The solution-orientation of the question is very important.”

A hundred Zoom meetings can’t replace physical interaction, says Semira Khaleeli, corporate trainer and coach at Imagenation. Is there any point then, to a virtual team-building exercise?

“The pandemic and resultant isolation have heightened the importance of team-building, but it is important when planning such a session to ensure that people are doing something other than working or talking about work,” Khaleeli says.

Here are her top tips to a successful pandemic-era team-building exercise:

Ensure purpose: There is a sense of exhaustion with virtual meetings, so don’t set up a team-building meeting with the idea of “just hanging out”. Make sure there is a clearly defined but non-work-related programme, preferably built around shared activities that will generate a sense of fun (games, personalised quizzes, etc). Without an agenda, there is also a high likelihood that people will sooner or later revert to talking about work.

Keep to the calendar: If a session is meant to last 90 minutes, it should start on time and should certainly end on schedule. In the virtual world, vacant time causes fatigue. If a session is set to go beyond two hours, be sure to also build in at least one break. A good way to reconstitute and re-energise the group when they return after a break is to have a short game or brief physical activity.

Make cameras optional: People may not want to share a view of their homes for a range of reasons. Activities should be designed around this being optional. Keep to smaller groups as well. Smaller numbers can more effectively draw out more members of a group. Without being too personal, use icebreakers to kick things off — ask participants to introduce themselves in only adjectives, or describe themselves in just one word.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Madhusree is a feature writer who loves Kolkata, is learning to love Mumbai. She loves to travel, write and bake

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