Simple ways to engage teams and build resilience

The way we work has been evolving for some time now as we become more digital and agile. But it's still work-in-progress. The norms we are used to are now being tested with the move to universal remote working. This challenge will be familiar to many of you: our weekly face-to-face check-ins, our project retrospectives, our Trello-board hacks are now even more important to get right.  

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Surprisingly, the challenge for us is less to do with the ability to stay productive; and more to do with figuring out how to sustain the high-levels of personal interaction and human engagement we've come to expect from an office environment and adjusting our working patterns to fit the new context.

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Underlying this desire is a need to strengthen our team and personal resilience to cope and even thrive during periods of significant and sometimes unpredictable stress. To address this need, we are focusing on what we do best, addressing the human dimensions of how people get work done. 

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Therefore, we adjusted some daily routines, established new behavioural norms, refined our objectives, increased the frequency of our check-ins, and agreed on a few reliable tools to sustain our adapted way of working. More importantly than anything else, we are bringing an attitude of intentionality to our interactions, being conscious of how we are communicating and engaging to ensure shared understanding across our remote colleagues, clients, and partners. 

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Of course, we’ve had the odd hiccups at times with laptop audio issues, impromptu broadband dropouts and the odd family member inadvertently joining meetings. However, none of these have deterred us and we’ve always found a creative work-around.

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Working with our technology partners, as part of our Partnerships 4.0 strategy, we help our clients embed these new work habits with easy-to-use digital tools that are supported by practical tips and actions.

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Saberr

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Provides an AI-driven coaching application called CoachBot that managers and teams can use to maintain a focus on team cohesion, ensuring remote teams stay engaged, perform better, and remain psychologically safe, even amid turmoil. It helps managers maintain regular check-ins and enables remote team coaching, both critical to maintaining high functioning teams and engaged employees, especially in today's decentralised environment.

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SPARTed

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Uses a mobile learning platform to create engaging content to bring ideas and solutions to life for remote or distributed teams, maintaining engagement, collaboration, and team bonds.

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We at Sia Partners help businesses to improve their ways of working, deliver change at scale, and to build an engaged and resilient workforce. Integrating these tools with new working habits that focus on the 'human’ connections helps to strengthen team bonds, build resilience, and increase personal motivation. We know from experience: get this right and everything else will follow. Watch this space and I'll let you know how we get on over the next few weeks.

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For assistance on this topic or other general business transformation challenges, contact us at ukcontact@sia-partners.com or on +44(0)20 7933 9333

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