Activity for remote team to celebrate project closure
Make your remote team celebrations more frequent
I'm a big fan of team celebrations. Working within change management, it's funny to notice that the first low-hanging fruit project teams often face and don't harvest is celebrating successes. Sometimes, we want to wait until the full project is actually live to celebrate, but in order to get there, we lose too many chances and people on the way.
I enjoy organizing team events to make the team stronger, so that when a task comes around, we don't just do it as a task, but we work on it as a team, helping each other out for a common purpose, like high-performing teams do.
At the end of a project, I found a useful exercise to do with the team, even though everyone is working remotely and there’s not enough budget to celebrate together at the same location.
I adapted the Wide Time calendar concept, emphasizing the events that made our perception of time feel intense, meaningful, and longer than it actually was, to create a team event. It has made the team stronger, with a greater sense of belonging and support.
Disclaimer: You will need to ask your colleagues personal questions. If you don’t feel comfortable with this, then you can adjust it to be less personal. However, I believe this is also part of the spark that makes this celebration more authentic.
Organize the event for the remote team
Organize this as a meeting of 30 minutes to 1 hour. I found that the longer the time you schedule, the more time there is for people to comment and share thoughts, which makes the celebration more authentic.
Send this email to your remote team before the event:
A couple of weeks before the scheduled meeting, send an email to the participants with the following questions:
Are you a cat or dog person?
How tall are you?
What’s a personal big achievement you got during the project? (For example, did you have a kid, move house, get a PhD, or receive a medal for sports)
What’s the weirdest thing that happened to you since we started?
Take a picture from various locations of the office (if your team is hybrid and works in different offices). This might require you to chase your colleagues a bit, in case they don’t send any pictures.
Where is your favorite place to work from while working remotely?
What's the toughest period you experienced since we started the project?
What's the nicest thing someone did since we started the project?
What' the skill you learned the most since we started?
What's the craziest work situation since we started the project?
Make predictions:
Will our team have more people by the end of 202*? Will we get unexpected requirements by 202*?
Will we close more than 100 Jira tickets (or support tickets) by end 202*?
What will be our greatest 202* achievement?
During the event:
Before the event, make sure you prepared a Miro board with the structure explained below.
You will facilite the event into three stages:
Breaking the ice
Reflecting and celebrating
High fiving for future collaborations
Your teammates don't necessarily need to know these stages, instead they are helpful for you to know to better navigate the emotions and psychological safety of the team as you guide them through the exercises.
Let's dive into each phase.
Break the ice:
Categorize your teammates as Dog or Cat person in a Venn diagram.
2 . Guess your team members’ height. Ask your teammates to position the other team members according to how tall they are. Split your team members into smaller groups, either in a breakout session, small remote locations they’re in, or in a chat. The idea here is that they are not silently sitting at their desks and positioning the cursor wherever; otherwise, it is not an interactive and immersive experience with your team. Ensure they are talking out loud about what they’re thinking or some experiences they might have had if they had met before. This is a funny exercise, as you might have been working with this person for hours on end per day, but you have no idea how their height, an obvious element if you were together, might be.
3. Make the smaller teams (that you created for step 2) guess the office location of each picture.
The Wide Time inspiration
Reflect and celebrate:
Show the answers of where the team members mostly like to work from.
2. Draw a Wide Time line, showing periods of intensity, highs and lows with the answers you got in the questions from 7-10.
3. Zoom in and take them through each themed answer (or the answers you selected): What was the high, what were the lows, what were the personal skills they learned along the way, what were outliers situations, and finally, take them to the common goal achieved. Of course, you should represent this as a high.
High five for the future:
Go back to the “make predictions” questions and instruct your team to make a cheer with a coffee cup, applaud, or make noise if the answer is “no” (alternatively with the answer that makes the most sense to cheer for).
In conclusion, celebrating success within remote teams is a vital yet often overlooked aspect of fostering a strong and cohesive work culture. The approach of the Wide Time calendar concept, adapted for remote collaboration, bridges work and personal stories adding more depth and meaning to people's interactions. This has proven to be a powerful tool in creating meaningful team events. By embracing personal connections and engaging in reflective activities, teams can strengthen their bonds, enhance a sense of belonging, and celebrate achievements, even in a virtual space.
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