Entertaining the troops!

These are trying times aren’t they. People are struggling, businesses are coping in many different ways and people are isolated.

Your people are isolated. They are on their own right now, working from home and perhaps only talking to someone on a webinar during the day.

Ask yourself: how many of your staff members are alone at home? Do you know who has kids/family/friends or lodgers?

Secondly ask yourself: how many of them have family, colleagues or friends working in the healthcare services?

If you don’t know the answer to these things you need to ask. You need to know. Now.

But what can you do?

Following that there are some things you can do during the workday to keep people talking, socialising and fend off some of that box-room-isolation lots of us are probably feeling right now.

Before I talk about what I’ve been doing, let’s have a quick show of virtual hands,

• Who has been dumped into a Teams channel which has remained ominously quiet?
• Who has been ‘asked’ to join a group somewhere (Yammer or Workplace perhaps) which is now the equivalent of an internet desert?
• Lastly, who has done something already? Share in the comments, I would love to see the activities and ideas everyone has shared among the network.

Teams Competitions

We use Teams, although this would work on any social channel.

I was one of those people placed into a new virtual Teams space to represent our office environment. I quickly realised that talking in the channel would almost certainly be restricted to questions about product and, well, that’s probably it!

I’ve been running competitions, daily, to generate traction, conversation, socialisation, interaction, you know: all those good words that mean people have something to turn to, much like they would in the office.

We kicked off with a Weirdest Gif Competition! Where people had to share in the channel the weirdest, most unusual Gif possible. I have never seen such a strange, odd and unusual bunch of Gifs shared EVER, it was hilarious, I loved it, we all did!

I decided to allocate points myself and, to avoid any issues around scoring, I immediately assumed the role of judge/dictator where I was solely in control of point supply and had no requirement to explain myself to anybody.

It was a great success, we had shares off most of the staff in the office and points were duly handed out. It was at the end of the day I decided to make it an on-going, daily competition with lots of variations on a loose theme of sharing something unrelated to work and generating conversations, laughter and sharing.

In this article I wanted to share the kinds of daily competitions we have been running and how the leader boards developed so you might look to replicate.

A word on points: I started by giving out 10 points to the leader, 9 points to second place, 8 to third and so on. I have recently moved to giving people a mark out of ten, so everybody earns points. You can be creative with the points so give some consideration to how to do this!

The Daily Competitions!

1. Weirdest Gif: points allocated for the most unusual Gif!
2. Mugface: a picture of your favourite mug (held up to your face) and why it is your favourite.
3. Doodle comp: the most creative OR funny doodle drawn and uploaded.
4. Song / Album recommendation: we did double points for this on the same day, it could be two days’ worth of comps. You could also make a Spotify list of the content.
5. Desk pictures (you look at the person but never the workspace) share a pic of the workspace you remote work in.
6. Crap presents! – what is the worst gift you have ever been given?
7. App/website: recommend an app/website no-one has heard of which is amazing!
8. Quiz time – a series of questions from the board game ‘Confident’ where you answer with a guesstimate of a range. We did 5 points for closest, 3 for second and 1 for third and I asked about a dozen questions throughout the day.
9. Worst Injuries share the experience of the worst injury you have ever sustained!
10. Evil Doodles: doodle a co-worker in a funny situation, then I remove up to 25 points off the person who is the focus of the picture!

That’s two weeks of competitions right there! I am still making up ideas on the fly to get people interacting and part of this is the competitions themselves, but a bigger part is the ability for ‘forced’ interaction.

There are, of course, lots of other ideas you can do. Who, for example, among you are running,

1)     Virtual pub quizzes

2)     Coffee meet ups in the workday between staff

3)     Non-work daily check ins

4)     A daily wrap up call.

5)     Gossip time for staff to have a natter!

But I would love to hear what else people are doing? Share in the comments your best ideas. What’s working for you? What are people enjoying? What are people engaging in? The more shares, the better!