Reboot Your Team (Again)
How rediscovering, recommissioning and recalibrating help you to bring your team back together after a time apart
Open, close, repeat. If you manage a location-based business like a hotel, restaurant, or store during the pandemic, you know this cycle all too well. You invest a lot of effort in building a team, only to have to send them on furlough or lay them off when the next wave hits. And when customers come flooding back in, you’re desperately trying to get your team back together. After all, there is a lease to pay, customers to regain, and strategies to adjust.
If you are like many others, you are already going through this cycle for the second (or third) time. In this short article you’ll read what you can do to bring your team back together. Again.
Three factors to consider when starting over
After a period of not seeing each other, your team members need three things. They need space to meet each other. They need a clear mission. And they need to adjust their way of working to the new reality. To start off, it is often enough to simply spend time together. Preferably in an informal setting. When clarifying their mission, be sure to involve the most important stakeholder. Finally, it is important to talk about the experiences of working from home and to acknowledge the lessons learned during this time.
Rediscover: Building the relationship
Many team members have not seen each other for a long time. Others have only seen each other on screens. Instead of looking each other in the eye, they have been blinking into cameras, watching themselves on screens, and searching for the mute button. And although people got a bit euphoric about digital wine tastings or Zoom coffee get-togethers at the beginning of the pandemic, they are now increasingly frustrated with digital events. For pity’s sake, no more video calls! Social interaction has steadily declined in many teams. In this time, many team members have changed. They have found new hobbies and shifted their priorities and viewpoints.
It is therefore even more important that your team members are now given the space to rediscover each other. Celebrate being together again. Some of our clients have simply taken their teams out for a pizza. Others have bought them a drink. Or two or three drinks. Others have organized half-day relationship-building workshops. These efforts pay off. One of our clients explained: “Hosting a barbecue at my house accomplished more than months of talks about internal communications.”
Plan time for one-on-one meetings in addition to group events. How are your team members really doing? What are their fears regarding the future? And their hopes? Pay attention, listen carefully.
Recommission: Clarifying the mission
Give your team a clear mission for this new start. What do you want or need to do? Rebuild your customer base, digitize sales or completely reinvent the business? In particular, talk with your most important stakeholder. He or she is usually the person or body you report to. Find out their expectations regarding the team. How would success look like? If you haven’t agreed on this, the team can only do what they think is best. And that may be right. Or it might not be. In the latter case, they might have done a great job, but it wasn’t the right job, unfortunately.
Pass the mission onto your team. One of our hotel clients reported a positive experience when the primary stakeholder (in this case, the COO) addressed the hotel leadership teams directly. Next, go a step further with your team. Ask yourself what the other stakeholders (employees, guests, neighbors, etc.) need from you in the new situation.
It’s about doing the right thing.
Once the team members know what they are supposed to be accomplishing, they can discuss how to go about it. At the same time, it’s about creating a spirit of collective effort. The best way of strengthening the bonds in a team is to pursue a goal that can only be achieved if all team members work together.
Recalibrate: Organizing collaboration
Collaboration has taken giant leaps over the last years. Many people who had previously worked in offices from nine-to-five — the traditional format — suddenly found themselves working remotely. And they have grown to appreciate some of the benefits of working from home. They can work more independently, can manage their daily schedules more flexibly, and they spend less time commuting. At the same time, some have found out how lonely it can be to work from home. And others have found navigating work, homeschooling, and housework to be a tremendous ordeal. There is no going back — these insights will remain. Encourage your team members to talk about how their perceptions of working together have changed. Ask them what you, as a team, should do to collaborate effectively in this new world. Be specific by asking them:
What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What should we continue doing?
Taken from a classic method used in team-building workshops, these three seemingly harmless questions are a powerful tool. They have helped countless teams around the world to improve their collaboration. Team members discuss what matters to them. And they agree on rules that strengthen their collaboration. All it takes is a little courage. And genuine interest in the answers.
Methods and attitude
You now know which three factors to consider when rebooting your team. You can decide how intensive you want to do this. You can schedule a one-day workshop to work on all three topics. You can hold three short meetings. Or you can ask the questions one-by-one at your team meetings.
However, a fundamental aspect underpins this methodology: the decision to involve your team.
Show your team members how important it is to you that they come together as one. And then go for it!
Together you will rock the baby.
