Communi-tea, And Other Ways That Teams Can Look After Each Other During These Unusual Times

It’s wonderful to see so many people doing so many things to support each other over the coming weeks and months, postcards through neighbours doors, the wonderful Beauty Banks appeal and the Mutual Aid Network to name just a few.

Here at Semble, our community is at the beating heart of what we do, but as Head of Operations I’m focusing not only on how we can keep it business as usual as much as possible, but how we can look after each other as a team. I thought it would be nice to share some of our initial ideas:

+ Daily tea(m) cuppa using Slack or Zoom (other Comms tech available)

+ As above, but with lunches

+ A team craft session: origami, collages etc

+ Daily challenges: best photo comp, Corona Haiku, joke of the day

+ A team quiz and bingo

+ A karaoke session (they don’t know about this one yet)

+ Best backdrop competition

+ Drawing competitions. E.g each team member is allocated another team member and need to draw a picture that symbolises who their person is and see if the rest of the team can guess.

+ A group cooking session, pizza is quite fun and accessible to all (subject to available ingredients)

+ A team walk and talk, separate locations but all dialled in to Zoom

+ Meeting up with members of the team that live near each other (keeping a safe distance of course)

+ Encouraging calls and video calls rather than just emails

+ A buddy system to make sure people are regularly checking in with each other

+ Supporting people with their home set ups as much as possible #ergonomics

We’re very fortunate to have a team that looks after each other, but we’ve found out that some of them live with freelancers or people who work for companies that don’t seem to realise that their most important asset is their people, so we are opening out the invitation to them to join some of our fun activities.

It would be great to hear about other ways that organisations and companies are looking after their teams, please let us know.

Perhaps ironically, in many ways it seems that this period of isolation and physical distancing is bringing many people closer together. We just need to remember to keep it going once the novelty has worn off. If we can each do a little bit, it will go a long way.