When your business grows, you bring new people in and the roles and responsibilities change. The previously harmonious cooperation of a small team often fades away. It is time to bring your team together as one effective team.
Breaking down silos becomes important to ensure team performance remains high. Managing team dynamics, eliminating unnecessary frustrations before your organisation suffers is what smart leaders do. Actually the disruption brought by Covid-19 makes rapid intervention even more important.
In the pre-Covid days you’d organise an off-site workshop. Effective Covid-safe virtual workshops are the new option that support teams and leaders in their performance optimisation journey. Being in lockdown, working remotely is not an excuse for procrastinating!
It is simply another good reason to prepare the future and “fix the cracks” as Mick Havill, from Wise Employment says. Bridgeworks shaped a virtual format that would bring his team together as one and deliver a results-changing experience.
View Mick’s Feedback On The Format Of Their Virtual Workshop
Or Read The Transcript On The Format Of The Workshop
Wayne:
G’day Mick, it is Wayne Dyson from Bridgeworks. Mick, I just really pleased that you gave us a chance to work with your team a week or so back. I’m interested in your feedback. How did it finish up for you?
Mick:
Hi Wayne, pleasure to see you as always. It was a great session that we had with you, thank you very much. It was 4x 1/2 days of intense and insightful activity that engaged the whole of my team so it was a great opportunity to connect and to achieve quite a lot of great stuff with the team.
And hopefully I think that it has changed them. There is a lot of new people in the team that had not experienced the Wayne Dyson experience before.
Wayne:
Yes Mick and we did it over four days, which you know in a virtual format is a bit of a stretch. But how did you find that?
Mick:
I think you know even taking two days and splitting it into four half day sessions. As we know, zoom is is quite tiring. People get zoomed out very quickly, and on half days we were probably pretty much at the limit of what people could cope with in a session like that; and I think it worked very well.
Some of the late starters in my team complained about having morning half days and not afternoons. You can’t please all the people all the time, but but you know the 1/2 days worked very well. We were able to schedule it and adapt. It gave us a time to adjust at the end of those sessions as well.
It did work very well I think. And we couldn’t have extended it any further. We would have lost too much momentum in the team and in what we’re trying to achieve. So it was pretty close to perfect on that four half days.
Meeting Business Needs – The Virtual Workshop’s Objective
Or Read The Transcript On The Objectives Of The Workshop
Wayne:
A lot of people are listening to this because they are tossing up whether they want to go ahead and do a team process that is in that online virtual format. What was the reason why you wanted to go ahead with it? It’s a large team. What was your objective in doing it?
Mick:
Yeah, so the team, you included, was 24 people on the days. The objective really was to take the opportunity to bring together a team that has grown. I think the last time you and I were together, Wayne, we would have been around about 12, so we’ve probably doubled in size. A lot of new people that haven’t had the benefit of the depth of understanding that they get from the experience.
We needed to address some issues that are starting to occur. Some cracks that were occurring in the team as the team’s got bigger then we’ve actually had to silo the actual roles a bit more, so there’s beginning to be some infighting between those roles, so it was a great opportunity really to get together and address those issues and create the one team experience and it certainly has achieved that.
Wayne:
Now look, Mick, as always it’s been terrific to work with you and you know the relationship we’ve had over many years now and I appreciate the trust that you have in me to continue that process. So mate I’m looking forward to hearing some positive good stories ahead. So thanks for joining us today mate.
Mick:
You’re very welcome, and anybody, if you want to a direct reference, say we will can, we can achieve that as well.
A participant’s Perspective On Bringing The Team Together
Or Read The Transcript Of Darius’ Comments On Communication And Trust
Wayne:
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Darius who heads up Business Intelligence for a large organization.
Darius, we put you through the ropes last week, we had four half days online, which is a big ask. How did it all go from your perspective?
Darius:
Pretty good, actually, Wayne. it certainly is a challenge keeping everybody focused and connected in these zoom days where everybody is working remotely, especially as there is 23 of us in the group.
Wayne:
That was probably one of the main motivators for doing the programme. You’ve got a small team within a large team and, as you were saying before, you don’t have a lot of connection with the other components of that team. So did that provide an opportunity to perhaps connect better?
Darius:
Yeah, look it did. And to be fair, we’ve got people that have been working remotely for years. We are based in Melbourne (our main team), but we’ve got people in Hobart, Sydney and South Australia who all work remotely as their day-to-day lives. So the fact that the balance of us are working remotely as well has almost levelled the playing field.
It also means that sometimes we don’t always connect with people naturally because we don’t have a purpose to, so it was good to be able to connect with people that we wouldn’t normally do.
Wayne:
What were the takeaways from your perspective in what we covered over those four days?
Darius:
It was definitely good. Obviously DISC is always great. I think trying to bit of an understanding as to how the same sort of functions and good ways to communicate with people; using DISC is awesome. I think that was a really, really good benefit for us.
And also some of the trust exercises as well. Particularly some of the team members who do work together really were challenged by that, I think; and I can learn from that as well, so it’s great.
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