Feeling like work is lacking in colour? Why it might be time to bring your team together

Just one month in to 2022, to our delight we’re hearing from more people asking us to run face-to-face team sessions.

They’re telling us that although they may have achieved much working remotely, months of online conversations have left them feeling a bit drab and disconnected. Like the proverbial cogs in a wheel, they are still motoring. Yet something has been lost for them being purely online.

So we thought it might be timely to share what we’ve learned about what works when you bring teams together, as well as some of our most vivid moments from working with teams IRL.

Over four articles, we’ll look at how teams can make the most of any time together to:

1.       Revisit and crystallise their purpose

2.       Renew the focus on their audiences

3.       Strengthen their team’s resilience

4.       Fuel their creativity and have some fun

A sense of purpose and why it matters

Research shows that a sense of shared purpose is the most critical element in building a strong and unified team. Yet facing the demand to deliver more and more activity, it’s easy for team leaders to put this on the back burner.

Imagine being asked to set aside one of your Sundays simply to run in a very large circle for about four hours, whatever the weather. No doubt your motivation for this would be low, if non-existent.  

Alternatively, you could be asked to set yourself a target time, raise money for your chosen charity, and to run alongside thousands of others in one of London’s most famous sporting events. The practical commitment is much the same.  The difference is that sense of purpose.

How to crystallise your team’s purpose

There are rich discussions to be had in exploring together why you as a team exist and in clarifying and articulating your purpose and value in an organisation.

Recently we worked with a communications team experiencing a heavy workload and a great deal of flux. They wanted to set aside some time to strengthen their common purpose.

In the feedback we received after the work, four elements stood out as having been critical to success. All of which can easily be adopted by other teams seeking to reunite around their shared goals:

1.       A focus on face-to-face interaction
The team was keen to meet face-to-face, and so followed all the safety procedures they could to enable this. For them, it was the right decision: the value of being in the same room featured consistently in their feedback. We also began the work on team purpose in small groups to maximise the interaction between them and ensure everyone was fully involved.  

2.       Seeking consensus on the stuff that really matters
Collectively, they identified the strongest ideas from the working groups and agreed on the key elements for their team purpose statement. They focused on some simple principles and the language that resonated, without getting bogged down in detail or endless wordsmithing (not easy for a bunch of comms folk).

3.       Keeping it practical and maintaining momentum

They created five principles that captured how they want to work together over the next year, ways of working that they all took pride in. And they agreed how they would use them to keep team culture and morale on track. This included revisiting them in regular team reviews and when attracting and selecting new team members.

They also identified some practical barriers that stood in the way of what they wanted to achieve. This led to a follow-up online session to generate ideas on how to overcome these, as well as ideas for keeping their purpose statement alive and fresh.

4.       Looking outwards as well as inwards

Having arrived at a succinct purpose statement that spoke to them, they realised how helpful it would be to use this in discussions with colleagues outside the team to demonstrate the value they bring. They agreed the work would help them position themselves within their organisation and more widely.

Feedback from the day showed that the team really valued the sessions, and found them “energising”, “engaging” and “thought-provoking”. The work together renewed their commitment and sense of shared identity and connection. Most notably, whilst it is never easy to press the pause button, their decision to carve out the time away from daily tasks and to come together in person after months apart proved to be spot on.

See here for an overview of our work with teams of many sizes. Or get in touch to find out more about our team Re-Charge tool.