56 employees, including ten trainees and working students, work in our CXS team. Most of us are assigned to the Butzbach, Göttingen, or Mannheim offices. We don’t all know each other very well, and new colleagues who have just joined us often don’t know us at all. To change that, we organize at least one team event annually.
At our last meeting, the atmosphere was very lively; everyone participated enthusiastically, and they were happy when their solutions worked. But one thing at a time. Our event coincided with the day of our trainees’ annual presentations. Therefore, they also kicked off our event. Initially, there was some excitement among the trainees, but this quickly subsided in the relaxed atmosphere.
The chain reaction
In the subsequent “Chain Reaction” workshop, we quickly found out how our colleagues operate. With the support of a trainer from stadterlebnisse.de, we were tasked with building a chain reaction and successfully setting it in motion. You can think of it as being similar to Domino Day, except that different materials were available to us. Seven small groups each constructed, built, and tested a section of the chain reaction within two hours, and then combined their sections to form a complete structure with the other groups.
How the others think
In the first step, the small groups organized themselves individually, distributed tasks, and found creative solutions for building their chain reaction. The special challenge for the entire team came in the second step: all of the individual builds had to be joined together to form one overall structure. What really made us sweat was the time limit. There was no shortage of stress. But it was very exciting to see how people handled it and how a great solution was created thanks to the different strengths in the team. The key to this was both the communication within the small groups and between the groups. There was often one person who was responsible for communicating with the other groups. Additionally, most groups designated some form of “project leader”. In many groups, some colleagues focused solely on the tasks and used tests to ensure that their setup worked. In principle, we made perfect use of the strengths of our entire team in the group work.
To be continued
Good communication was definitely the key to success. During the subsequent meal, we celebrated the success of the chain reaction and used the time for plenty of conversations. For all of us, our event was a great opportunity to exchange ideas and get to know each other. And: we had a lot of fun together.
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