The impact of the health crisis on workplace life and the future of team building

Recent events around the world will have an undeniable impact on the future of work and on team building. In the short term, a great many companies had no choice but to move their employees to remote working. 25% of French workers did so. In the Paris region, that figure soars to no less than 41%!

Remote working in France: a challenge for team cohesion

Tried and tested? According to a survey by Odoxa-Adviso Partners, 76% of French people are in favour of developing the practice over the long term. And there is no shortage of upsides. Remote working cuts pollution considerably, allows greater autonomy and spares employees the time lost commuting. That time back lets people focus for longer on family life (or on the daily run, which seems to be the new Eldorado for many Parisians). This sense of wellbeing, working from home, in turn boosts employee motivation.

On the employer side, many were wary about letting their teams work remotely, which explains the low number of people who had ever worked from home before the RATP strikes in December. There are several reasons for that mistrust. One of the most commonly cited is trust in your own team, a deeply rooted belief in France: if people are at home, productivity will drop. The difficulty of managing a team remotely also plays a part.

Mistrust of remote working

A manager who feels they have less oversight of their team will start to doubt its effectiveness. Some managers, however, were already convinced by remote working and had put collaborative tools in place to drive performance around shared goals. Working with employees digitally calls for a certain way of organising work and, above all, for coaching. To bring people together, these forward-thinking team leaders highlighted greater autonomy and flexible hours as a way of keeping cohesion strong. A real asset for the employer brand and for motivating employees.

After many weeks of remote working, the converts now seem far more numerous! Plenty of companies are already planning to rely on remote working for the long term. PSA is one of them. Employees not tied to production will work remotely most of the time. They will only need to be in the office one and a half days a week. That affects 80,000 employees. A radical change!

A new company culture

Faced with this cultural shift, one thing seems more essential than ever: companies will need to bring people together and get employees talking to one another to strengthen team spirit. If a team no longer sees each other every day, being close-knit, with a high level of communication and mutual understanding, becomes a must. That is what will make remote working succeed over the long term. Teams will also need a shared goal and stronger collective intelligence. Group cohesion will help avoid the rise in burnout caused by a lack of connection and by isolation. Bringing teams together sits right at the heart of team management.

At the same time, how can you imagine hiring someone and starting to work with them without them ever meeting their future colleagues? What form could onboarding take if, after a few days, the employee finds themselves at home with only a limited grasp of how the company works? How do you picture colleagues who used to see each other daily, talking face to face all day long, now barely meeting at all? How do you set up and master new tools and communication channels? And above all, how do you avoid dehumanisation while keeping morale high?

Team building as a remote-working ally

Team building, in its various forms, is arguably the best answer to the problems remote working can create. Allow us to make the case.

There is nothing left to prove: team building strengthens the bonds within a team quickly and effectively. It breaks the ice in record time and builds cohesion around a shared project. Countless companies had already embraced it long before lockdown. Now, as we emerge from lockdown into a major shift in the world of work, team building is one of the answers to these new challenges.

Remote team building…

What better way to get to grips with a communication tool or a new piece of software than through play? With Arcane Experience’s remote formats, your employees can explore and understand the various tools while strengthening their team cohesion. The game usually runs through the video conferencing tool the company already uses (Zoom, Teams, etc.) and a game master guides participants through the investigation and keeps the group dynamic alive. Depending on each company’s objectives, we can draw on the employees’ own working environment and build in the software and apps they use while working remotely. A clue could be hidden in an Excel spreadsheet or in a shared folder, for example.

We can, of course, go further and imagine online onboarding developing fast. Onboarding means designing a journey to welcome a new employee into the company. It could go through gamification almost as a matter of course, making everything quicker and easier to absorb.

In the same way, team meetings, brainstorming sessions and even remote management could be gamified. Play would take centre stage in the way people work together, making it more enjoyable and more effective.

Remote team building is clearly needed, not least to get comfortable with communication and tools. But real, face-to-face connections will still matter in the years to come (or so we hope). That is why in-person team building will almost certainly become far more widespread as a way of building cohesion.

Team building IRL (in real life)…

As remote working grows, in-person team building will helpimprove communication between every team member. In-person team building lets you understand how your colleagues work, and therefore communicate better with them. Conversations are always more direct, and so more effective, with people you know at least a little. Keeping cohesion alive to work better together sits at the heart of any offsite.

The whole team’s awareness of its strengths matters more than the specific make-up of each member’s strengths. In other words, as long as you understand your own strengths and those of your teammates, you can improve how you contribute and perform within a dynamic team.

When working remotely, the sense of belonging to a company can fade if good practices are not put in place and no coaching happens. Running an event where participants commit from start to finish to claim the finest of victories tightens those bonds and keeps the group dynamic going. All the more so if the company uses that event to get its messages across, whether about news or about values.

Team cohesion at a distance

Spotting hidden skills in each employee is far harder through a screen. Ever since it began, team building has revealed hidden talents and encouraged people to help one another. By giving our best and pooling our skills for something with no real stakes, we discover surprising personalities! It is often hugely instructive for managers, who can build a bond with each member of the team. Good relationships within teams create a positive working atmosphere and, in turn, raise productivity. Put simply: you cannot build a close-knit team without buy-in to a shared project. Rallying employees around a common cause and building genuine human cohesion is what develops real teamwork.

Using team building to build a team

Gamified recruitment is increasingly common. According to a study by Le Monde, 12.7% of probation periods for permanent contracts end unsuccessfully. Hence the importance of picking the right person, especially if you will go on to work with them remotely (which calls for far greater independence). Team games save a considerable amount of time here. They let you observe a candidate’s personality, their ability to work in a team, their leadership and their thinking. Play puts candidates into concrete, real-world situations. Does the candidate take the initiative, or hold back? Do they listen, or act without regard for the group? Unlike a conventional job interview, which often favours theory, team building builds genuine team spirit.

An offsite to take things further

Beyond its ability to improve remote-working conditions, play has plenty of other benefits. The Arcane Experience team is on hand to build offsites that strengthen and develop your team’s cohesion. Collaborative working is at the heart of what we do. Our team coaching adapts to your objectives. To look at the future in a new light, through team building or something entirely bespoke, anything is possible! The future is waiting for you.