Tips to inspire and motivate your team

We’ve been using these team building and communication methodologies since our inception. With the challenges brought by 2020, motivating and inspiring your team has become even more critical as people are facing challenges not witnessed in our lifetime. It also meant that some of our techniques had to be adapted to cater to WFH requirements enforced through lockdowns.

I hope these provide some insight into how we create a positive and successful working environment at #teamPageProof ?? and feel free to reach out to me directly if you’d like to learn more.

• Each week begins with a “CEO seven report”: a quick summary of what happened in the last 7 days, and looking forward to the week ahead. This is a really short, bulleted summary of goals, priorities, and teams involved, and takes me a few minutes to pop into a Slack channel. I’ve found this keeps everyone in the know, and saves multiple conversations and updates at various meetings, and sets the business tone for the week ahead.
• Daily morning stand-ups (or Slack videos on our WFH days), to share what each person aims to achieve that day and this is summarized in a Slack channel. We follow this up at the end of the day with a quick post into the same Slack channel letting everyone know how the day ended. This has proven to be a great method for self-reflection and celebrating successes. From a management perspective you can also quickly see when tasks are taking longer than expected and who needs help from others.
• How to make stand-ups more inclusive and engaging? We rotate who leads the team through the daily stand-ups – it’s important to give everyone a voice and opportunity to take the lead. This person shares their thoughts on a monthly topic (we really enjoyed ‘brain puzzles’ in the first lockdown, ‘food delicacies’ (this one even drew out some home cooking along the way!) recently, and we are now dreaming about traveling to our ‘favorite overseas destination’). We’ve been doing this for over 5 years now, and have kept an amazing history of ‘restaurants I love’, ‘favorite books’, ‘Netflix must-watch’...so many topics and so many viewpoints!
• Fortnightly on a Thursday is “champagne & share” – where we take time out in the afternoon to sit together and share any learnings, insights and celebrate team wins. These don’t have to be work-related either – outside topics are just as important to stimulate conversations and team engagement.
• Sharing videos and posts on a fun #random Slack channel is of course a must. We have set up quirky Slack bots, customized emojis...go wild in your team communication tool to make conversations fun.

These few things have really helped my team stay connected and motivated. How have you been keeping up energy and team spirit during this difficult time?