Running My First Team Health Workshop

Last week I had the opportunity to co-run my first Team Health Workshop for my coworkers, and it went great! At Sproutly LLC, we have three business units, one of which is the coaching department. There are three of us in that department and we are in charge of running a monthly hour and a half something that benefits the general team health of all of us here at Sproutly. This month was the first time I got to take the primary role in planning and running it, so I wanted to share about that experience.

We had recently sent out a survey to all employees, trying to ascertain what kind of things make them feel more connected to each other, and trying to gauge how connected everyone was feeling. In general the results were pretty good - no red flags to address - so we decided to use sort of a Solution-Focus approach, and try to chase the bright spots (encourage more of the good stuff). This was inspired by the book I'm currently reading, "Switch" by Dan Heath and Chip Heath. What everyone was saying made them feel connected was video face-to-face time, and personal sharing. So the first goal was to really allow a good amount of that to happen during this time - but not in a way that people walked away and thought "that was a waste of time". We really wanted people leaning in and wanting more. But we also wanted to get people sharing about their personal lives just a bit, so we draw closer together as a team. We wanted to do some breakout sessions and group learning for the main session, and we decided to pull the focus in more on what makes a good team player vs what doesn't. Then we wanted to make sure everyone was going to not just walk away and forget about it - so we needed something to tie a bow on everything at the end too.

The first activity we opened up with was an energizer activity called Photo From Your Life. [credit here: https://connecteam.com/team-building-games-remote-workers/] I explained the premise on Slack the day before and requested that everyone DM me a photo before the meeting. Then one at a time I shared the photos via Slack and everyone took a bit to talk out loud and guess who had submitted the photo, before the person revealed him or herself. Then they would share briefly about why the photo they submitted was significant. This went really well and people really enjoyed it! I also realized that this basic activity has a ton of flexibility for reuse in future meetings. You just keep the format the same, but change the thing being submitted - bucket list item, favorite band name, book you are currently reading, baby photos, etc. It will continue to be a fun way to get everyone opening up at the beginning of a workshop - which fosters them sharing more later on in the heart of the workshop, while also getting everyone to know each other a little better personally each time, increasing psychological safety and trust. We had photos of things like a can of cherries from Wisconsin, to a stack of stones, to a tennis ball that had a twist use, to a Christmas tree chicken. The challenge for me as the facilitator was to keep the activity moving - people wanted to just chat and joke a lot, which is good, but you have to keep a lid on it to be able to keep your workshop to time. So instead of ever saying anything out loud about time, I would just use my ability to take a photo down or put the next one up as a visual cue for everyone to move on - and it worked well. They responded without feeling like they were getting chided.

We shared some of the results from the survey next as a way to encourage everyone that "hey, here are some of the things your coworkers really like and really feel connected to you when these happen, so do more of this."

Then we moved into the main activity. I had pre-made some Jamboards, including having a bunch of little +1 icons on each page (enough for everyone to have three per side to use). Then I divided the large group up into three smaller groups, and gave them instructions. Go to the Jamboard for your group, and have a conversation while using the stickies to fill in each side with all the things that make up a good team player ("This person rocks!"), and that make for a poor team player ("Don't be like this guy/gal"). This activity comes from Fun Retrospectives [credit https://www.funretrospectives.com/that-guy-this-guy/]. Then, you each get to dot vote for the three on each side you feel either resonated most with you, or are most important. Then you talk about that as a group and pick someone from the group to be your presenter. This was a timed activity at 20 minutes (should have been 25 minutes to be just right I think). Then they would come back to the main video call and we'd all get back together to hear the presentations from each group on their conversation and what the group thought were the highlights from each side. This teaching concept was used in the Agile coaching class that I took this spring and stems from the concept of teaching from the back of the room. The group teaches itself through the material, instead of having to listen to a boring lecture. Engagement and retainment is much higher, and I think the depth of what is added to the conversations is greater having everyone involved too. Here is a sample board from our workshop:

Then we brought everyone back together and had the each group's presenter share their insights. There was some great conversation as the groups all saw each other's boards as well and saw the similarities and differences.

The final activity we did was to just go around and have everyone say out loud one takeaway they have from today's workshop. This is a good way to make sure everyone is really latching on to at least one key idea before they leave. In hindsight, I would have had everyone take 2 minutes to do this before we went around and shared, only because people tended to struggle through it just a bit in the moment, but it was still okay.

I was pleased with this workshop because I think everyone was pretty well engaged with each other and with the content the entire time - and doing this with everyone being remote felt like an extra bit of success. I think everyone had a really high/new level of appreciation for their teammates insights that were shared, and I believe we accomplished our goal of helping to encourage everyone to be better teammates. I'm not sure yet what next month's topic will be, but I'm pretty sure we'll be doing a very similar format to this because it seemed to work really well. This shows how important facilitation and planning ahead of time is to the success of your workshops. I had an awesome time getting to be more a part of this, side by side and engaged with my coworkers, instead of being "on the other side of the lectern."

I'll be sharing some of the team's insights on our Sproutly social media pages going forward on Team Health Tuesdays. This was an idea that came up at the end of our workshop - that we have some really great insights and we want to share those outside our organization too, so this will help us to do so, and to help people get to know now just the work we do but who we are at Sproutly too.