Great topic
@Danielle Schroeder McCaskey! Employee engagement can really take your work life to a happier level.
One of the best employee engagements I had was once a month our team of 6 people would get a half day to "team build". The team build activities would never be the same, and they could be anything that someone had a passion about. The idea was to do an activity you like to do outside of work, but with your coworkers.
Sometimes we would go out to a new restaurant nearby. Sometimes we would go to a movie someone was excited about. Sometimes we would go for a walk in a nearby park if the weather was nice. We went to a museum once. We went to a car show another time.
It was a really cool way to get to know your coworkers better and to see what their interests and hobbies were.
Our manager at the time also would stress that during team builds, we weren't allowed to talk about work. I think this really helped emphasize that this event is about getting to know each other on a more personal level, rather than we are working from a different location.
I will say apart from it just being a fun break from the normal work week, these team builds did help the communication of our team, and foster the mindset that we are a "team", so we helped each other out a lot more with tasks, even if it wasn't necessarily our responsibility to do so.
I will note that this team build idea wasn't something the organization I worked for implemented, but something our teams manager implemented on their own.
I know every month I always looked forward to whatever team build event we were having, as you got to see your coworkers in their element when they chose the team build event, and sometimes you would see some coworkers in an uncomfortable environment with some humorous effect too.
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Doug Cantrell P.E., M.ASCE
Professional Engineer
Durham NC
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