One of the key components of Team Building is Employee Engagement, engagement drives the hidden potential of members helping do their best work. However, working virtually during this pandemic, the means to engagement have been limited which often can be a negative detractor for overall Team/Org/Company wide momentum. One of such experiments we ran across our organisation which enables a culture of brining your whole self to work.
Sharing some of these learnings , which can be adopted across multiple distributed organisation. The below Handbook can be tweaked based on team sizes and key expectations.
Key Contributors-
Objective
- This Handbook is a guideline on conducting a month-long Employee Engagement activity for team strength > 150 people.
- The 150-member org to be divided into 10 teams of 15 people each. Each team to fight for the Maximum Golds/Silvers/Bronze at the end of month similar to an actual Olympics.
- The sizes of events and participants can be tweaked according to number of global sites (IDC, US, Any other Remote Location) and sizes of their respective working team.
Organisation Composition
Teams- The 150-member org to be divided into 10 teams of 15 people each. Each team to fight for the Maximum Golds/Silvers/Bronze at the end of month like an actual Olympics. o Each team to have a Mascot who is a leader from the organisation, something like an IPL owner.
- Team to have fancy team names and some special awards based on the creativeness there.
Organisers — Employees responsible for running the overall show for a single month and ensuring the smooth co-ordination with daily work activities. o
- Event Managers- 2 per event. Responsible for defining the detailed rules, schedule and to ensure all the events are running on time.
- Flag Bearers- 1 per team to ensure there is not heaving lifting on event managers by co-ordinating with participants to show up on time and any other team needs to be communicated with the core-committee.
- Core Committee — 5–7 member team which oversees the communication, judging and all external dependencies for running the Olympics.
Themes/Tracks
While the overall theme is for employee engagement, the event should be further divided into tracks to cater the needs of varied audience needs/choices.
- Physical Activities- These activities include evaluating participants based on their physical prowess. Some activities as part of this can be daily running and cycling and tracking their mileage to evaluate winners at the end of the month/Olympics.
- Mind Activities- These activities include evaluating participants based on their mental strength. Some events as part of this can be solving the Sudoku, Kakuro, DrawSauraus, 2048 puzzles. These events can be judged based on the fastest time of solution.
- Entertainment Activities- These activities include judging the creative side of the participants using events such as dancing, singing, drawing or creative art. This can be further sub-categorised on Online and Offline Format depending on nature of the creative art.
Events
Overall Prize Ceremony.
The overall prize is calculated at the end of 1 month to find the best performing teams in the organisation based on their Physical/Mental and Entertainment quotient. The main prize ceremony is a cumulative score of the Events listed in the above Event Matrix.
- For each event above- Gold, Silver and Bronze to be awarded at the end of the final round in the event.
- For 1 event, independent of whether Individual or team event, the count of medals is always singular.
- Top 3 teams in the medal Table to get Team Trophies which can be rolling in nature if the event is to be done every year.
In addition to the Main Prize Ceremony, the following special awards to be given to encourage participation
- MVP of the Tournament- The participant who has won the most medals across all the events
- Fair Play Award — The participant who has won the most participation across all the events without winning a medal
- Team Fair Play Award- The team with the best co-ordination with the organisers and hassle-free participant in all the events.
For feedback, please drop a message to amit[dot]894[at]gmail[dot]com or reach out to any of the links at https://about.me/amit_raj.
