We, human beings, are essentially social beings, and, in these lockdown and isolation times, the loneliness can sneak on unnoticed and bring to the surface feelings & fears about future, health, work, money, and more.
Here at Mindly however, despite all these points, we feel that we became a stronger team during these times and so, we asked our HR Manager, and also graduated Psychologist, Berit Luik, to share some of the advice and practices that worked for us.
We hope that you can extract some ideas from that and have good results with your company as well.
Advice 01: Have in Mind the Predominance of Introverts in IT & Software Companies
IT & Software and, most of the sectors where most people are engineers or from related graduations are full of introverts. This is a well-well known fact and, aside introverts, there will be also extroverts and quiet extroverts as well, and, this can make a little bit challenging to design team activities that fit everyone.
The advice here is to be genuinely interested in knowing topics that are commonly attractive for all and, design the group activities around these to motivate interaction between all of them.
Advice 02: Stimulate The Visual Contact
Did you notice already how, as human beings, we tend to sometimes see in general objects visual patterns that remind faces?
If in ancient civilizations it maybe helped to extract meaning from a chaotic world, in current times, especially when we’re isolated, it can show us how it’s important to most of us to know that we’re not totally alone in the world.
So, the advice here is to try to stimulate always that it’s possible the visual contact with the technology and tools that we have at hand for remote work & interaction.
Practice 01: The Team Quiz
Since most of the people like a good Quiz and are curious to know a little more about the colleagues this activity take the following steps:
- Elaborate a list of questions about the person (20 is a good number) with some curiosities, hobbies and, also some sense of humor and, then send to your team (word document or Google form) and give them a deadline to reply it;
- With the answers at hands, you can use a platform like MyQuiz to create and schedule the online quizzes for the team;
- Then you can create a schedule using Google Calendar (here we had twice in a week by the end of the day) and Google Meet for these events/calls, keeping the link for the Quiz in the schedule event description;
- Each one of these events is dedicated to one team member that will be only watching how people reply to the questions about him;
- During these conferences, you can stimulate the visual contact as well (turn on the webcam);
- For the winner (best score from all quizzes), you can give also a prize to make things even a little more exciting.
From the benefits, we noticed here at Mindly, people started to add theirs, colleagues, in social media like Facebook and chatting more about personal and life-related stuff, and, of course, a lot of good laughs is surely guaranteed.
Practice 02: The Mindly Eurovision Contest
When it comes to things that catch people’s interest, music is a hot one.
Here in Estonia people love music and are big fans of these contests like Eurovision or like The Voice.
Having this in mind, we created our version of Eurovision. The Mindly Eurovision.
This can be even more exciting and richer, like our case, if you have plenty of different nationalities and cultures at your team.
The general steps are the following:
- We defined which country each one of the team members would be the representative. For the ones from different countries, we asked them to represent their own country and, from the ones from Estonia we randomly gave them a paper with a country name for being the representative;
- Then, we gave them a deadline for selecting from youtube a Youtube music video from an artist that represents the country they’re in charge and, send this by email to our HR;
- After receiving all these music videos, a Youtube playlist was created and sent by email to them, with the instructions about how to vote/rank and, soon they received a Google Meet schedule for the contest day;
- The voting/ranking instructions in our case was to rank from 11 to 1, being 11 the best of the best (super like) and, then, from 10 (best) to 1 (worse), forcing also some of the songs to out of the ranking;
- In the contest day, we did run a Google Meet conference and played 30 seconds of each one of the songs and, then asked each one (one by one) to show his votes/ranking;
- The top-ranked was elected the winner.
From the benefits, we noticed at Mindly that aside from good fun and laughs, we could learn more about each other and, of course, some amazing songs and singers that probably we would never know without this.
Conclusions
Yes. These times of lockdown and the introvert profile of tech people can be challenging but with a genuine interest in each other, and, some creative ideas but still simple ideas, we can become an even stronger team.
