So, how do you host a summer outing that brings your team together? Hybrid events! While some employees attend from one venue or participate from your office, others can engage in the same experience from far, far away or right down the street. There are many ways you can bring your team together while hosting a live, virtual outing.
As streaming video conferencing has become more common, virtual and hybrid company events have gained in popularity. They offer reduced costs and a way for companies with workforces based across the country to create a sense of camaraderie and teamwork. Apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams make including your at home team members in your company event a snap! Here are some tips to help you plan the ultimate hybrid summer outing for your company.
1. Get Everyone On The Same Page
Find a day and time that works for all (or at least the vast majority of) your employees.
Finding a day that everyone can attend your event is an important first step. Consider your company’s work style and schedule when planning your event. Are your teams’ workloads heaviest at the beginning or end of the week? It’s a lot easier to enjoy yourself if you don’t feel the pressure of work deadlines. Ask your team to give you feedback on what day of the week and month is best for an event. Tools like Doodle polls can help with this.
The time of day is also an important consideration. Do all of your virtual employees work in the same time zones? If not, try to find a time that is convenient for the whole group. If you are asking some employees to attend during work while others are attending off-hours, consider how you can compensate for that time.
2. Have Broad Appeal
Choose an activity with something for everybody to enjoy.
While an online Dungeons & Dragons tournament might be right up the alley of some of your staff, it’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea. Or perhaps it is…Choose an activity each team member can get something out of. This is another key element to a great hybrid summer event. People are looking to get “out” and get engaged with each other.
Museums or zoos in your city may be offering virtual tours. Including a hybrid picnic or BBQ would allow everyone to have a similar experience that is virtual and immersive. You can organize food to be delivered to your employees, both at home and at the office.
Each of your team members will receive their own complete chocolate making kit, with all the ingredients and tools to make beautiful, delicious chocolate truffles. During your hybrid summer outing, everyone will participate in a live class with a master chocolatier. They will learn how to make their own custom chocolates utilizing their kits, and take part in exciting games and competitions. Your employees will be able to recharge their creativity and bond with their co-workers in a fun and relaxed setting. In the end they will have some great memories and some decadent chocolates to share with family and friends. With reasonable prices and packages for different group sizes, tinyB Chocolates are a perfect fit for your summer virtual outing.
3. Can You Hear Me Now?
Find the right software and hardware to stream your virtual event.
All your planning for your hybrid event will go right out the window if you don’t have a reliable way for everyone to stream and participate in it. If you are hiring an organization to deliver a hybrid activity or presentation, inquire what their suggested software is, as well as bandwidth for your wifi. You might need to upgrade it to ensure smooth streaming. You may also need to check in with employees working from home to make sure they have the support they need. This can help you identify challenges with tech accessibility that has been impacting work, too.
Incorporating other virtual elements, aside from streaming, can also help employees engage with each other during your summer outing. Coordinating different online and social platforms can be confusing and time consuming. Luckily, there are some great tools available to help you with this. Curator (which does have a free version) is a social media platform aggregator which helps you organize and sync up your live and virtual events into a clean and easy to use landing space. You can customize the interface with company colors and logos, giving your event that extra flair. Your employees will be able to log in and take part in your event with ease.
4. Get Your SWAG On
Customized gifts and keepsakes can complete your awesome virtual summer outing.
Everyone appreciates free goodies, and giveaways are a great way to show your team how much you value them. Custom company items like shirts, hoodies, and thermos cups are always great ideas, but if you want to stand out, there are a variety of creative options.
One of the advantages of a tinyB summer outing activity is that you are already sending your team the gift of chocolate, which they can enjoy themselves or share with friends and family. You can easily add even more corporate chocolate gifts with a personal touch to your plan.
And what goes better with chocolate than wine? Check out the tinyB Wine + Chocolate kit for a more seamless fulfillment of this perfect pair. A tinyB Chocolatier will host an experience of storytelling and teaching participants how to make and decorate their own Brazilian chocolate brigadeiros while sipping delicious wine.
La Colombe Coffee Roasters and the L'Occitane spa and hand cream store offer other tasty and handy additions to any team outing gift bag. You can create a care package with a variety of items, or match the contents to the theme of your event. The possibilities are endless.
5. Have Fun!
Company outings and events are about appreciating the people on your team.
In the end, your summer company hybrid event is an opportunity for you and your employees to relax, strengthen your team bond and cooperative spirit, and most importantly, have fun! With the right theme, tools and planning, you can put on an event your employees will never forget.
Taking the time to understand what kind of activities will work best for your company, and energize your team, can make all the difference in the success of your event. Seize the day, summer won’t last forever!
Feature Image: Nenad Stojkovic]]>Unfortunately for many, it's been a year or more.
And remote working, while once a novelty, is now the new norm.
With no signs of this pesky COVID pandemic easing, it’s wearing employees and their teams down. Everyone needs a break, and also needs new ways to connect.
The past year has been one giant test for every company’s financials, resilience, and especially employee morale. For the first time ever, many employees are navigating a new working reality from their kitchen table, all while juggling a myriad of personal challenges and the "extra" that has come along with the COVID pandemic.
Recent research by BCG shows that 40% of companies now expect that their employees will continue working remotely in some way in the future. Remote or virtual working is here to stay.
While this can be wonderful for those who love to work in their pajamas and avoid long commute times, this extended time away from the office has also led to a feeling of disconnectedness.
A feeling of being disconnected from a team often happens through online or remote working, especially for people who aren't used to it. Not being connected to people at work has the potential to lead to a significant decrease in productivity.
For people who are responsible for maintaining company culture regardless of where team is located, building employee engagement not just a task. It's a mandate. Engaging your team through effective online communication and relationship building is now mission critical to the growth and success of your organization.
While employee engagement is often flouted in the top strategic objectives of Fortune 500 companies and startups alike, it can be difficult to decide how much time, effort, and energy to devote to it.
Measuring employee engagement can be difficult, and approaches vary.
But research unanimously shows that it is too important to ignore. According to Gallup, those teams that score top in engagement are 17% more productive. They realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism and 59% less turnover. For your company, cost reductions and increased productivity that come through focusing on engagement can equate to millions of dollars each year.
Research from MIT also showed that engagement and communication among team members is the single most important indicator for team success and productivity. Surprising to many, engagement and communication are even more important than intelligence, personality, skills, and content.
What this means is that even if your corporate hiring team brings in top talent, when the members of your team aren’t engaged, you’re leaving a lot on the table.
While we typically focus on hiring the smartest people, giving employees the latest tools to do their jobs, and managing for high performance, we should be giving equal attention to that ‘other half’: engagement and communication. We need to be investing time and energy in creating teams with members who communicate frequently (formally and informally), talk as well as listen, feel socially connected to their colleagues, and regularly engage with people outside of their direct team. If not, we’re not realizing our company’s potential.
That’s a lot of responsibility for those in charge of ‘building employee engagement’. How can you improve employee engagement when it’s not driven by skill, intelligence, work, or personality AND your employees are working remotely? Unlike before when a happy hour or a team offsite would give everyone a much needed morale boost, right now we need to think a little more outside the box.
Contrary to what a standard web search may tell you, there’s no step-by-step recipe for drumming up engaged remote employees overnight. That said, remote working does not have to be any less engaging. It just requires commitment from leadership, some creativity, a little remote team building, and of course, really good communication.
Here are a few tried and tested ideas to get you started…
While we were all used to the odd team bonding exercise pre-pandemic (whether we liked them or not!), there has been a recent trend towards hosting virtual team building events for remote teams. They’re what you do when your team needs a break, an injection of energy, or even a pat on the back. Plus, they’re often easier to organize, shorter to run, and cheaper than their in-person equivalent!
You can think of a virtual team event like a regular team building exercise. They’re designed to get a mixture of employees from different levels together in the same space (albeit online), doing the same easy and fun team activity, without the pressure of work or an agenda.
Online events also great for
These are all essential ingredients for building effective teams.
With a myriad of virtual team building events available, it can be hard to choose the right one for your team. Many are too complicated to organize. Online cooking team events often require participants to buy ingredients in advance. Other online get-togethers often include activities that are too obscure or difficult. Some are tough to schedule. To keep things simple, it’s best to choose activities that anyone can do (even family members and roommates). You want to keep the activities of your event fun and engaging.
You want to focus on the kinds of remote team events that employees will remember and talk about, whether work remains virtual or we all head back to being in offices together.
While we know there is a lot more to employee engagement than simply entertaining your team members for an hour or two, adding virtual events into your social playbook can be a great way to give your team a much needed break, especially now.
Even just a single fun event on the calendar can go a long way in helping your employees feel a little more connected to their team, a little more valued, and hopefully a little more engaged!
We've posted this helpful information from things we've learned hosting team events over the past several years. Making chocolate brigadeiros together is a great corporate event.
Even before COVID, we had made virtual events possible with tinyB. In our new online work and collaboration world, companies and teams are loving these online chocolate events. They find it to be a great alternative where team members can bring their family to the get-together, since it's usually being done right in their kitchen as a shared experience via video. Learn more about our chocolate virtual team building events.
and consider giving your team a break from their work from home routine. It's a fun chocolate experience, anyone can participate, and there are no shopping lists and no cooking required.
Other Interesting Reads
How to foster employee engagement when your team is remote (Harvard Business School) |
Five tips from Harvard Business School on engaging remote employees. |
What’s Wrong with the Way We Work (New Yorker) |
A historical account of how Americans have come to work more hours than their counterparts in peer nations, but is it too much? Should we be reassessing our relationship with our jobs? |
The surprising science behind successful remote meetings (MIT Sloan Management Review) |
Hosting productive meetings with a remote team doesn’t have to be a burden. Consider some of these tried and tested strategies for making the most of your virtual team meetings. |
Why the first five minutes of a meeting shape its outcome (Strategy and Business) |
Getting the right people in the room on time with a clear sense of purpose can create more active and productive remote meetings. |