How to Run an Engaging Team Day

Thursday 27th April 2023 with UoE Digital at the Creative Quadrant in the Business School, University of Exeter

Getting your whole department together in person can be a great way to boost team morale, get everybody knowing each other better, and to make sure everyone is aligned on current priorities in a fun, engaging way – which is increasingly important since the rise in remote and hybrid working.

Given that many of our team work remotely and that the team has grown exponentially over the past year, our April Digital away day was a welcome opportunity for everyone to meet, interact and communicate. Perhaps you might have a similar situation with your team or department, where you might be working in smaller hubs or groups on a day-to-day basis and don’t have the opportunity to ‘meet’ with the whole team. Read this article to get inspiration on how to run an exciting team day around Design Thinking, objective setting, and knowing your values.

1. Introduction to Design Thinking Session

Here’s how we ran an interactive session on Design Thinking using pipe cleaner people and flight experiences!

Adam Lusby – Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Dr. Maarten Koeners – Senior Lecturer in Medicine & Medical Sciences began their presentation of ‘Introduction to Design Thinking’.  We began with a fun intro session playing interactive games such as ‘Dobble’ and ‘Tinderbox’ in small groups to enhance interaction and warm up our minds.

Continuing in different small groups, Adam and Maarten took us through a number of creative tasks. The first was to create a pipe cleaner person representing ourselves and to attach objects that we associated with, for example; a tennis racket or animal to represent having a pet or hobby.  We also wrote three keywords about ourselves. This got everyone activated and animated, laughing and talking about ourselves while learning about each other.  These were all pinned to the wall for everyone to appreciate, it was fascinating to see how many different hobbies and passions each person had.  

We then went through a ‘Flight Experience Challenge’ where we drew a timeline of our day as if we were going on a flight, considering emotions and detailing excitement, joy, fear, concern, or apprehension. 

These ‘key moments’ were plotted along the timeline showing the peaks and troughs of the day from before the flight, during and afterwards.  It’s interesting to consider how much one’s emotions and feelings can change throughout the day and how often this can be reflected in the working day.  People then split off in pairs to describe their ‘chart’ to another person and for them to redraw their interpretation without looking at the original version. 

This was an interesting way to enable empathy between staff members and to be able to appreciate each other’s experiences and feelings throughout the day, as well as to see how well we matched up our drawings to the original version.  From the exercise, Adam wanted the team to consider how to ‘Frame a question’, then how to ‘Empathise’, ‘Define’ and ‘Gather Inspiration’ to move from a problem into a solution.

Once in the solution space, he explored the concepts of ‘ideate’, ‘prototype’ and ‘test’, then finally ‘share the story’, which was particularly relevant given the recent progression and development within the Digital team.  It was an interesting way to explore how we all work currently and what could be implemented moving forward.

You can find out more information about Adam and Maarten here:
https://theplayfuluniversity.co.uk/

2. ‘Hill to Climb’ Session

Want to know how we engage the whole team with objective setting? Read on.

Sharing achievements and having the whole team come together to set clear objectives is a great way to ensure everyone’s on the same page and are working towards shared goals – this is something we’ve been doing for a year or so here in UoE Digital and we call it our ‘Hill to Climb’.

Next up, Helen and Mina took the team through the April outcomes and worked on the next ‘Hill to Climb’ for July, setting out everything we want to achieve. By creating this section in the agenda, it was a great opportunity to reflect on the latest achievements and pinpoint items currently in the development phase and goals yet to reach over the next quarter.

The team then met with their relevant chapters to discuss specific chapter-related developments and goals, as well as the Digital Strategy and how we are all in our different capacities working towards this. 

We wrote all these items onto sticky notes and put them on the wall so that everyone had access to read from all the chapters and appreciate the scale of the work taking place across the entire team.

3. Knowing Your Values Session

Empowering your team to feel the value they bring is so beneficial to team morale. Here’s more on how we did this.

Stacy, a Leadership Coach and Consultant and a member of our Digital Advisory Network, joined us after lunch.  It was a fascinating session spent exploring the concept of values and how being aware of our own values and what motivates us each day can help us to develop as not only colleagues but individuals.

Feedback From Stacy:

“Why knowing your values helps you bring your best to work.

Being a part of a team that is going through rapid, ambitious growth is both exciting and challenging. Knowing how to bring our best self to work (which includes being honest about when we’re not feeling our best) helps to create a culture of trust, authenticity and connection. And from this, personal and company growth.

A great place to start on this journey is to look at values which is exactly the exercise I took the UoE Digital team through at their offsite. With a key focus of the day being the Hill to Climb it felt fitting to help the team to look at ‘how’ they would approach ‘what’ they wanted to achieve. How could they each be at their best to collectively create this forward momentum in a positive and sustainable way?

We talked about what makes a high performing and highly engaged team before then diving into exploring values. I like to think of values as our very own internal compass that guides us through our days and our decision making. They’re personal beliefs or principles and what is important will differ from person to person. When people know what their values are at work and are able to be in alignment with these it helps them to find meaning in what they do, creates loyalty, increases satisfaction and guides good career choices.

The afternoon included a number of break out sessions where people shared with each other what they were discovering as well as where they needed help from each other, further building connection and community. One of the team fed back that “It was good to see what other’s values were, what values we had that were the same, what values were different, and why they were different!”.

Stacy Holland – Leadership Coach & Consultant
www.stacy-holland.com

4. Ben’s Big Quiz

You can’t end a team day without a fun session, can you?

The day finished with allocated social time to enable the team to talk and to get to know each other more, this is especially helpful with a team that is predominately working remotely and may not get as much time to interact on a more social level. We also had a fantastic quiz created by our team member Ben, where we collaborated in new teams to try and work out all the answers.  It was a very close competition and a real highlight of the day, giving everyone the opportunity to interact and get to know each other even more.

To keep up to date with what we’re up to in UoE Digital visit our website. If you would like the opportunity to be a part of UoE Digital at the University of Exeter, then check out our recruitment page. Search the keyword ‘digital’ to view all of our vacancies, we are constantly looking for new talent so keep checking the site for updates!