How to Get Your Team Excited About In-Person Work

By Kathryn P. Haydon

After nearly a year and a half of virtual work, leaders are finding out that it’s important for people to be back in the office in person—at least sometimes.

There’s something essential missing in virtual work and it’s starting to catch up with us. I’m hearing reports that creative thinking is in free-fall and that previously cohesive, fun teams have become snippy and short with each other.

Even so, it turns out that many people have become quite content to stay home and work in their PJs. This is prompting companies to bring down the gauntlet. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman wrote to employees that they’d better be back in the office by Labor Day, “or we’ll have a different kind of conversation.”

Threats like these may work for some, but they may also compound the employee retention issue that many companies are also facing. If employees want to work in their PJs they can probably find another job that will let them.

What are leaders to do?

People need an intrinsic reason to find value in returning to work.

They need:

their leaders to articulate this reason, and
to experience the positive benefits of being back in the same room as their co-workers.

Articulating the Value of In-Person Teams

So what is missing in virtual teams?

When working digitally, we lose our personal connections to each other, the spontaneous and multi-dimensional interactions that can lead to innovative thinking, and our emotional connection to our team and its mission. Team-building and creativity suffer most.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon articulated this well in his recent annual letter to shareholders. He wrote, “Remote work virtually eliminates spontaneous learning and creativity.”

Help Your Team EXPERIENCE What They’ve Missed

Being in the same physical space with others strengthens bonds and provides the spontaneity necessary for truly innovative thinking. But after a long time away, this doesn’t just happen on its own. Your team needs a structured experience to reawaken connection, collaboration, and creativity. Sparkitivity’s Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop can help you do just that. We can help you create a new beginning and establish a new organizational culture that leverages each employees’ creative strengths and highest-level problem solving capabilities.

In just 4 hours, we can help your team recognize each others’ thinking strengths and work together to solve a pressing challenge that’s confronting the team or business.

Examples of problems teams have solved through the Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop are:

how to increase employee retention
how to bring more spontaneity into the workplace
how to increase sales

The Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop delivers results.

A ZipRecruiter team that worked to solve an employee retention issue in the Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in turnover and hiring costs when they implemented the solutions generated in our workshop. Furthermore, team cohesion was fortified and helped sustain the group’s creativity even during the long spell of remote work.

As you get ready to lead your team to step out of the virtual world and go back to the office, we at Sparkitivity are serious about helping you take the golden opportunity to make work better than it was before.
We want to help you provide your employees with an authentic experience that demonstrates the power of in-person collaboration and creativity.

On top of developing the agile thinking skills that will help your business keep ahead of change, each of your team members will receive:

The Non-Obvious Guide to Being More Creative
a personal set of creative thinking cards
a follow-up digital workbook.

Your team members will walk away from the workshop with

a clear understanding of each others’ unique creative problem solving strengths,
they will have practiced a set of strategies that can be applied to any business challenge, and
they will have solved a pressing challenge that will improve your bottom line.

Click here to start a conversation about how the Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop can rejuvenate your in-person team while they experience the high value of in-person creative collaboration!