A growing demand for team building and conflict reduction

It may just be coincidence, but I suspect not. In the last few weeks, we have had three requests for virtual team building exercises, and two projects that (more or less explicitly) are seeking to take the poison out of conflictual situations in a team.

My rationalisation is that, after a long time of kicking the can down the road, a number of teams have realised that they cannot just “wait for COVID to go away”, and need to engage in team building now, or else face the consquence of conflicts brewing up, of new staff not really being integrated into the team, and of the joint vision gluing colleagues together getting lost.

If you are looking for a one-to-one replacement of a “presence” event, then you will be disappointed. But the fact is you can do things in virtual meetings that you cannot do in “real” meetings. The key that we are working on, is to identify what these things are. Given space, let me give just one example: in most events (especially team building) there is down time, where you grab a coffee and chat with a friend from the team. The charm of the virtual: we can replicate that in Zoom, but by having you thrown into a small (2 or 3 person) group where the people in the group are randomly selected. Ok, it is not as good as meeting a person face to face with cuppa in the hand. But here you get to talk to somebody that you may not have actually (dared to?) go up to and chat with. In other words, you get a different experience, that can also be valuable!