What a weekend away can do for your (volunteer) team
The TEDxTUM team recently went away for their very first team weekend! We thought it would be a nice idea to get out and take time to get to know each other and reflect on our mission and plans for our upcoming main event. Our team has grown to 30 members in the past years and the structure has also evolved continuously, as I described in detail in this previous post. I am a firm believer that in most cases a good team spirit is more important than the skills of the individual team members (within boundaries, of course): when people trust each other, they will go above and beyond to reach the team goal. Team spirit is especially important in a volunteer team because this context lacks many extrinsic motivators that are present in a business environment. This makes it even more vital that people feel like they belong and get more out of the experience than they put in.
Long story short, we put together what we believed was a recipe for team spirit: two days away, a nice view of the Bavarian mountains, and a mix of structured and free time. None of the team leads had organized such a weekend before but we were ready to take on the challenge and decided to have two 2-hour workshops and three smaller activities for reflection. Each of the activities was organized by a different team, thus dividing the preparation work. More on that below.
First things first, we made some basic decisions. We wanted to:
- Go away from Munich to be yanked out of our day-to-day lives
- Not go too far away — luckily, Munich is very close to the mountains
- Be mindful of costs, because team spirit should not be a luxury
We selected a German “Jugendherberge” (youth hostel) which was 2 hours away by train/bus and offered bunk beds as well as breakfast, lunch, and dinner at a reasonable price. It also had a seminar room which they reserved for us. After fixing the date, we asked the team members to decide whether they would attend; while we covered their stay, we asked them to pay their meals and the cost of the train ticket in order to make them commit to their decision. 20 out of our 30 team members decided to come, which made us psyched to prepare the content!
In the true German spirit, we thoroughly planned the weekend, as shown in the below figure. In 1.5 days, we wanted to conduct a couple of workshops, spend some quality time together and go on a team hike!
The Workshops
We planned two 2-hour workshops, the first of which was all about personas. Maria, our Marketing team lead, describes it as follows: We split the team into three groups and asked them what they imagine TEDxTUM would look like as a person. We received very diverse results and learned that TEDxTUM embodies many different facets ranging from being a funny, sometimes even childish guy to being a highly intellectual, successful woman with interest in scientific topics. In the second part of the workshop, each group’s TEDxTUM persona received a goal. Each group came up with a plan to realize it, learning that some goals, like meeting new people with varying backgrounds, are hard to achieve. We also generated some new ideas we can execute as part of the TEDxTUM marketing strategy.
In the venue workshop, our Operations team divided the team into 4 groups and gave each of them a big printout of our event venue. Each team then created possible floor plans for placing the different elements of our event while keeping in mind some constraints that we clarified in the beginning. This helped us generate ideas to work around a substantial change in venue. We gained some new ideas on where to place critical things like wardrobe, registration, and coffee. The team with the most creative floor plan that fit the requirements won a dinner with the Operations team!
The Team Building
As to the planned activities, the first icebreaker was a Tangram exercise in which people got into groups of 2, sat back to back and collaboratively built a Tangram shape. One person had the plan and was giving instructions to the other person building the puzzle. In the first round, the person building was not allowed to say anything at all, thus depriving the explainer of any feedback. They switched in the second round and were allowed to talk as much as needed, but nevertheless some puzzles did not end up as planned. This exercise is a marvelous illustration of the fact that no matter how clear the image is in one’s own mind, it takes a lot to transfer it to someone else using words. It made us more mindful of the importance of clear communication.
The second activity was a questionnaire put together by multiple team leads which was an additional channel for the team members to voice their opinion about TEDxTUM. It also gave more introverted team members the chance to participate.
Finally, just before leaving we did a True Colors Test. This activity is excellent for facilitating reflection and communication about one’s values, feelings and preferences in team work. It divides people into four “colors” (similar to categories in other personality tests) but emphasizes that each person has every attribute in them, but they are not equally strong. After determining one’s primary color, we divided people into groups based on that and had them discuss what they like and dislike in team work. This activity is not so much about identifying one’s personality, but reflecting on one’s preferences and discussing how they work together with other personalities. As a last step, the sub-teams came together and everyone shared what they found. Some of them got into heated discussions on how they (don’t) want to work and even found new mechanisms for communication within their sub-team! I can highly recommend this test to any team, and it works with both large and smaller groups — happy to send over material including instructions on how to moderate.
The Free Time
A major part of our team weekend was aimed at spending quality time together. We thought of some light activities which would get the conversation going but were not set on a specific schedule, as we wanted things to develop naturally. We kicked off the evening with a fireside music session outside, followed by board games and conversation. We were surprised at how eagerly even the shy team members participated. The evening was relaxed and fun.
Finally, the Sunday was dedicated to our team hike! Being in the mountains, we only needed to go out of the door to climb the Wendelstein. The hike turned out to be more challenging than we thought, but we made it to the top! I don’t know what it is about collective suffering, but it somehow brings a group of people together.
Tips for organizing your own team weekend
That’s our team weekend, folks! Here’s a collection of things we think you should think about when organizing your own. Let us know how it worked out!
PREPARATION CHECKLIST:
- Search for a venue and get a price offer from venue; ask for food options and determine how flexible they are
- Determine possible dates within your team and ask people to commit
- Book venue, food, transport as applicable
- Prepare workshops and make sure to bring everything — if you’re at a remote location, you can’t pop home because you forgot an adapter
- Organize getting there: for instance, we had train leads buying group tickets who communicated with their group where to meet, which distributed the organizational hassle
TIPS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
- Be mindful of costs to include everyone; have people cover a bit of the costs themselves, they will feel more invested and eager to take away something from your time together
- Plan for enough free time, but enable conversation and socializing through open activities or icebreakers, especially at the beginning
- Get people out of their comfort zone at least a little bit (we did this through music and exercise) — you will instantly feel more of a team spirit
- You don’t have to plan for overly exciting activities, simple-to-organize ones often do the trick! For us, both the Tangram and True Colors Test were huge successes and they required little preparation
- Have activities where everyone can pitch in (bring games, instruments, etc.)
- Be inclusive to more introverted team members
- Document it! Have them everyone take pics and videos to cherish the memories later
Check out other articles we wrote for TEDx organizers here!
