How did Mandarine Academy energize its online business seminar?Temps de lecture : 5 minutes

With the Covid 19 crisis, companies had to adapt to new remote work organizations. Mandarine Academy team has been teleworking since the beginning of the pandemic and is putting everything in place to stay productive. The need to meet, interact and have a friendly moment with coworkers is always present for the well-being and performance of employees. The seminar is an effective way to strengthen team spirit, solidarity, and synergy between employees.

Mandarine Academy organizes its annual corporate seminar in order to combine conviviality and team cohesion. Activities such as Escape Games or sporting events cannot take place, but the company still wanted to maintain this event by digitizing it. Mandarine Academy had to show creativity and innovation to engage all its employees.

How to provide fun and original activities online in order to create a moment of conviviality and strengthen team cohesion?

How to organize a seminar and especially how to communicate well on it with employees?

We explain how we realized our team building in this article.

Videoconferencing for an efficient organization of team building

Good organization is the key to a successful seminar. Videoconferencing is a clever way to bring all employees together without delay, to maintain and develop relationships remotely.

To captivate the audience, an organizer was present to ensure the smooth running of the day and establish the rules, while creating interactivity.

Mandarine Academy chose the Microsoft Teams tool from the Office 365 suite to allow all employees to sign in and participate.

Microsoft Teams is a great tool for creating meetings and having access to features that all users can apply. The particularity of this tool is that it allows you to create breakout rooms to bring participants into small groups for lively conversation and brainstorming sessions.

To facilitate the organization and create game teams, all employees joined the Teams conference room. Once the day’s agenda and rules explained, the organizer split the participants into small groups and sent them to different rooms.

The advantage of breakout rooms is that the groups can be random, or Organizers can create the groups themselves. They can also easily move participants from one room to another and add announcements, close all breakout rooms, and bring everyone back to the main room any time to debrief on the activity.

Are you interested in setting up an event of this type? We have a set of tutorials on the MOOC site to teach you how to manage breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams.

Discover the tutorials:

• Assign or switch participants between breakout rooms
• Add breakout rooms
• Change breakout room settings
• A participant wants to go back to the main room
• Recover saved items in a breakout room

Online activities for team bonding

For more than a year, online fun activities and games have developed and are relevant in the organization of team building in order to entertain and bond employees.

The company has selected two online games: Among Us and Gartic Phone.

Gartic Phone is a fantastic way to spark team creativity and have a friendly time. The principle of this game is the same as that of the Arabic phone: the first player proposes a sentence, the second player will have to draw to try to make the next player guess this sentence, and so on. At the end of the game, players compare the last guessed sentence to the starting sentence, it must be as close as possible to the original sentence.

The interest of this game is not actually to win but to help foster team spirit, goodwill and bonding between teams while entertaining them. Among Us is a multiplayer game that will challenge employees and unite teams since they have to cooperate to identify a saboteur. It is about surviving in a science fiction universe. The Impostors’ objective is to eliminate players and Sabotage using either aggressive, defensive, or passive tactics before the Crewmates complete all of their tasks or discover everyone’s true identity.

A group sharing of team building moments

At the end of each game, all participants returned to the main meeting room in order to share the results of the games together. This moment made it possible to strengthen cohesion and create a joyful and friendly moment, whilst discovering all the drawings of each team.

After a company seminar, it is important for staff to debrief and discuss their day together. All the employees of Mandarine Academy expressed their feelings regarding the difficulties they ran into, the day’s critical points but also the successes of this experience. This debrief allows to collect information and identify avenues for improvement.

It is not easy to motivate and engage all people as we all have different feelings / ease about getting involved in games or using digital tools. Remotely, it is all the more complicated to organize this kind of event because we do not have the face to face codes of communication. The idea is to draw a parallel with support for change; There can be resistance and we must ensure that all people are on board.

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