Asked and Answered: Closers for a Virtual Team
November 28, 2011 • By Scott Enebo
Asked: I am looking for a team-building activity
for 15 people at the end of a two-day meeting. We are a virtual team of
trainers, managers and supervisors having a face-to-face meeting. Do you have
any suggestions?
Answered: I
think you are looking for a quality closing activity that is energizing and
helps synthesize information from your conference. I originally read that you
wanted a team-building activity, but since this is the end of the two days, it
sounds like a networking opportunity that combines elements from throughout
your session would be most effective.
First, I would suggest clarifying what message you want
to end with. Do you need them to take some sort of new action? Are you hoping
to better hone the relationships of this virtual team? You could likely do so
many things, but here are a couple of ideas that you may find helpful depending
on what you are looking for:
1) Graduation: Taking the concepts in the link, you may
want to think about what ideas you would want people to walk out of the room
with. This connects people in a chain as they find one another, and then you
could even take this a bit further and have a closing celebration with people
as they are now standing and possibly in a circle. Adapt, adopt and apply this
to your own context as useful.
2) CTT Quilt: The instructions on this are really as
important as the end product. With a virtual team, it is nice to know what each
person is bringing to the table and how they are going to engage and support
one another. Tailor this activity to achieve the goal you set for the end of
this session.
[These two activities are only available online until January 4, 2012. After this date, they are only available in 50 Creative Training Closers, available at the link below.]
There are a lot of other resources out in the world that
you may want to explore for more ideas too.
I took the above ideas from one of our books called 50
Creative Training Closers. For this and other book resources visit our
online store here.
I popped on to the Trainers' Warehouse website and found
a page
that is all about teambuilding activities. There are expensive and
less-expensive ideas, but they may help spark for you another idea of what you
might like to accomplish.
Scott
Enebo is a training consultant at The Bob Pike Group.