2020 and now 2021 has changed many businesses, industries and lives forever. With most studios having to quickly move to a work from home model, new challenges are inevitable. Some we were prepared for and some we had to figure out quickly. There’s the technical challenge of making sure that everyone has what they need to contribute from home. The production challenge of making sure we are still hitting our goals despite our flow being shaken up.The challenge of onboarding new staff and making them feel at home without a physical space to greet them in.
One challenge that I’ve personally been working to solve this last year, is trying to make sure that our team still feels connected. We have so many characters and personalities that I sorely miss seeing face to face. We need to feel together, even though we are apart. To still feel like we have friends, or someone to laugh with, even though we may be in our sweats eating ice cream for breakfast.
It can be lonely working from home. It’s hard onboarding new employees and finding ways to make sure they can meet people and feel at home at the studio, even if they’ve never stepped foot in our office.
So, what to do? The first step was to set up a weekly hangout. Every Friday at 4pm, everyone who wants to participate steps away from work and joins our Zoom call. The thing we quickly realized is, you kind of need a focus or activity to keep it fun and fresh. Just sitting around chatting can get stale quickly.
If you are being tasked with creating events for your company’s hangout sessions – I have a cheat code. Use SurveyMonkey. Create fun, random surveys and reveal the results once everyone is together. It sparks tons of lively conversation, speculation on how people will vote, reminds us of old stories to share etc.
In this example, I used SurveyMonkey to create options for our “official” studio uniform, anticipating the day we are all back in the office together. Of course, I went RIDICULOUS. To the point that some people refused to vote, but that’s part of the fun.
Some examples of the team’s options:
