In this guide, you’ll find communication games and exercises designed to improve and teach communication skills to your team. Try running these activities with any group that wants to communicate more effectively, be better listeners and improve their interpersonal relationships.

Why are communication skills important at work? 

Effective communication is a vital aspect of any high-performing team. With good workplace communication, teams can more effectively align on what’s important, feel connected, and effectively achieve their goals.

Communication skills like active listening, honesty, radical candor, and respect can help your team create strong working relationships, be more productive and feel happier too! 

Without effective communication, problems like team siloing, misalignment, employee unhappiness and more are likely to surface. Something as simple as an unsent email or a bad Zoom meeting can be what makes a campaign fail or a team become unproductive. Working to improve team communication can be transformative for your interpersonal relationships, whatever your role or workplace!

What are the benefits of improving workplace communication?

The benefits of good communication in the workplace are numerous and extend beyond meetings, interpersonal communications, and emails.

Effective communication is at the heart of how your team interrelates and collaborates. Team members who communicate well are often more connected, more resilient and able to be productive in their roles too!

With a considered effort to improve communication skills and bolster emotional intelligence across your team, you can see some of the following benefits:

• Better conflict management and conflict mitigation
• A more connected and resilient team
• Improved surfacing of problems and challenges
• More productive and engaged teams
• Supercharged innovation and ideation
• Help cross functional teams work together effectively
• Improved employee happiness and satisfaction
• A culture of trust, openness and radical candour
• Knowledge and skill sharing
• Better relationships and improved empathy
• More effective, fit-for-purpose solutions
• Highly aligned and driven teams

The best format for improving team communication is often a workshop or training session.

By guiding your team members through a series of activities that includes experiential games and opportunities to practice their conversation skills and sharpen their emotional intelligence, you can have a profound impact on how your team members collaborate.

With SessionLab, it’s quick and easy to create a group workshop on any subject.

Drag and drop your activities into place to create your schedule in minutes. Design an effective learning flow or training session with clear timing for every item in the agenda.

When you’re done, create a printout of your agenda to bring to your communication workshop and facilitate with confidence.

Communication games to improve listening skills

Better communication starts with learning to listen. Particularly in our working relationships, a failure to listen effectively can be the root cause of many strained conversations and misunderstandings.

Learning to listen means being more present, trying to understand what other people are trying to communicate, and empathizing with their position.

Whether it’s everyday meetings or team building sessions, learning to listen can be swiftly transformative for groups of all shapes and sizes. The communication activities below are a great place to start on your journey to being a better listener, so let’s get started!

Blind Drawing

A key part of developing our communication abilities means learning to navigate gaps in understanding and listen more carefully to what other people are saying.

Put your team’s communication and listening skills to the test in this quick, creative game. Start by asking team members to pair up. Next, one person must describe an object in abstract terms, without giving away what the object is. The other team member must draw the object as best they can with the instructions they receive.

This team communication exercise is great demonstrating the power of clear communication while also warming up your group. Debrief the exercise and ask participants what they would do to improve next time for best results.

Best Summary

In many cases, better workplace communication begins by paying closer attention to our colleagues, whether that’s on Zoom, over email, or in real life. Best Summary is a great communication exercise for teaching the value of paying attention, taking notes when necessary, and listening more actively. 

Start by preparing a presentation into several logical units. After the first unit, distribute index cards and ask each participant to summarise the presentation so far. Next, sort everyone into teams and have each team pass their summary cards to the next group to evaluate and rate. 

Once the best summaries have been decided, offer feedback on key points and then continue the presentation. Follow this with another summary and evaluation step so everyone can quickly and effectively use the feedback from the first round to improve their listening and summarization skills. 

Active Listening

Whether you’re a practiced active listener or not, using the method with a practical communication activity is important in building the skill and ensuring you really live the values of active listening in your workplace. In this communication method from Hyper Island, start by introducing the idea that when we listen to others, we often do so without giving our full attention. 

Split participants into groups of three so they can each explore the roles of subject, active listener, and observer while working on a common problem or topic. By ensuring each group member experiences all three roles and reflecting on their experience, you can help your team improve workplace communication with better listening and presence in communication. 

Spread the Word

When trying to impart the practical benefits of being a better listener to a group, it can help to show how active listening can help prepare us for follow-up tasks. With this communication game, begin by sharing a short 10-20 minute presentation with your team. Next, invite small groups to independently prepare a 3-minute presentation on the key points from your presentation for a specific audience such as 7-year-old children, engineers, or volunteers. 

This is also a great way to impart other aspects of effective communication to a group, such as the need to tailor content for an audience and bring concision to what we’re discussing. Be sure to debrief effectively and highlight how teams that listened carefully were better able to summarise key points and deliver effective presentations.

Open Questions Role Play

A common pitfall for people who need to improve their communication is focusing on what they are about to say, rather than listening to the other person. This communication activity uses the power of open questions and active listening to teach participants better communication skills.

Begin by sharing the six kinds of open question with the group: What, Why, When, How, Where and Who. Next, invite one team member to volunteer and leave the room while the other team members decide something they wish to know about the volunteer. For example, the group may wish to know where the person last went on holiday.

Invite the volunteer back and ask them to make a statement about anything they wish. The group can then ask any open question to try and learn where the person last went on holiday but can only ask a question based on the last thing the volunteer said.

So for example, let’s say the volunteer starts by saying, “I had to have a cup of coffee to start my day.” The group might ask, “Where do you usually drink your coffee?” and then attempt to use the volunteers answers to guide the conversation forward while always referring back to something they said.

Experiential communication games like this one can be incredibly powerful when it comes to teaching communication skills and making them stick. Be sure to bring it to your next communication workshop or training session!

Team of Two 

Whether it’s at home or at work, many of our closest and most important relationships are between us and one other person. When communication with that person becomes strained, it can affect our personal and working life in a profound way.

Team of Two is a communication exercise designed to explicitly help two people work and communicate together more effectively. Improving your communication skills through the lens of a single person-to-person relationship can make the process more approachable and instantly gratifying. Be sure to give it a go!

Fun communication games for teaching communication skills

Improving how a team talks to one another can be hard work. Teaching better communication techniques and improving core communication skills such as active listening is important, but it’s vital you help everyone warm up and arrive in the workshop ready to become a better communicator. 

These games are great ways to demonstrate the power of effective team communication while also helping a group warm up and get to know each other. Let’s take a look!

Stress Balls 

Energizing your team while demonstrating the importance of good communication is a great way to kick-off any team workshop. Stress Balls is a fun communication game that starts simple but can easily get out of control – a good analogy for workplace communication! 

Start by forming a circle with a single stress ball and a rule to pass it along to the left. Over successive rounds, you’ll add more balls with additional rules and debrief how the added complexity impacted the efficacy of the task. Not only is Stress Balls a fun energizer but it can serve as a great introduction to communication skills and concepts you might explore later in the session. 

Minefield

Few games improve communication skills as well as needing to navigate an obstacle course while blindfolded! In Minefield, teams must go through the course in the time allocated one by one while other team members will verbally guide them.

Start by creating a simple obstacle course of soft toys and mines that players must navigate. Have a large group? Create two courses and two teams and keep track of how many mines are hit to determine a winner.

Sticks – A Metaphorical Simulation Game

A powerful learning point from any discussion of communication in the workplace is that conversations often feel different for all those involved. While an email, video call, or impromptu meeting might be zero stress for you, it might take a lot of energy for someone else. 

Sticks is a game that can help a group build greater awareness of how our energy levels, intentions and responses can affect workplace communication. Start by asking pairs to hold a stick between them without using their hands. One person is designated to lead the pair around the room or to a destination with the goal of keeping the stick upright without talking. Switch roles before then adding the rule that the person being led must keep their eyes closed. During the debrief, ask everyone to share what they learned about effective communication and what the effects of applying different pressures on their partner were. 

Broken Email

When communication fails, it can be hard for a group or team to pass knowledge or tasks effectively between members. Avoid potential frustration by helping a group learn how to better communicate ideas and pass information on effectively. 

For this communication technique, start by asking small groups to stand in a line. Show the person in the back a simple image and then take it away. That person is then tasked to trace the image on the next person’s back using their finger. Each group does this with the next person in line until the person at the front must then draw the image on a piece of paper. For added fun, add a time limit or give each time a different image. The result is a fun, reflective team game that can help kickstart a session on improving communication in the workplace too! 

Double Talk

Sometimes, the cause of ineffective communication is simply the fact that people are preoccupied with other thoughts and aren’t fully present in the conversation. Try this communication exercise if you want to jolt a group awake or gently introduce concepts of active listening while having fun. 

Start by putting people into pairs and ask one person to be a listener while the other person plays the role of the IV. While the facilitator gives a short, preferably dry, presentation, ask the IV to whisper distracting thoughts in the listener’s ear. Next, ask the group some questions based on your presentation and reflect on how well they listened. 

Reveal to the group that IV stands for inner voice and debrief on how letting your inner voice distract you while attempting to listen or communicate can lead to frustration or missed insight. Be sure to give kudos to the most creative inner voices for their distractions while debriefing to make this communication game extra memorable!   

Nonverbal communication games

Humans communicate in so many different ways beyond verbal communication. We use body language, eye contact, touch, proximity and many more methods to communicate with others, often without knowing!

These nonverbal communication games are designed to improve self awareness and teach communication skills that lie outside of traditional verbal methods.

Birthday Lineup

The best communication games are often the most simple. Birthday Lineup is a great communication exercise that teaches the importance of nonverbal communication. Begin by asking team members to organize themselves in a line according to their birthday without speaking. Without the ease of verbal communication, team members must attempt to communicate effectively by using body language, hand signals and touch.

Want to complicate things or try a variation? Blindfold a few team members or ask people to line up alphabetically. In any case, debrief by asking what the experience was like and what they learned about different people’s communication styles.

Mirrors

Becoming more aware of the body language of others (and ourselves!) is an important part of improving our communication skills. In this simple communication game, ask team members to get into pairs and choose one person to be the leader.

The goal of the game is for both people to become perfectly in-sync, as if they were the reflection in the mirror. Have one person start leading by moving and creating shapes and then, after a few minutes, switch leadership to the second person. Switch back and forth a few times and eventually let them share leadership.

This communication exercise is especially effective for teaching teams to communicate in a way that their partners can follow (not too fast!) and that communication is more enjoyable when you’re working together!

Nonverbal improv

Nonverbal communication is all about communicating meaning with our bodies, our eyes, our gestures and more. As human beings, we often do this unconsciously. In this communication game, teams are invited to consciously try and communicate a phrase to a partner without speaking.

Start with simple phrases to warm-up your group before moving to more difficult ones. Miming, “Would you like a drink?” is one thing, but how about, “Don’t go swimming! There’s a shark in the water!”

As with all communication exercises, the experience of working with good, poor or plain different communication styles can be an effective way of improving communication skills and asking participants to be more thoughtful in how they communicate.

Near and far

Whenever you bring a group of people together, you are also creating an interconnected system. How we choose to communicate with one another and the group at large can have a profound effect on that system. Consider how a spat between managers can ripple out to impact group dynamics. The Near and Far nonverbal communication game is a great way to teach communication skills while also introducing systems thinking to group.

Start by asking team members to stand in a large circle where they can make eye contact with one another. Next, ask each team member to silently choose one person in the group to stay close to and pick another they attempt to stay far away from.

Finally, have everyone attempt to be simultaneously near and far from their chosen people while moving around the room. As soon as the group moves into action, interesting dynamics will unfold. Afterwards, ask everyone to share their experiences and how this might relate to group dynamics and communication within groups.

Communication activities to improve honesty and openness

Good communication is all about finding ways to be open and honest while staying productive, respectful, and empathetic toward others. These communication techniques are designed to help everyone in a group communicate their needs, concerns, and challenges with a framework that promotes cohesion and trust. 

Finding ways to be more open and honest is key when it comes to solving organizational problems and these activities can be helpful in encouraging these values in your team. 

Appreciative Interviews

When trying to move past a problem or communication block, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of focusing on the negative elements and what went wrong. Appreciative Interviews is a great method to solving problems by starting from a point of exploring previous successes in pairs. 

Each person tells a story about a time they worked on a challenge and were proud of the outcome. Each partner then takes turns interviewing the other to discover why that situation was a success. Afterward, groups of four retell their partner’s story and listen for patterns and insight the group might use or learn from in the future.  Not only is this communication activity great for surfacing solutions positively, but it also encourages active listening, empathy and openness within a team. 

What will you tell who about what made your day today?

If workplace communication has become difficult there are things we might tell one person about how we’re feeling but not others. Think about workplace issues that you don’t feel you can share with your boss, but then discuss with your partner or friends outside of work. Often, after talking about a workplace challenge with someone outside of work, we then feel ready to talk about it inside of work. 

This communication activity utilizes this effect by asking a group to reflect on what they would say about a meeting, workshop or challenge and who they would say it to. By employing this framework, a group can not only concretize their learnings for the day but also consider how they communicate to different people. Often, we are more open and honest with some people than others when debriefing an event. By touching on this as a group, we can think about how we might communicate more openly with those people who most need it.   

Stinky Fish

Communication is hard if uncertainties, anxieties or interpersonal issues don’t have space to surface and continue to have an effect on our relationships. Stinky Fish is a framework for sharing issues, creating openness, and finding solutions as a group. As a communication exercise, it’s effective at helping a team get things off their chest constructively and with a view to create solutions rather than attribute blame.

Invite each group to write down their personal stinky fish relating to a core organisational challenge or around the subject of communication or connection. Next, give everyone time to share their fishes with the rest of the group and reflect on the experience. For best results, follow-up with an exercise that helps resolve those issues though bear in mind that finding time and space to share these worries constructively can often have a positive effect in itself! 

Generative Relationships STAR

When workplace communication is strained, it can feel tough to find a productive way to explore what has affected everyone’s working relationships safely. Communication activities that include a set framework for guiding conversations can help keep things on track and also ensure the group’s psychological safety is maintained. Start by introducing the four points of the star: Separateness, Tuning, Actions and Reasons for working together. 

Ask each person to reflect on where the team is currently at in regards to each of the four points before then sharing these in small groups and find points of consensus and difference. From there, brainstorm actions you can take to improve these points and find those you can make immediately. By ensuring everyone first has a chance to share their feelings openly and be heard, you can help a group communicate effectively and then improve a situation from there.   

Bright Blurry Blind

Organizational silos or feelings of an ‘us and them’ dynamic is anthical to good workplace communication. Building a one-team mentality that helps people interact meaningfully and positively regardless of their department of role. Bright Blurry Blind is a great communication activity that gives employees the chance to speak openly and honestly about concerns and then build a more positive working relationship. 

Start by sharing the three metaphor cards for what is bright, (clear, common knowledge) what is blurry, (known but not spoken about openly) and blind (not known and should be). Have groups arranged by role or department then create a presentation of what is bright, blurry or blind for them and their department to share with the rest of the organization. Follow with some reflection on the process and consider how you can help blind issues surface, what you can do to ensure blurry issues become bright and how to better communicate any concerns between teams in the future. 

Communication exercises to improve empathy and understanding

Without empathy and understanding, working with others can prove difficult, if not impossible. Whether it’s how we communicate in the workplace or converse in our interpersonal relationships, it can always be helpful to find ways to empathize with the other person and understand their position. 

If you’re a leader wanting to improve your facilitation skills and figure out how to help your team, empathy and understanding is possibly the best place to start. Let’s get started.

Heard, Seen, Respected 

One of the baselines for effective workplace communication is ensuring that everyone is heard when they try to speak, is seen and recognized in their efforts, and is respected by others. In this activity for communication, start by briefing the purpose: to practice listening without trying to fix anything or make any judgments. Next, break the group into pairs and ask everyone to share a story of a time when they were not heard, seen, or respected. 

By first sharing these stories before moving to groups of four to discuss patterns, your team can effectively see how the concepts of listening and helping people be heard without first rushing to judgement can help everyone communicate better and be more understood. The result is a group that can more effectively empathize and help one another be seen and heard – a surefire way of improving communication in the workplace.

Understanding Chain

Building shared understanding is fundamental to creating a culture of clear, effective communication. In an organization, it often falls to managers to impart information to the rest of the team and help them understand their position though, without the right approach, this isn’t always effective. 

Understanding Chain is a communication activity designed to help create an audience-first approach to communication. Start by asking a group to think of who they’ll be talking to and invite them to brainstorm questions that the group might ask of them. Next, invite the team to place those in the understanding chain, under one of three headings: situation, complication, or resolution. By first empathizing with an audience and sorting questions into a story chain, your group can effectively understand what they need to present and in what order in order to successfully build understanding. 

Seven Words

Words have impact. Not only do the words we choose have an effect, but our tone, delivery and where we place stress in our sentences and arguments have an impact too. This activity is based on the concept of thinking about how we say something, alongside thinking about what we say. Start by writing a seven-word sentence about yourself on a flipchart while stressing the “I” of the sentence. Ask the group to comment on the message and meaning that was conveyed by how you said the sentence and collect different interpretations. Follow with pair work where participants write and interpret their own sentences before debriefing as a whole group. 

By asking the group to consider the importance of how we say things as well as reflecting on moments they felt misunderstood, they can better empathize with others and try to create conversations free of possible misinterpretation in the future.  

Translated Rant

When passionate people care about something and something goes wrong, this can lead to people feeling upset, hurt, or angry. When this happens, it’s easy to react to the immediate situation instead of trying to understand where they are coming from and help them move forward. This communication game for work is a highly effective way to helping a group better empathize and communicate under conditions of upset or duress. 

Start by asking pairs to work together with one person ranting for sixty seconds on their pet peeve or major annoyance. Next, invite the second person to translate the rant into what the first person cares about, what they value, and what’s important to them. Check to ensure the second person got it right before switching roles and debriefing. By helping a group see what’s behind the rant and focus on what an upset person might care about and value, future conversations, and disagreements can be handled more empathetically and productively. 

Both Sides

When we receive different sets of advice that might seem contradictory, it might seem that there is a lack of understanding or empathy which can be frustrating. An important aspect of receiving advice and moving forward constructively is understanding that advice is contextual and that even if the advice might seem contradictory or not wholly helpful, the intention of the person is good. 

Both Sides is a communication activity that helps a group explore the advantages and disadvantages of two sets of advice or sides of an argument and reach an understanding that incorporates elements of both. It’s so easy to get ourselves into a position of saying one side is right and the other is wrong, though this isn’t always an empathetic or understanding approach.

Try using this activity the next time differences of opinion or advice create a blocker at work. You’ll often find that by seeing both sides, you can help all parties feel more seen and valued while also finding a productive way forward.  

What, So What, Now What?

One of the first steps to improve empathy and understanding at work is being able to see an event free from judgment and from multiple perspectives. This exercise from Liberating Structures is a great framework for reflecting on an event as a group and building mutual understanding without conflict. 

Start by asking individuals to reflect on what happened and what they noticed before discussing why it was important and then finally making suggestions on how to move forward as a team. By surfacing thoughts and feelings objectively and sharing them, a group can better understand an event and its importance in an effort to do better next time. With practice and a considered approach, this communication technique can be your goto activity for debriefings and building team understanding.    

Better Connections

Workplace communication can prove difficult if you don’t know your colleagues very well and feel disconnected from your team. Truly getting to know everyone in your team as people and not just because of their role can be what makes all the difference. Better Connections is a communication exercise designed to help a group understand one another as individuals, form better relationships and thus contextualize how we communicate in future situations. 

Start by asking a group to pair up with someone they don’t know too well and rate how connected they are to that person. Next, ask each pair to take three minutes to describe a close relationship with someone they love very much while the other person listens carefully. Debrief afterward and reinforce the point that better connections are formed through sharing, listening, and finding safe ways to communicate in the workplace.   

Exercises to teach clear communication

Have you ever felt a discussion around a workplace challenge or new project go around and around to the point of being unproductive or frustrating? 

Finding ways to be clear, concise, and stay on topic is a vital communication skill that can help both in and out of the workplace. These communication games and activities are effective at not only providing a framework for clear communication but can help teach groups and individuals how to be more clear and concise in the future. This alone can be a surefire way to help teams be more productive! 

What I Need From You

A common reason for unproductive or frustrating workplace relationships is a lack of clarity in what two parties need from one another. Misalignment or misunderstandings are problems within themselves but can also create further frustration and communication issues. 

What I Need From You is a communication technique that encourages a small group to share their core needs simply and clearly with those affected and then invite the other person to respond with concision. Ensure everyone makes clear, concrete requests and to give clear requests too. By practicing this communication style, your team can fix existing issues and also find better ways to communicate needs and dependencies in the future.    

Clear Communication

Some communication concepts are best explored with simple games that allow people to learn and engage while having fun. When it comes to helping a group communicate more clearly, this communication game is a great way of iterating quickly and building on learnings. 

Start by choosing a category of communication skill. Good examples include active listening techniques or purposes of communication. Have small groups each write a clear response to the concept on an index card and then vote for the clearest example (no voting on your own card!). Repeat and reflect to help a team share examples of best communication practices quickly while also learning the value of concision. 

Customer Service Categories 

Clear, effective communication is a staple of great customer service. But learning how to anticipate the needs of others and respond concisely to their requests is helpful whatever your role. 

In this communication game, start with a customer service category such as ‘How to win customer’s trust’ or ‘What customers expect.’ Invite each person in the group to take turns to say an item that belongs to the category while listening to the items supplied to the other players. Ask the group to eliminate any player who hesitates for too long, repeats an item, or offers an item that doesn’t belong to the category. This game is great for encouraging the learning of key communication concepts but also for building core communication skills. 

500-year-gap

Gaps in a group’s shared understanding can be one of the biggest challenges to effective workplace communication. While these gaps are likely to occur when people from different backgrounds and disciplines work together, there are things we can do to close these gaps and facilitate better communication. 

In this communication activity, start by splitting a group into pairs and having one person role-play someone from 500-years-ago. Have one person explain a modern-day object or appliance – such as a mobile phone or airplane – to the person from 500 years ago without telling them what it is. Encourage those people to fully embrace the mindset of someone from the past and ask questions in character. When debriefing, be sure to ask how the group made assumptions in understanding and how they tried to navigate the knowledge gap with concision and clarity. 

Name That Tune

So many misunderstandings and breakdowns in communication can simply come from a gap in the information two parties posess. Communication games like Name That Tune are effective methods of teaching communication skills in an experiential manner.

In this game, start by getting team members into pairs. One person will start as the listener and the other will start out as a tapper. The goal of this communication exercise is for the tapper to choose a familiar song and to tap out the rhythm on the table with their fingertips. While tappers might expect listeners to easily guess the tune, the information gap between them can make this a nigh impossible task.

To demonstrate the power of sharing information when communicating with others, try running a second round where one person can hum or give a clue and see how different the results are.

Activities to help identify and improve your communication style

Communication is often more complicated than it first seems. Articulating our needs, listening properly and responding with care takes time and effort and people communicate differently. Learning your communication style and taking steps to become a more effective communicator by being aware of how others communicate can be truly transformative. 

If you or your team find that conflict arises easily or that some members regularly feel unheard or unable to speak, that’s likely a problem with clashing communication styles. While most of the communication techniques in this post can help improve communication generally, it can also be effective to reflect on how our individual communication styles can impact group dynamics. Dedicated effort on this can help unblock unproductive working processes and improve interpersonal relationships in a cinch! Let’s give it a go!

Grounded Assertiveness Communication

Navigating workplace communication successfully means not only identifying how we communicate, but how others do it too. With this exercise, start by introducing sets of cards with the four basic communication styles: passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, and assertive. 

Have pairs or small groups then draw a random communication style card and roleplay a scenario using the scenario on the card. When debriefing, be sure to reflect on the tone, energy, and body language generated by each scenario. Learning how different communication styles can impact the openness or productivity of a conversation can be transformative. Be sure to give this game a go if you want a quick and easy way to introduce communication styles to your team.   

Yes and Picnic

For some groups, the traditional labels associated with communication styles can be limiting or difficult to get their heads around. Whatever framework you use, the end goal is the same – to help everyone communicate better while understanding that people communicate differently. 

Yes and Picnic is a great workplace communication activity to help show a group how our approach to a conversation can massively impact the outcome. Start by asking pairs to plan an imaginary event together and have four conversations on the subject. One person should enthusiastically want to do the activity while the other person responds with a response ranging from a simple no, to a yes and back and forth. By having each pair use responses that correspond with typical communication styles, they can see how these can impact a conversation and consider how to use them moving forward. 

Reframing Silence

When working as a team, silence can be interpreted differently by everyone in a group. What might be necessary reflection time for one person might be considered awkward or a sign of non-participation by others. Using a communication activity to reframe silence and help quieter group members contribute is a great way to help a group grow and learn to sit with silence. 

Start by explaining all the ways in which silence can be interpreted, ask for understanding and space, and then gently encourage participation from quieter teammates. When it comes to effective workplace communication, helping everyone be understood while being given a chance to contribute can make all the difference. Try following this exercise with further activities and discussions and challenge the group to be aware of the lessons learned, whatever the workplace context.

Communication games to improve self awareness 

Some workplaces issues can stem from failing to understand or be aware of the ways in which our actions or communication styles can affect others. Being self-aware when we communicate often means being mindful of how we listen, speak and deliver information, all while also being aware of our own needs, triggers, and sore points. 

As with all communication skills, what might seem easy for one person or situation might not be easy in another. Recognizing that this is an important element of communication and then moving towards improving it is the first step on your communication journey. 

Everyday Hassles

Even the most self-aware of us can often have automatic responses and behaviors which can affect those around us. Think about how getting stuff in traffic might lead to us getting angry without thinking. Does that response actually help or make us feel good? 

This communication game is designed to show us that our automatic responses can be changed and we can improve behaviors that might otherwise affect our workplace relationships. Start by asking small groups to brainstorm alternative, better ways to respond to an annoying situation such as getting stuck in a traffic jam. By then considering alternative responses to a series of hassles and then identifying patterns, your group can each see how we might reconsider our automatic responses and be more self-aware of how we communicate with others.

Lasting Impression Elevator Pitch

Most people know that first impressions have a lasting impact that can make all the difference to how we later communicate. Being aware of how we introduce ourselves and our roles can be crucial at improving both our careers and workplace relationships. 

This exercise from Thiagi Group asks participants to prepare an elevator pitch for quickly describing themselves, their role and interests. By workshopping and reflecting on how they’ve presented themselves to others, your group will be more self aware in future communications. Plus, they’ll learn a valuable skill in being able to discuss themselves and their role with efficiency and clarity. Perfect when it comes to working with others and communicating better at work!

Blame or Praise 

A large part of using self awareness to be a better communicator is in gaining knowledge of how we can interpret situations because of preexisting conditions. This communication game is another great method for helping a group develop workplace awareness. Start by distributing the two different versions of the blame or praise handout among the group and ask them to record their responses. 

Both versions of the handout explain how a company chairman’s decisions either had a positive or negative effect on an outcome. Crucially, each handout differs in regards to whether the chairman intended the outcome to happen or not. By reflecting as a group, we can learn to separate intentions from outcomes and practically examine how certain conditions can impact how we perceive and communicate with others. 

Social Virus

We’ve all been caught up in workplaces where positive or negative feelings have spread through the team. By considering how our emotions can be transmitted through a group, we can start to practice a greater degree of self-awareness and control in all of our workplace communications. 

Start by choosing one person at random to be the infector general, whose job it is to infect other people in the group with a negative facial expression. Once infected, a player’s role is to try and infect three other people. After a negative round, switch it up to a positive infection. Communication games like Social Virus are great for teaching concepts in a fun, memorable way while also inviting self-awareness. Try it at your next team meeting as part of a broader conversation on group communication for even better results!

Playing with Status

Organizations aren’t flat. Sometimes, communication between people at differing levels of seniority or expertise can feel tough because of this imbalance, but it doesn’t have to be! Playing with Status is a communication game where pairs roleplay a simple workplace situation multiple times with different levels of status. 

Being aware of how power dynamics can not only affect how others speak to you but how you might speak to them can be transformative when it comes to improving communication at work. When we’re made to feel inferior in status or are simply unempathetic to how status affects others, the result can be damaging. Don’t let this be the case in your organization!  

Communication techniques for giving feedback

All teams have times when they need to reflect, debrief and share feedback. Done correctly, it’s one of the best ways to improve group dynamics and be more effective in your working practices. Done incorrectly, poorly delivered feedback or unfocused discussion on what went wrong can do more harm than good. These communication activities are designed to help a group give better, more focused feedback that helps everyone share how they feel in a productive manner.

Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue

Effective communication is all about concision and empathy, though when teams come to giving one another feedback, that can often go out of the window. Communication frameworks such as this exercise are great for helping groups have productive feedback sessions that build trust and openness. 

Have small groups work to write feedback to each other using a simple start, stop and continue structure. By filling in the gaps in set sentences, each person is able to deliver consistent feedback that is simple and useful to everyone. Finish by having each person deliver feedback verbally and then handing the post-it to the person addressed. You’ll find that feedback is not only more effectively transmitted but also received, and without the potential for as many difficult, unproductive discussions. 

Principles of Effective Feedback

Outcomes and frameworks shaped by a group are often more effective than those simply given to them. What works for one team might not work for another, and this communication exercise is all about coming up with a set of rules for giving feedback that is bespoke and designed by the team that will use it. 

Start by working in pairs to give examples of when they have received effective and ineffective feedback. As a group, you’ll then brainstorm principles of effective and ineffective feedback and agree on a set to use in feedback sessions moving forward. By finishing with a discussion of how to ensure these principles are followed, you can have more meaningful and productive communications around feedback. You’ll also have a readily usable resource for the future! 

One Breath Feedback

Unfocused communication can be frustrating and unproductive for all involved, especially when it comes to giving and receiving feedback. Some people might feel intimidated when giving feedback at the end of a session or alternatively, someone might continue speaking long after their point has been made. 

Avoid these situations and create a more productive, concise feedback culture with this communication exercise. Simply ask your group to give feedback using just a single breath – often just 20-30 seconds per person. By clearly outlining this rule in advance, your team will also have to carefully consider what they might say too – a great result for any workplace communication! 

In conclusion 

Strong, effective communication in the workplace is crucial for effective teams, though, without considered effort, it can become problematic. 

We know that when group communication breaks down or is in need of improvement, it can be difficult to know where to begin. By using communication games, team members can find a framework for moving forward, improve their listening skills and develop their emotional intelligence too!

Ready to go further? Explore this guide on how to plan an effective workshop for the next time you’re leading a session of communication skills.

Without a healthy company culture, you can see toxic behavior, reduced productivity, and even lose members of the team!

But how can you and your team co-create an organizational culture you can be proud of and that makes your team want to come into work every day?

In this article, we’ll explore why team culture is important and discuss eight ways you can start to improve your culture today. Let’s dig in!

What is team culture?

Team culture is a collection of values, behaviors, working practices, and beliefs that team members share while aiming to fulfill their collective purpose. 

Every team has a culture. Even if you’ve never thought of it in those terms, consider all the ways in which your team interacts, what you value, and what is important to you as a group. That’s your culture. 

Remember that team culture is a reflection of your shared values and working practices, and it will be formed by both collective and individual actions within the team. 

The question you need to ask is whether you’ve thought about what your culture should be and what actions you have taken to achieve it.

What is good team culture? 

A strong team culture is one where everyone in the team is aligned on purpose, values, behaviors, and working practices while also feeling they are celebrated as individuals. 

In a good team culture, members of a team understand group and individual purpose as well as their role within the team. It’s vital to know why you are doing the work you are doing and believe in the goals and purpose of the team.  

While positive team culture can emerge organically, it’s important that you come together to define your culture and align on what it is and how you live it. This might mean creating a culture statement or code of conduct, or simply working to strengthen the bonds and shared understanding between your team. 

Here are some of the major elements of a great team culture:

• Clearly defined purpose and goals 
• Alignment on team values & working practices
• Space for personal and professional growth
• Regular opportunities for open, honest discussion
• Flexible working hours
• Wellbeing programs
• Supportive policies on illness and vacation
• Opportunities for cross-function collaboration and connection
• Team code of conduct
• Transparent, communicative management
• Thoughtful systems for feedback
• Time and space to have fun as a team

​​Why is team culture important? 

Team culture is important, whether you’re an organization of five people or five hundred. With a healthy team culture, everyone in your team can be happier, more engaged, and productive in the work that they do. 

Your working environment is a direct result of the team culture you’ve created – it touches all aspects of the work you do as a group and can make a workplace successful or unbearable.  

As mentioned above, every team develops a standardized way of interacting, working together, and demonstrating certain values. It’s important to define and co-create your team culture so you can ensure those interactions, working practices, and behaviors are those you want as a group. 

Without a healthy and well-defined team culture, it’s easy to slip into a toxic or unproductive culture. As reported by HR magazine, as many as 27% of UK employees quit their job due to toxic workplace culture. Good team culture is an important ingredient in attracting and retaining great talent. 

So whether you run a team building session or a workshop on company culture, it’s worth investing time and effort to define and improve your team culture.

What are the benefits of a good company culture?

When you and your team work together to define and improve your culture, the benefits can be seen in everything from everyday interactions to organizational outcomes. 

Remember that company culture is a collection of your values, working practices, and behaviors. Your shared culture has an impact on every part of your organization and the benefits of improving your team culture will be felt at every level. 

Here are some of the benefits of a good company culture:

• Improved motivation
• A happier, more engaged team
• Retention of top talent
• Better communication and collaboration
• Improved surfacing of problems and challenges
• Increased trust between team members
• Purposeful, value-based decision making
• Improved autonomy and efficiency 
• Personal and professional growth
• Supportive working environment

How to improve team culture?

Improving the way your team works together and understands one another isn’t as hard as you might think. Creating a great company culture is something you can start doing immediately, in ways both big and small. What’s important is that you understand what you are trying to achieve and involve your entire team in the process. 

Remember that team culture isn’t about giving everyone bean bag chairs, having a happy hour, and calling it a day. Thoughtful projects, team workshops, discussions, and incremental changes to working practices are all part of making a great team culture, though they can take time to have an impact. 

In the next section, we’ll explore eight steps you can follow to build a strong team culture. You’ll also find include some tried and tested activities and methods you can use to engage your team members in the process too. 

Define your purpose 

Defining the purpose of your team is an important first step to building a productive team culture and improving team performance.

Without a shared purpose, it’s hard for a group to feel like they are pulling in the right direction and might not even understand why they are doing what they are doing. A poorly defined or nonexistent purpose can leave members feeling isolated or aimless – all of which can have a devastating effect on culture. 

Co-creating and defining a clear purpose for your team can help ensure alignment, get people doing work that makes them happy, and improve communication between team members too. 

The following activities are great for helping a team define its purpose and understand why you’re being brought together. This creates a foundation for a high performing teams to blossom and thrive.

• Team Purpose & Culture
• Nine Whys
• Purpose to Practice

Team Purpose & Culture

Defining what your shared purpose is and what you want your team culture to be is the first step towards having a culture you can be proud of. There are many ways you can go about defining your culture, though having a structured approach is vital. A framework like this method from Hyper Island can help ensure that everyone is heard, can contribute, and that the results are something you can stand behind as a group. 

With this proven step-by-step process, you can co-create a living visual document for both team purpose and culture that can be referred to in the future and can grow with you. 

Nine Whys

When working to align on team purpose and understand what we might bring to the table, it’s important to go deeper than the first, most obvious answer. For example, it’s reasonable to say that the purpose of a software company is to sell software but is that enough for people to get behind?

In order to craft a compelling purpose that a team culture can be built around, a group must go further and ask why are you making this software specifically? What problems are you trying to solve, and why is solving that problem important to you? This exercise from Liberating Structures challenges a group to go deeper and provides a framework for surfacing core purpose meaningfully. 

Finding a compelling purpose and going beyond our initial assumptions or responses can help provide the foundation for a productive team and culture. Give it a go!

Purpose to Practice 

For some groups, big picture thinking around team purpose is enough to feel galvanized, connected, and ready to move forward. For others, it’s important to connect core purpose to concrete actions at the outset in order to get them on board. In either case, helping stakeholders understand how their individual efforts and practices intersect with the overall purpose can help ensure that your purpose and culture are lived by everyone in an organization.

With this method, start by defining your shared purpose before introducing key elements—principles, participants, structure, and practices— that will help the team achieve that purpose in concrete terms.

Define and live your core values

Your core values are what differentiates your team from others, and they are a unifying force your team can get behind when making decisions and working together. For example, if your core values include kindness and honesty, these aspects should be highlighted and practiced by your team.

Your team’s culture goes hand in hand with your core values and often, teams that are having difficulty building a winning team culture are missing clearly defined core values. On other occasions, it’s a matter of teams having core values lost in a document somewhere and not truly living them.

Defining your core values is an activity that is best done with all team members and the activities below are a great way to do that. Once you’ve defined your values, it’s also vital that you live them as a team. Try celebrating great demonstrations of core values from individual team members during your monthly all hands and using them as part of your performance analysis cycles.

In my experience, a positive team culture is one in which your core values are well defined, front of mind and are regularly discussed among team members.

• Team Canvas
• Core Values Canvas
• Explore your Values

Team Canvas

Shared documents that clearly align everything from core values to how your team wants to collaborate are a hallmark of a high performing team culture. In this step-by-step activity, you and your team can first work to discuss, define and refine and desired team culture.

By involving all team members in the creation of the canvas, you can also create alignment on how each aspect should be done in practice. This makes living core values a much sim

Core Values Canvas

Building a positive team culture often starts with your core values, but it’s not always easy to decide on what they should be. This exercise is an effective way of simplifying the process and getting buy-in from every team member.

Start by explaining the importance of values and exploring what inflates and deflates your company’s culture. By then creating shared understanding of each value and then ranking their importance, you can effectively create the foundation for a great culture in which your values are front of mind.

Explore your Values

Understanding and sharing our individual values can be an important first step to defining values for your entire time. This exercise is designed to help participants quickly brainstorm values that are important to them before narrowing them down to their three core values. Follow this with a reflection and small group discussion to explore the importance of these values, as well as how they are seen and lived in everyday life. 

A working environment where everyone feels able to live their values and are appreciated for doing so is a healthy, productive one! 

Cocreate your culture and put it into writing 

Team culture can often feel like an indescribable, effusive thing and your group might have different ideas of what your team culture is. If you want to ensure your whole team believes in your team culture and can contribute to it, it’s important to document and share what your team culture actually is. 

Even more importantly, it’s best if you and your team create your team culture statement together. Not only can everyone get a shared understanding of what your team culture is, but you can ensure everyone can contribute to shaping what your team culture might be. A good team culture reflects the group as a whole – be sure to tap into the collective energy of your team and create this together. 

These team culture exercises will help your group define your culture together and then create living documents that you can refer to and improve on in the future!

• Culture Design Canvas
• Code of Conduct

Culture Design Canvas 

Team culture is a composite of purpose, values, behaviors, and agreed-upon working practices – in short, it’s a lot of elements to keep track of! Using a framework for defining your culture and touching upon all the vital elements is helpful in ensuring you and your team explore what makes a healthy team culture. 

The Culture Design Canvas by Gustavo Razzetti is also useful in helping you map both your current and desired team culture and identify the steps you can take to reach a future state that works for everyone in a team. We’ve used this method internally at SessionLab and found it especially useful when trying to create change as a team!

Code of Conduct

Having your culture documented is often a vital step in ensuring that the group upholds that culture and understands what is expected from them in concrete terms. The challenge of many working agreements is that people may not have taken part in creating them, do not have a shared understanding of the contents, or simply disagree with some of the elements. This activity from Gamestorming methods is an effective way of co-creating a code of conduct that everyone can understand, uphold and live by. 

Start by writing down “Meaningful” and “Pleasant” and inviting the group to share how they will make the meeting or workshop have those outcomes. By then asking participants to agree on what an idea means and how they might ensure it happens, you can effectively move towards creating a code of conduct you all feel empowered to follow. 

Clarify how you want to work together 

Teams are always composed of individuals who may have varying ideas of how they want to work together. Culture can be made or broken by how team members interact and work together.

A good team culture is one where everyone is treated how they want to be treated and you are aligned on working practices. 

If someone does not feel their needs are being met or that their time or work is being respected, this can have a negative effect on team culture and working practices.

Take the time to define and clarify your working practices and you’ll see benefits across all team interactions – a huge boon to creating a happy, productive team culture!

• Alignment & Autonomy
• Generative Relationships STAR
• Team Remote Working Charter
• What I Need From You (WINFY)

Alignment & Autonomy

A strong team culture is one where people are aligned on purpose and empowered to work both individually and collectively on achieving that purpose. Often, this means giving all members of a group autonomy to work in the best way for them and enabling better-working flexibility.

Start by asking the team to reflect on times in the last six months where they felt more and less aligned and more or less autonomous. After reflecting, challenge your group to consider what would help them be more aligned but also, how they might be empowered to be autonomous and work better both individually and as a team. 

You’ll often find that helping people discover the ways they can be autonomous in their work while supporting the shared goal can be transformative in how we spend our day-to-day and can massively improve team culture. 

Generative Relationships STAR

From one perspective, team culture is formed and practiced by how we interact with the other people on our team. Considering what makes some of those relationships good and impactful while other relationships may be strained or difficult can help reveal how to make a healthier team culture. 

With this method, invite each member of the group to individually assess the team using four characteristics: separateness, tuning, action and reason. Next, ask small groups to place dots on the STAR compass for how strongly they feel the team is performing on each point and discuss. By then identifying patterns and coming up with ideas for how to improve problem areas, your team can successfully create some action steps for improving team work and your collective culture. 

Team Remote Working Charter

All teams benefit from having defined working practices and habits. A working charter can help everyone in the group know what’s expected of them, collaborate effectively and be successful in their role. What’s important is that any such charter should reflect the group, and ideally be co-created by members of that group. 

When working in a virtual team, it’s helpful to acknowledge the unique and sometimes challenging nature of remote work in order to come up with a set of working practices that are fit for purpose. This method from Hyper Island is designed especially to help a virtual team define how they want to work together while surfacing some of the challenging elements of remote working in a productive way.

What I Need From You (WINFY)

It’s common for friction to emerge for teams working together, even if they’ve aligned on a shared purpose. Often, part of the problem can arise in how we communicate our needs and coordinate around that purpose. When communication breaks down or we don’t feel supported by our colleagues or managers, that can be massively damaging to team culture. If the issue persists it can even result in a toxic workplace – something we want to avoid!

What I Need From You is a simple framework for helping members of a team express their needs simply and clearly and repair relationships that might have been damaged under previous working practices. By using a structured response of either yes, no, I will try, or whatever, you can have an effective, meaningful conversation and move things forward with transparency from both sides.  

Build trust

Good teams are built on trust. When it comes to sharing values, and discussing challenges productively, it’s hard to do so without first having trust. When a team really trusts one another, people feel able to share, raise concerns and contribute to the living team culture. 

When trust in the workplace is in need of repair, it’s a real test of the culture you’ve built. Do people feel they can air concerns freely and can trust that they’ll be listened to? Can you work together towards a meaningful resolution and rebuild trust?

Trust, honesty, and openness are integral to building and maintaining a strong team culture. Whatever the age of your team, be sure to create space for building, maintaining, and repairing trust with these activities.

• Trust
• Translated Rant
• Life Map
• Trust Battery 

Trust

While it might seem that trust is universal, it’s common for members of a team to have varying interpretations of how trust is shown, received, and understood. Discussing how each of us might feel trusted and how we build and show trust and creating space to explore the differences and similarities can be generative. This exercise from Thiagi Group is designed expressly to do that.

Start by pre-preparing a set of around twenty trust cards, each with a single characteristic, behavior, attitude, habit, value, or beliefs around trust written on it. By then going through a process of creating and sharing their own trust cards and creating team trust posters, your group can effectively surface all those factors that affect trust in the workplace and think about how they can better build trust moving forward.  

Translated Rant

Creating space for members of a team to be open and honest is a vital ingredient when building trust and improving organizational culture. The other side of the equation is trusting that the other person is willing to actively listen when you are honest and try to understand where you are coming from. 

This activity from Erica Marx is a great way of helping people build the skills to understand others and support efforts to be honest and open. In pairs, have one player rant for sixty seconds about a pet peeve while the other is instructed to listen for what’s important to them and what they value.

After the rant, the second player then translates the rant into statements about what they care about while checking that they got it right. By switching roles and then debriefing, you can help your group better prepare for both being honest and receiving honesty in a productive way. 

Life Map

It’s hard to trust people you don’t know well. When we get to know people better and in a more meaningful way, it’s much easier to interpret actions, work together productively and trust the other person. 

Life Map is an activity designed to help people express what is important to them and share their stories in a simple, fun manner. Start by asking participants to draw a map of their lives from birth to the present day by using common symbols and simple pictures to note significant moments. 

The result is a team of people who know each other better, feel more comfortable sharing what’s important to them, and are better positioned to contribute to an open and inclusive team culture. 

Trust Battery 

As with all aspects of team culture, it’s vital that a group is open and honest about where they are at and what problems they face with trust in order to move forward. Trust Battery is a great method for helping a group check-in with themselves and each other before then understanding what they need to do in order to build or repair trust. 

Start by inviting participants to measure the level of their trust battery with each of their coworkers. Remember to be honest and ask your group to reflect on how they might improve their trust batteries. During the debrief, it’s also important to note where people are misaligned and find space to surface why this might be. Be sure to explore this fully and encourage everyone to consider what actions they might take to improve mutual trust for the biggest impact! 

Develop shared understanding

Team culture can be broadly understood as a set of shared values and agreed-upon behaviors that determine how a group interacts and works together.

Taking the time to align on those values and behaviors and ensure everyone is one the same page is integral in building a strong team culture that sticks.

Not only this, but teams that understand one another are better able to navigate issues, support one another, and stay happy. Without a shared understanding of roles, working practices, and how our actions affect others, it can be hard to create an effective team culture.

Let’s look at some activities that can help create a shared understanding among the members of a team. 

• Team Self Assessment
• W³ – What, So What, Now What?
• Circles of Influence
• History Map

Team Self Assessment

All teams are composed of individuals with different roles, needs, and working practices. Developing a shared understanding of how everyone will work together is a key part of building your team culture. Without defining and clarifying these elements, it’s hard for a group to align and come together meaningfully. 

This method from Hyper Island provides a framework for allowing a team to self-assess and explore how they might better work together across six categories ranging from team relations & environment to responsibility and productivity. By the end of the activity, you’ll have a clear document you can use as a point of shared understanding for your team! 

W³ – What, So What, Now What?

Any working group of people may encounter conflict or differences of opinion from time to time. If these situations are not properly discussed and learned from, the result can be disgruntled employees, misaligned teams, and a toxic work environment. 

This activity is designed to help a group methodically explore and debrief an event or process to understand what happened, why it is important, and then decide how to improve and move forward together. Start by working individually to describe what happened before moving to small group work. By then debriefing and deciding actions as a full group, you’ll ensure everyone is heard and can be collectively understood. A great foundation for a productive team culture!

Circles of Influence

Companies and teams can be increasingly complex as they grow. This complexity can be part of the reason for team misalignment and if not properly managed, can damage your team culture too. Build a more conscientious team culture by using this exercise from Hyper Island!

Start by asking everyone to write down things that meaningfully impact the team, both internally and externally. Next, invite the group to decide whether these items fall in under the circle of influence or the circle of concern. Debrief and discuss in order to help everyone understand and align on what items they should or should not focus energy on in the future.

History Map

Creating a shared understanding of a team’s history or collective experience is a vital part of great team culture. This activity is designed to help a group reflect on a period or project collectively while allowing everyone space to contribute both their individual experiences too. 

Start with a large whiteboard or piece of paper and include a few key events or dates to create a timeline for the reflection period. Next, invite the group to add elements of their experience to the history map using words, images, drawings and whatever else you feel is appropriate. 

After some silent reflection, invite participants to share a single moment that has been most impactful to them. By creating a collective history map, your group can reflect on all aspects of a project and better align with one another too!

Appreciate and celebrate one another  

After a team has aligned on their culture and values, it’s important to celebrate when you actively live those values and appreciate everyone’s efforts. It’s a vital part of keeping your team culture alive!

Going further and showing appreciation for each other as individuals is also a vital part of a healthy team culture. When we are seen and valued, it makes us feel good and more connected to one another as a group. 

Try using some of these activities to help a group appreciate one another and build an appreciative team culture where everyone is seen and valued.  

• Appreciations Exercise
• Myers-Briggs Team Reflection
• Living Core Values

Appreciations Exercise

Hearing about your strengths and receiving positive feedback from others is an effective way of building bonds and creating a healthy team culture. It feels good to feel valued by your teammates! For this exercise, start by having each participant write down their names on the bottom of a piece of paper before handing it to the person to their left. Each person then writes down a few words to describe what they value most about the person named on the page. 

Once the paper has come back to the original person, have a few moments to read before having each person read out the strength or value they liked the most. By affirming this strength on paper and then aloud, the appreciation is more likely to have lasting impact. 

Myers-Briggs Team Reflection

Personality tests can be great tools for improving group and personal understanding. Being aware of both your own personality type and those of your colleagues can be massively helpful for your team. Not only can it help a group understand actions and motivations, but it can also make it easy to see and celebrate strengths too.

Whatever personality type tool you use, be sure to take the time for groups to reflect on the different aspects of their results and discuss as a team. The resulting discussions and celebrations of one another through such a tool can often be as helpful as the initial result. 

Living Core Values

An environment where team members regularly give kudos to each other is one signifier of a great company culture. Organising appreciation giving rituals around your values is both a great way to celebrate what you’ve done well but also ensure that your values are continually practiced and reinforced.

The best team cultures I’ve been a part of have always spent time celebrating individual and collective efforts. Use this exercise to not only highlight how people are living your company’s values but also create space for thanks and celebration.

Have fun together! 

An example of poor team culture is when people don’t feel connected to one another. Of all the methods there are for building team culture, having fun as a team can be one of the most transformative. Simply feeling more connected and getting to know each other outside of working roles can be instrumental in helping your team culture grow.

You might have away days, team events, and wellbeing programs that focus on introducing fun in the workplace, but it’s important to note that you can have fun together during meetings and workshops with simple icebreakers games or energizers. 

Remember that team building games and activities of all shapes and sizes can be useful when building your culture!

Laughing and having fun together between tough tasks and periods of hard work can be integral to building a great team culture, even if it’s just ten minutes in your day. Try these games and activities if you want an easy, low-impact way to start building a fun team culture. 

• Bang
• Doodling Together
• Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament)
• GIF challenge

Bang

Having fun as a group is especially important for new teams who are just getting to know one another. Bang is a fun icebreaker game that is simple to teach and can instantly generate a good atmosphere in a group. 

Start by getting the group to stand in a circle and choose one person to stand in the middle as the sheriff. The sheriff spins around before stopping, pointing at someone and shouting bang. The target must duck to avoid the shot while the person on their left and right must then shout the name of the other person. The last to shout the other person’s name is then out of the game. Repeat until you have just two people left and have a duel to finish the game! 

Doodling Together

Tapping into some of the things we did as kids and unleashing our inner child can be especially effective when starting to build your company culture. Finding space to have fun, collaborate, and celebrate creativity should always be encouraged.

With Doodling Together, start by handing postcards or small pieces of paper to your group. Next, invite each person to draw a form before passing their card to the next person. The next person then adds an animal to the form and passes the card on again. 

By adding new elements with each pass and encouraging silliness, you and your group can establish creative confidence while having fun too! 

Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament)

Simplicity is king when it comes to finding space to have fun as a team while at work. If you want to find a quick and easy way to inject fun into a team workshop, a rock, paper, scissors tournament is a great place to start.

Start by asking everyone in a group to pair up and play rock, paper, scissors. The loser then becomes a fan of the winner who cheers them on in the next round. Continue until you have two large crowds cheering on the final pairing. Add additional rules or conditions for cheering if you like and don’t be afraid to run this one in virtual or hybrid settings too! 

GIF challenge 

Having fun as a group is especially important for virtual teams who may not have as many opportunities for spontaneous games or exercises. GIF challenge is a simple activity that can work as a quick icebreaker game or be used as part of an ongoing tournament or challenge.

Start by posing a question or challenge in your messaging app or on your online whiteboard. Each participant must quickly respond using a fun and appropriate GIF. Anonymous posting is best so you can then have the group vote on their favorite and you can select a winner! Run several rounds and allocate points to turn this into a tournament and give out prizes to the winner for bonus credit!

Team culture is too important to leave to chance

Defining and improving your team culture with a structured workshop is an effective way to engage your team and create a culture you can be proud of.

With SessionLab, it’s easy to create an effective agenda for your culture workshop. Drag, drop and reorder blocks to build your agenda in minutes.

Your session timing adjusts automatically as you make changes and when you’re done, you can share a beautiful printout with your colleagues and participants.

Explore how teams use SessionLab to collaboratively design effective workshops or watch this five minute video to see the planner in action!

Wrap up

Building an enduring team culture doesn’t happen overnight, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things you can do today to improve your culture. Being honest about what needs to improve, defining your ideal culture, and taking pragmatic steps to achieve a better team culture are great ways to get started. 

It’s so vital to try and cultivate a team culture where everyone feels seen and heard and where their values are celebrated. Not only will you see an improvement in motivation and productivity, but you’ll have a happier, more connected team too!

Did you have any tips for building team culture? Have you found any of the above methods particularly useful? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below! 

How many times have you found it tough to work with others or been frustrated by working processes? These are symptoms of poor collaboration skills and it might be time to reconsider how you and your team collaborate and work towards your shared goals. 

It’s important to note that collaboration has fundamentally changed over time, and it is not as simple as it sounds. You can’t make collaboration in the workplace happen overnight. It is a process that often requires open discussions, building skills, and an honest appraisal of working practices. 

A great place to start is in first helping your employees to build their skills while creating a work environment that supports those skills. An environment that inspires your employees towards better collaboration also helps build resiliency, productivity, and happiness. 

Whether you are a hybrid, fully remote, or co-located team, you should invest in improving workplace collaboration.

In this post, we’ll explore what good collaboration is, show you some of the most important collaboration skills and give you practical tips for improving team collaboration. Let’s dive in! 

• What is effective collaboration?
• Why is collaboration in the workplace important?
• What skills do you need to be a great collaborator?
• How to improve your collaboration skills
• How to improve team collaboration

What is effective collaboration?

The simplest way to understand collaboration is that it is effective teamwork. A team with good collaboration skills can work together effectively enough to produce better goods with it. Whether virtually or in person, your teams need to be connected. You can use communications tools or cloud-based servers to build collaboration among your team members. 

Besides this, there are many other ways to create and foster a collaborative workplace. The most significant indicator of a collaborative workplace is where your employees feel safe, seen, and heard. Your company should have standardized systems and collaboration processes to run efficient work sessions and meetings. 

Remember that all group efforts should extend throughout your organization. From junior staff to executives, collaboration principles should be lived by everyone. Collaboration doesn’t work if not everyone in the team is living its core elements and thinking about how to better work together.  

Why is collaboration in the workplace important? 

You might have a team of diverse individuals with different skills, talents, and expertise. To bring out the best from them, you need to ensure that the door to collaboration is always open to them; nothing should come in their way. That way, you will utilize their abilities, knowledge, experience, and skills to the maximum capacity. This will not only help them, but your organization will also benefit from it in the long run. 

Collaboration can especially be helpful for fast-tracking projects as employees with combined skills and expertise can get tasks done more efficiently. More minds mean more input, so if one employee cannot do a job, the other would help them get through.

When your employees know each other and understand how their teams think and work, they can maintain a mutually beneficial approach to work. Here are a few of the benefits you can see from improving workplace collaboration on your team.

• Enable innovation
• Stronger teams
• Better customer experience
• More skilled and knowledgeable employees
• Open and productive team culture

Enable innovation

When all the employees work together with their collaborative skills, abilities, and knowledge, they can produce more incredible ideas that lead to innovation. Without collaboration, you might never be able to achieve innovation. 

This is why companies are increasingly starting to form teams with people from different departments of the organization together in brainstorming sessions. As a result, they resolve issues more effectively and develop innovative ideas that benefit the business. A great team is the starting point for innovation – meaningful collaboration is what helps that team achieve its goals and innovate. 

Stronger teams

In one way or another, every organization has been working to build effective communication among their teams and employees. What is the reason behind it? All the efforts they make are to form teams with more robust social networks. It gives the employees a strong sense of purpose when they work towards the same goal with the collaboration of their minds. 

It also enables team members to divide work and fill in each other’s skills gaps. This instills an unquestionable strength in the team. Poor collaboration makes for unhappy, groups that aren’t resilient to change. 

Better customer experience

All teams and organizations encounter problems that affect their customers or clients. When issues occur, it’s a real test of how well your team collaborates.  

Teams that collaborate make it easier to serve customers and solve problems since they provide a streamlined service that solves problems faster and more effectively. What’s more, a collaborative mindset is also helpful when it comes to working with clients and customers. When your team sees these relationships as collaborative, rather than adversarial or purely transactional, great things happen!  

Simply put, effective collaboration can help create happy customers and more productive partnerships too! 

More skilled and knowledgeable employees

When people work together, they get to learn new skills, techniques, and knowledge from each other. Thus, it contributes to the overall personal and professional development of the team members. 

People are also challenged to articulate, learn and think about their competencies when collaborating with people from different teams. Moreover, they also get to build a better understanding of their own weaknesses and strength. After all, self-awareness is the first step to improvement.

Open and productive team culture

The culture of a team is formed by all of the interactions and working practices between the people in that group. When we collaborate more effectively, we break down barriers, build bonds and learn to celebrate everyone on the team. Collaboration is one of the major contributing factors to strong team culture. If your company culture is suffering, look to how you collaborate – it’s usually where your biggest problems are! 

What skills do you need to be a great collaborator? 

Collaboration skills develop in individuals and teams over time as they work together. While effective team work can emerge organically, it’s also possible for bad habits to come up too.

To help your group meaningfully build their collaboration skills and be great collaborators also requires support from leaders and a supportive work environment. Without these soft skills that employees learn through interaction and working on tasks towards a common goal, work can stall. You can even find your team unhappy, unproductive, and unable to grow.

It really pays to be proactive in improving your collaborative skills and think about how you work together as a team. Here’s a list of some of the skills you’d need to develop to be a better collaborator.

• Open-mindedness
• Communication
• Adaptability
• Long-term thinking
• Debate
• Active listening

Open-mindedness

When working with a team, you need to have an open mind towards your team members’ ideas. Learning to accept and explore other people’s ideas is one of the most critical collaborative skills. Getting in the same room with 10 other people without an open mind means you won’t get any results. When you discuss projects, every member will have a unique thought process, and they should be encouraged to share those ideas with others. 

Having an open mind will allow you to look at other people’s perspectives thoughtfully, instead of being rigid and rejecting them. You will also be able to choose the best option, whether it is yours or someone else’s. 

Communication

The whole point of collaboration is to encourage clear and thoughtful communication. To make the cooperation a successful experience, you need to maintain effective communication. You need to be expressive and have the ability to share your thoughts with other people whenever required. 

However, not everyone can share their thoughts in groups or meetings – they get uncomfortable. On the other hand, some people have no trouble speaking in front of a large audience. So team members need to enable different communication styles to make the most out of their collaboration. It is possible that and adapting the way you communicate accordingly.

Adaptability

No matter how much you plan, some things still might not go as planned. So to maintain collaboration, your team members need to have adaptability. When a problem occurs, there’s a shift in priorities, and obstacles delay progress, it will send the whole project into chaos. 

In a situation like this, many employees give up as they are not adaptable. However, you cannot let that happen at your workplace. So, to get through stressful situations, your people will need to adapt to new work conditions at short notices. 

Adaptability is all about being flexible and open to change while taking action. It’s an important skill to learn and will help you both inside and outside of workplace collaboration.

Long-term thinking

When it comes to collaboration, you cannot avoid long-term thinking. To allow a successful partnership, you need to envision and focus on the result of your team’s work. So how can your employees work towards a shared purpose or common goal without recognizing what they’re trying to achieve? 

When they know how their contributions are leading them towards the goal, they would have better collaboration. Employees who want to work on and improve their collaboration skills would need to do that by gaining a clear understanding of their role in the project’s scope. When they have better knowledge, they can perform better in a given project.

Debate

An effective collaborator will be capable of productively and tactfully coming up with debate ideas that can bring about healthy discussion. In the meetings where you’re trying to figure out the direction of your project, debates can spark up innovative ideas. Your project team will come up with good ideas, and the not-as-good ideas will take the backseat. 

This will allow the team to make the project move forward more efficiently. However, acquiring the ability to debate can be very difficult. Not everyone can lead a debate, especially if an emotional attachment is involved. Remember that using facilitation techniques to encourage healthy, respectful debate can be a key factor too! 

Active listening

Working in a team requires you to have an open mind and open ears. You need to have the capability to listen to others while you work closely with them. For example, when a team member gives feedback, idea, or advice about the project, you need to listen closely, pay attention and be considerate and respectful. 

You may think your ideas to lead the project are superior, but that’s because you haven’t given others the chance to share their ideas. This is why active listening is essential for collaboration. If you’re working solo, you may have to settle with your own idea, but when in a team, you can take your colleague’s opinion and benefit from it while you can. 

How to improve your collaboration skills

Effective collaboration can be a complicated process. Remember that all collaboration is the coming together of two or more people, all of whom have their own ideas, challenges, and goals. Balancing all of those elements isn’t easy! 

Navigating all these moving parts and working at your best within a team can be tricky, but there are lots of ways you can improve as a collaborator.

One of the best ways to start is to first be aware of your collaboration skillset and take steps to improve where you can. Here are some of the ways you can practically improve your collaboration skills.

• Practice your core collaboration skills
• Clarify how you want to collaborate
• Identify obstacles and co-create solutions
• Learn from others (whatever their field!)
• Explore other perspectives
• Learn how to navigate knowledge gaps
• Play collaborative games with your team!

Practice your core collaboration skills

All of the above collaboration skills – from active listening to open-mindedness – can be improved by practicing them! 

Remember that not every aspect of collaboration comes naturally to everyone. That’s okay, but it’s important to take the time to reflect on where you might want to improve and practice these skills. 

If you’re not a great listener, try some active listening techniques and research the subject. If you simply haven’t had the chance to collaborate regularly and feel a bit rusty, see how you can get involved in projects big or small at work.

When it comes to practicing better collaboration, it’s often helpful to start with small practical steps. Get a little more involved in group discussions, contribute where you can, and practice asking what others need from you. You’ll be surprised by how small steps like learning to collaborate better over email can have ripple effects across your working life. 

Clarify how you want to collaborate

As with any group process, different people might have different ideas of how they want to collaborate and work together to achieve their goals. One of the best ways to improve your skills as a collaborator is to clearly state how you best collaborate and what you need in order to collaborate effectively. Doing this collectively means you can lean into what works and either avoid or improve what doesn’t! 

What I Need From You is a method designed to help teams clearly articulate their needs, request help, and respond to the needs of others. It’s a great way to improve how teams work together and if you get into a habit of being clear about your needs, you’ll be a much better collaborator too!

Identify obstacles and cocreate solutions

There can be many obstacles to collaboration – some of which are easy to overcome, while others might be hidden from view. Learning to correctly identify the obstacles to collaborating with others is a vital part of the process. If an obstacle isn’t known to you, it’s extremely difficult to resolve it! 

Speedboat is a simple, visual method for identifying obstacles and turning them into action points. Start by drawing or using an image of a speedboat – think of this speedboat as a representation of group collaboration. Then, ask the group to brainstorm and add anchors to the boat to show what is holding back effective collaboration.

As with any collaborative process, remember it’s best to involve all those people involved and work on this together. Once you’ve identified all those things that are holding collaboration back, you can then figure out what you might do to remove those anchors and push your speedboat forward! 

Learn from others (whatever their field!)

Effective collaboration is the goal of every team, no matter the sector or industry. While you should learn from others in your organization and sector, you can go further.

Learning how Steve Jobs, Barcelona Football club, or Pixar learned to enable collaboration is a great way to improve your collaboration skills. I’ve often been inspired by stories from outside my field and the change in perspective can be especially useful.

When reading Creativity Inc. – a book about removing obstacles to creativity and progress – I was massively inspired by how Pixar used radical candor and a commitment to creating a psychologically safe environment in their Braintrust meetings.

Seeing how they overcame challenges to speaking up and enabling collaboration made me think about how I might do the same in my working relationships. Read widely and outside your industry and you might be surprised at how you can improve your skills! 

Looking for an activity to help collectively surface learnings from people we respect and admire? Role-playing as our role models is a great way to share knowledge from the group in a fast and fun manner! 

Explore other perspectives

A large part of great collaboration is finding ways to see things from the perspectives of others. Being stuck in a particular mindset or being unable to empathize with your teammates is a major obstacle to collaboration. Being more open-minded and developing a willingness to see things from other points of view is a key collaboration skill.

There are heaps of creative thinking exercises you can use to help you be more open-minded and willing to change your perspective. Flip It is a great method that can show you and your team that our points of view are made, not born. Sometimes, our perspectives need to change, or we can benefit from exploring other points of view. Flip It helps a team think radically and be open to change – a great way to improve team collaboration! 

Learn how to navigate knowledge gaps

Knowledge gaps can be a collaboration killer, particularly with cross-discipline teams. Sometimes we can take some parts of our knowledge for granted, or assume others know things implicitly. These gaps in knowledge, understanding, and familiarity can be barriers to great collaboration.

Helping a group understand the impact of knowledge gaps and finding ways to bridge them can massively improve collaboration on your team. With 500 year gap, ask participants to role-play a conversation between someone from today and someone from 500 years in the past. By seeing how knowledge gaps can be navigated more successfully with a change in attitude, everyone in your team can improve their collaboration skills – whether they’re time travelers or not! 

Play collaborative games with your team!

Not all collaborative processes are massive projects involving multiple departments, budgets, and strict timeframes. 

Team building games and activities that involve working with others towards a common goal all require collaboration and teamwork – even if that goal is winning the game! In fact, play is a great route towards improving collaborative skills and teaching important lessons about collaboration.  

In the Blind Square – Rope game, teams must collaborate in order to make a length of rope into a perfect square while blindfolded. By asking participants to make a plan before then enacting the plan, you can collectively practice many aspects 

How to improve team collaboration 

If you want your company to succeed and not have any unhappy employees or unfulfilled projects, you need to improve your teams’ collaboration skills. Invest your time and resources to increase the productivity of your employees with the help of better collaborative skills.

You won’t need to spend a big budget or make huge changes either. Instead, you can promptly start with these 4 simple ways to build better collaboration in the workplace.

• Clearly state your company goals
• Set clear expectations
• Clarify roles
• Recognize and utilize people’s strengths
• Take time to get to know one another

Clearly state your company goals 

You have a great team, but they cannot collaborate because the aim of their collaboration is not clear to them. An unclear company goal and vision can become a big challenge for your team. They will be confused about their tasks and might end up working in the opposite direction. When they won’t know what they’re working on, how would they use their collaborative strengths to work towards it? 

So, before assigning a project, make it a habit to announce its goals. Then, you can use facilitation techniques like a classic SWOT analysis or Project Point of Departure to set your goals and keep track of all the critical metrics.

Set clear expectations

Setting expectations is essential for team collaboration. When the individuals and the team know what is expected of them, they can stay focused and perform better. So, before starting a new year, a new initiative, or a new project, you need to communicate the goals to your teams and individuals to ensure that everyone knows what they need to do. Moreover, they will align their goals with the team and company’s goals to get a better idea of where they’re going. 

You can hold scheduled discussions or general meetings with your employees from time to time to update them about their goals and progress. Additionally, you can carry out online conferences for remote teams to keep them in the loop about new plans, changes, projects, progress, and expectations. 

Collaborating as a team is made even easier if you have a process or framework for setting and checking tasks and the expectations that come with them. 

Try Who/What/When Matrix when you want to create a single source of truth around expectations and work to be done.

Clarify roles 

When you hire new employees, one most important thing you need to do is communicate their job descriptions to them appropriately. They should know their job responsibility in detail and what role they would be playing in the company and their team. 

Communicating the role to them will help them mentally prepare for their responsibilities and maintain a work-life balance. This practice ensures that the employee doesn’t get exhausted from the job and decides to switch. No one likes to be given uninformed and unasked for. 

However, if the employee himself asks to take on more responsibilities, that shows willingness. In that case, you can assign them new roles. 

Need help clarifying roles and exploring dependencies? Try RACI Matrix to help everyone understand what they’re responsible for, accountable for and where their input might be required. 

Recognize and utilize people’s strengths

It would be best if you recognized that no two people in your team would be the same. You will have to acknowledge and approach their strengths in a personalized way. Everyone has a weakness, but you have to focus on what they can do instead of what they can’t do. For example, having a remote team working for you from a different city or country will allow you to have broader perspectives in your team meetings. Hence, you will have more talent on your table that will enable innovation.

So, promote your employees’ strengths before assigning any roles and projects to them. This will motivate them to participate in the tasks more efficiently and come up with practical outcomes. To do this, you will have to carry out individual meetings with your employees to have better consideration. 

Exploring individual and team strengths as a group is absolutely worth your time. Strength Envelopes is a great exercise for recognizing strengths but also showing appreciation and building team bonds too! 

Take time to get to know one another

When collaborating on a tough project, things go wrong, tempers flare and understanding where other people are coming from can be instrumental in keeping things going. Teams that have taken the time to bond and get to know each other as people with lives outside of work are more resilient to problems. What’s more, people can often be more open and honest with those they know well – both things which can improve working relationships.

The Four Quadrants Activity is a favourite of ours at SessionLab! It’s a quick, fun and visual way of getting teams to share with the group and get to know each other better. Start by asking participants to answer four questions by drawing their answers on a piece of paper. Try using questions that help them share something about themselves and what they bring to the team to start conversations and build relationships between members of the group.

Conclusion

Collaboration helps you create an environment where every employee can perform at maximum capacity with team support. It enables efficiency, innovation, productivity, and whatnot. Your team will be proactive instead of reactive. They will take action before the problems even surface. 

Moreover, since the collaborative workspace allows every individual to have a voice, employees don’t feel pressured or undervalued. When your employees feel good about their work, they start performing better too!

Great collaboration encourages every individual to contribute their skills and abilities to the team while also helping to realize the potential of others. When this is in place, you have a great foundation for everything that follows!

Left unresolved, conflict in the workplace can result in a toxic working environment and unhappy staff. As such, conflict management is one of the most necessary skills in a leader’s toolbox. Managing, growing, and developing a productive team is extremely difficult without it! 

In this post, we’ll explore how your team can approach conflict management productively and create a safe space for exploration, discussion and resolution. 

You’ll find practical tips for every stage of managing a conflict and we’ll include conflict management techniques to help you facilitate the process too! 

• What is conflict management?
• What are some common causes of conflict in the workplace?
• How to successfully manage and resolve a conflict

What is conflict management?

Conflict management is a process of guiding groups safely and productively through a thorough exploration, discussion, and resolution of a conflict or issue. 

Effectively managing conflict means helping everyone be heard, facilitating a fair, equitable space for discussion, and limiting the potential for unproductive practices. Conflict management also means being able to identify sources of conflict, enabling others to participate, and build skills to help prevent and navigate conflict productively. 

It’s important to note that conflict management isn’t always a straightforward or linear path. Some conflicts need to be revisited, evaluated, and built upon as teams and organizations grow. Successfully managing conflict in the workplace means being committed to an ongoing cycle of discovery, exploration, discussion, and resolution. 

What are some common causes of conflict in the workplace?

All of us are likely to include conflict, friction, and interpersonal issues at some stage in our working lives. While individual differences can be part of what makes a team successful, creative, and resilient, they can also be a cause of conflict. 

Remember that while conflict in the workplace is almost inevitable, the way that conflict is handled and approached is entirely in our control. Identifying the potential causes of workplace conflict can be a great start when trying to build your conflict management skills. 

Here are some of the most common causes of workplace conflict though bear in mind this is not exhaustive, and you should be vigilant for potential issues specific to your team and organization.

• Power imbalances and differences in status
• Closed, broken-down communication 
• Rigid hierarchies
• Conflicts of interest
• Lack of clear ownership
• Micromanagement 
• Team siloing
• No alignment on goals on shared purpose
• Difference in values or ideologies
• Performance expectations 
• Lack of resources or support
• Competition
• Overdependence on certain parties 

How to successfully manage and resolve a conflict

Conflict in the workplace can occur whatever the size, makeup, or happiness of an organization. While toxic workplaces are more likely to result in conflict, even happy workplaces can see issues arise. Whenever you bring together a group of people to work on something they care about, differences of opinion can become something that needs to be addressed. 

When conflict becomes a problem, it’s vital you follow a process to manage the issue and find a solution productively. Conflict handling can become problematic if people involved don’t trust that a solution will be found or that management doesn’t care about the issue. 

Effective conflict management creates a safe space to explore the issue, discuss the effects it is having and then help the group create a solution together. 

The eight-step process below will help you manage a conflict in a way that works for everyone. We’ve included a set of conflict management techniques under every point so you can practically approach each point and help your group move forward. Let’s dig in! 

• 1. Help everyone speak up and be heard
• 2. Correctly identify the cause of the conflict
• 3. Reach a shared understanding
• 4. Cocreate the solution
• 5. Set clear actions and responsibilities
• 6. Build emotional intelligence
• 7. Debrief and collect insights
• 8. Evaluate progress and follow up

1. Help everyone speak up and be heard

When resolving a conflict, it can be tempting to try and rush to the end. Especially if you believe you know the cause and solution to the problem. But taking this approach can create further issues if you don’t first take the time to hear everyone out. 

Often, conflict arises because people aren’t being listened to, or because someone feels like they aren’t being understood. Taking time to ensure everyone has a chance to speak and be heard is an important part of conflict management you can’t afford to miss. 

Skipping this step can mean some people don’t have their issues raised or worse, that the group doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. This ill-feeling can quickly get worse and lead to disengagement. When solving conflict, it’s a priority to create a safe space for sharing that helps everyone move forward together. The following activities are great for achieving just that! 

• 1-2-4-All
• Take a Stand
• Heard, Seen, Respected
• Rollercoaster Check-in

1-2-4-All

Most teams want to help all their members be heard and share their thoughts – particularly during times of conflict. The problem is that unstructured discussions or certain frameworks don’t actively create space for everyone to contribute and be heard by others. 

1-2-4-All is a proven technique to facilitate meaningful group discussion. Start with a round of silent self-reflection on a central question related to your conflict. Move on to pair and small group discussion before then sharing with the larger room.

It’s much easier to feel heard in pairs and small groups and by going through this process, everyone can air their concerns meaningfully. Be sure to mindfully choose your core discussion point and brief everyone to listen and be respectful for best results!

Take a Stand

Some attempts at resolving issues fail because of the format of the meeting. A traditional group discussion can lead to heated exchanges and some people may not get a chance to be heard. 

Take a Stand is an activity that explores an alternative way to surface feelings and help everyone make their opinion known. Start by asking participants to imagine a line where one end equals zero while the other end equals ten. Next ask a series of questions to surface how people are feeling and have people arrange themselves on the line based on their answer.

For example, you might ask “How well are we communicating as a team? 0 is not communicating at all. 10 is perfectly open and clear communication.” Have people discuss their position on the line with the person next to them. Afterward, move towards a group discussion to get opinions from people at various points on the line. 

Having everyone stand on the line means you can get a quick read on group feelings and focus on those areas that need attention. Plus, everyone’s opinion is out in the open without any possibility of being talked over or shot down!

Heard, Seen, Respected

Using methods designed to help everyone in a group speak up and be heard is integral when it comes to solving conflict. But how can we go further and create a working atmosphere where people are ready to listen and enable others to speak?

Heard, Seen, Respected is an activity designed to help a group walk in the shoes of others, listen more deeply and build empathy. Start by asking pairs to share a story of a time when they did not feel heard, seen, and respected. Next, ask groups to reflect on the experience and discuss patterns they see in these examples.  

Try this activity when you want to help your group develop their conversational skills and be better listeners. The result will be a team of better, more empathetic listeners than will also feel more compelled to speak up and be heard. 

Rollercoaster Check-in

When kicking off a conflict resolution meeting or workshop, it’s a great idea to get a temperature check from the room. But how can we encourage honest participation if people are upset as a result of recent conflict? 

Rollercoaster Check-in is a simple but powerful way of opening your sessions and checking in with your team. Start by drawing a wavy line to represent the rollercoaster of group feelings on a whiteboard. Next, invite participants to draw themselves on the rollercoaster, depicting the main way they are feeling. 

By reframing the check-in this way, your group can surface their feelings more safely and openly than by simply engaging in open discussion. 

2. Correctly identify the cause of the conflict

One of the most important steps in resolving a conflict is correctly identifying the actual cause of the issue. If you don’t take the opportunity to go deeper and find out what the true nature of the conflict is, any solutions are unlikely to resolve the issue. 

Remember that identifying the cause of a conflict needs to come after everyone has had a chance to speak. It’s important not to rush to judgment and try to predetermine the cause of conflict.

If one person is upset because they feel their work isn’t being valued and they lash out verbally in a meeting, your first instinct might be to talk to that person about meeting etiquette. 

By exploring the conflict, you might find that the deeper cause of the conflict is that the person doesn’t feel valued by the team or that you need to find time to celebrate wins as a group. Only by correctly identifying the root cause can you and your team move towards solving the actual issue.

In our experience, people often have different perspectives on why a conflict has occurred. Explore these perspectives together before then aligning on the root cause of the conflict. 

• Stinky Fish
• Speed Boat
• Fishbone Analysis
• What, So What, Now What? W³

Stinky Fish

It can be a challenge to discuss the conflict in the workplace while keeping things productive and neutral. Finding the root cause of conflict often means finding space to share fears, anxieties, and challenges safely. 

Stinky Fish is a method designed to enable everyone in a group to share what’s bothering them. The metaphor of something you carry around but don’t talk about while it gets stinkier and stinkier can be especially effective at helping a group approach conflict analysis. 

This activity is particularly useful if you’re not quite sure what the issue is, but know that there’s conflict and challenges in your team that need to be surfaced and solved. 

Speed Boat

Some conflicts have a more obvious cause than others. When you are stuck on identifying what’s causing conflict on your team, it can be helpful to reframe the conversation and explore the problem from a new angle. 

With Speed Boat, start by drawing a boat with several anchors attached. Identify the boat as a topic such as team cohesion or team happiness, and ask participants to brainstorm what things might be holding the boat back. From this perspective, you can surface all those things that might be causing conflict on the team without getting bogged down in attaching blame.

Follow with a round of voting on which anchors are the most important and move towards a more focused discussion. You can then try removing those anchors by asking the group how you might fix them as a team.

Fishbone Analysis

Successfully diagnosing a problem and identifying the true cause of a conflict means going deeper. Some conflicts that seem simple on the surface have numerous contributing factors. Only by exploring a subject deeply and bringing all those factors into the open can you effectively resolve a workplace conflict. 

Fishbone Analysis helps a group go deeper by first starting with a core conflict or issue and labeling that as the head of the fish on the diagram. Next, participants brainstorm the causes of the issue and add these as bones to the diagram. Add subcategories and additional bones to the fish by asking why these causes come up. 

After several rounds of brainstorming and discussion, you’ll have a clear picture of what’s causing the core issue from multiple perspectives. End by identifying any recurring causes and prioritize those that have the largest impact on your conflict. These are what you want to work on as a group! 

What, So What, Now What? W³

When a team conflict has occurred, it’s important to unpack what happened methodically to correctly identify the cause. It can be so easy for teams to get bogged down in the details and fail to understand the chain of events that can lead to conflict. 

What, So What, Now What? is an effective framework for helping everyone articulate what happened and why it was important from their perspective. This approach to sharing not only helps everyone be heard but also helps surface key insights that can move the group forward. 

Use this activity when you want to debrief on a shared conflict and ensure it is explored in full before developing solutions together. 

3. Reach a shared understanding

One of the biggest challenges to resolving a conflict is alignment. If not everyone is on the same page and does not understand why people are upset, it’s very difficult to move forward. 

Building a shared understanding means helping your group see things from other perspectives and agreeing on a path forward. Once you’ve helped everyone be heard, this means filtering down to key points and helping the group align. 

These conflict management techniques are effective tools in this process. With a shared understanding, your group will then be positioned to create a solution together. Let’s take a look!

• Agreement-Certainty Matrix
• What I Need From You
• Give and Take Matrix
• Issue Analysis

Agreement-Certainty Matrix

After everyone has had a chance to speak, it can be useful to align on the problems that have surfaced. Does everyone see them the same way? Only by aligning on the importance and nature of a problem can you create solutions that have an impact.

This activity from Liberating Structures helps a group consider the causes of conflict objectively. By sorting challenges based on four factors – simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic – you can create a shared understanding of issues and agree on a way forward together.

Be sure to align and find common ground on the nature of a problem before rushing to a solution. Skipping this can result in poor outcomes that might not address the issue!

What I Need From You

We all have things we need from others in a team to be successful and happy in our work. When we feel our needs aren’t being met, or we’re unclear about what people need of us it can be frustrating for both parties. 

Conflict of this nature can contribute to an unproductive working environment with unhappy employees. Thankfully, this method is an effective way of getting things back on track!

Begin by inviting your group to articulate the core needs of other individuals and parts of the organization. Each affected group must then respond to those needs with one of four options and agree to take action as a result. By being clear, concrete, and practical, you can repair misunderstandings and move beyond conflict together. 

Give and Take Matrix

Teams are complex systems of different roles, needs, interactions, and motivations. Creating a shared understanding of that system can help a group navigate challenges, support one another and also identify causes of conflict. 

Start the Give and Take Matrix by listing all of the actors in a system on both the vertical and horizontal axes of the matrix. Next, have each person add what they need from the system to the matrix. Finally, move through each cell and have each person consider what they can offer one another to help them fulfill their primary needs. 

Completing the matrix helps build a complete picture of how needs flow through the system and what every actor in the system has to offer. You can also see where there might be room for improvement and create space for people to see how they can help others too!

Issue Analysis

Some conflicts can feel difficult to solve because they are large, complicated, or vague. Finding a means to analyze a conflict and break it up into manageable parts is an important step in the process. 

Start by stating the core issue to be addressed in clear, simple terms. Follow by asking the group to brainstorm ideas around the issue with the statements  “I wish….” or “How to….”. 

Synthesize and clarify those ideas and then prioritize based on seriousness, urgency, and the speed at which the issue is growing. By sorting challenges relating to the conflict in this way, your group can align easily on the nature of the problem and then choose which aspects to focus on too.  

4. Cocreate the solution

The best solutions are those that everyone in the team has a part in creating – this is even more true in the case of group conflict. By working together on the resolution to an issue, you can ensure it is in everyone’s interest. Remember that any conflict management process is improved when you involve all of the affected parties in creating the solution.

The result is a solution that is fit for purpose and addresses everyone’s concerns. This allows ample buy-in from your team and also helps highlight any weak points in the strategy.

Let’s take a look at activities designed to help a group collectively come up with a solution to the conflict. 

• The Six Thinking Hats
• Discovery & Action Dialogue
• Team of Two
• Making Space with TRIZ

The Six Thinking Hats

Creating an effective solution as a team means tapping into everyone’s collective wisdom. Particularly when trying to develop a solution to the conflict, it’s important to explore different ways of thinking rather than arguing over which is best.

Six Thinking Hats is a great method for exploring a problem from various points of view and co-creating the solution. Start by explaining the six hats and their different approaches to the problem. For example, use the green hat to generate ideas, the yellow hat to explore benefits and values, and the red hat to explore feelings and intuition. 

Ensure everyone uses the same hat at the same time and consider developing sequences of hats to address different problems. Cocreating the solution to your conflict with a clear framework is a surefire way to ensure buy-in from the whole team.

Discovery & Action Dialogue

Effectively resolving a conflict often means going beyond the current issues. Understanding the patterns and conditions that lead to the conflict will also want to be addressed to prevent further issues and get everyone back on track!

Discovery & Action Dialogue is a 7 step discussion designed to uncover and share practices and tacit solutions from within the team. Surfacing these with a proper framework means that the group can discover better solutions to common problems together.

Begin by asking the group how they know when problem X is present before asking successive questions to help everyone consider how they can contribute to solving that problem. 

Team of Two

While conflicts in the workplace can come in all shapes and sizes, it’s worth noting that most disagreements occur between two individuals working together. Taking time to explore and repair these close working relationships can have massive benefits to the team at large.

With this activity, start by having each person in your team of two writes down how they think they could help the other person and how the other person could help them. By keeping things simple, you can help improve future interactions between employees and repair areas of common conflict. Be sure to guide participants to give and take equitably and be clear and concise with their requests for best results. 

Making Space with TRIZ

It can be hard to move towards resolution if your team is stuck in the same old ways of thinking. Finding space for innovation and turn a conflict on its head can be one of the most effective ways to generate impactful solutions.

Start this activity by asking the group to make a list of all the worst things they could do to resolve the current conflict. You’ll find this reframing of the issue often elicits laughter and creativity too! Honestly assess the list and see if you are doing anything that resembles those items. Next, make a list of counterproductive behaviors and actions and discuss their impact.

Finally, explore what first steps you could take to prevent those counterproductive actions from occurring. Getting the skeletons out of the closet can be difficult. But with this reframed discussion, you can explore those issues and come up with innovative approaches too! 

5. Set clear actions and responsibilities 

After you’ve figured out the solution to a workplace conflict, your group should agree on what actions should be taken to achieve it. This means agreeing on specific things that we can do both collectively and as individuals and then putting them in writing. 

Effective conflict management is about enabling everyone to take responsibility while also helping them take the first steps in achieving change. These frameworks are a great next step that can ensure any solution is carried out methodically and that the core issue is resolved over time. 

• Who/What/When Matrix
• 3 Action Steps
• RACI Matrix

Who/What/When Matrix

Just as a workplace conflict can be composed of many complex parts, so too can the solution. Simplify the process by breaking down the next steps, assigning responsibilities, and giving a clear timeframe for completion. 

Who/What/When Matrix is a simple, effective method for managing expectations and tasks that come out of the conflict management process. Start by adding the name of participants responsible for taking action in the first column. Next, add the tasks they are responsible for and ask them when that task will be completed. Simple!

Remember that successfully managing any conflict means ensuring that agreed-upon actions are carried out in a timely and effective manner. Use this matrix to help a team move forward after discussing what to do and follow through on the solution!

3 Action Steps

Some conflicts have less clear points of resolution. Perhaps the change needed from your team is less structured, and you’re asking for a change in how people communicate or treat each other in the workplace. 

This activity is designed to help everyone in a group identify some clear next steps they can take to achieve the desired change. This can be especially helpful if there is still a lack of clarity about what individuals can practically do to minimize conflict at work. 

Start by asking the participants to imagine the workplace in 6 months from now, after the conflict has been resolved and they’ve accomplished everything they set out to accomplish. Next, ask them to write down what their vision is and then suggest concrete steps they can take to make that happen.

Finish by asking the group what the first thing is that they’ll do once they’ll return to work. The result is a team that feels enabled to start making the necessary changes to create a better work environment!

RACI Matrix

Having a clear sense of everyone involved in delivering a solution is important in ensuring it is delivered effectively. What’s more, it’s valuable to see where other people fit into the process and also get a sense of who wants to be involved in a smaller capacity. 

RACI Matrix is a framework for helping a group understand everyone’s role in the process and also for agreeing on stakeholders. Start by creating a list of work that needs to be done to achieve your conflict solution and a list of roles. Set the work along the horizontal axis and the roles along the vertical axis of the matrix. Next, assign responsibility using one of four options: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. 

By assigning responsibilities, everyone on the team has a clear view of their role and where they can and should get involved. When managing conflict, it’s integral that everyone in the group understands how they can help and who is ultimately responsible for certain outcomes on the road to resolution. 

6. Build emotional intelligence

Conflict is hard work. It can be emotionally draining and ask a lot of us as people. While we might not be able to prevent conflict, we can build our emotional intelligence to help manage how we engage with others. Responding calmly to conflict and treating others with empathy and care throughout is something we can all learn to improve. 

These activities are designed to help you and your team build emotional intelligence, self-awareness and reconsider how we react to conflict. All of which can be instrumental in successfully navigating and managing workplace conflict.  

• Conflict Responses
• Everyday Hassles 
• Explore your values
• 9 dimensions

Conflict Responses

Reconsidering how we react to conflict and pressure can be transformative. We’re all capable of overreacting or handling things in a less than ideal manner. What’s important is that we take the opportunity to reflect and learn from those instances.

Conflict Responses is an activity designed for reflection on a previous conflict. Start by having participants write down examples of previous team conflicts and then rate how they reacted. Next, ask the group to consider and discuss what behaviors and actions were helpful and unhelpful. Finally, ask your team to come up with some new guidelines for effective conflict handling based on those discussions. This reflection also serves as a catalyst for emotional intelligence and personal growth.

The resulting guidelines can then be used as a resource for future conflicts. By generating these guidelines as a team, you’ll find they are more relevant and likely to be used in practice!

Everyday Hassles 

Our automatic responses to what we might find annoying can be the cause of inter-team conflict. Challenging these responses and developing our emotional intelligence so we can respond better can be a key aspect of avoiding issues in the future.

In this activity, give participants the example of being annoyed at being stuck in traffic and ask them to brainstorm other everyday hassles. Give each group an everyday hassle and then ask them to come up with positive reactions to that situation.

Over successive rounds and a debriefing, your group will see how a change in mindset can help them react better to such hassles in the future. They’ll also learn that taking personal responsibility for our emotions and reactions is a vital ingredient for happy, productive teams – bonus! 

Explore your values

Our core values are incredibly important to our sense of self and overarching happiness at work. Conflict can arise in groups where we feel our values are not being reflected, used, or appreciated. So how can we help ensure everyone’s values are celebrated and do not become a possible point of conflict? 

Explore your values is a great activity to encourage reflection and help everyone in your team understand what is important to them. Begin by having everyone write down their top ten values. Then, one by one, reduce those ten values to the three most important. Ask your group to then reflect on how they might live those values more and use them in their working life. 

You’ll often find that people who do not have a chance to live their core values or are put in situations that challenge their values can become embroiled in conflict. By exploring these values, you can better understand how conflict might occur and create a happier, more emotionally engaged team.

9 dimensions – team variant

Being more emotionally intelligent often means being more self-aware of how you are doing and being open about that with your team. When you create a culture of self-awareness and honesty, you also create a team that is more resilient to conflict. 

With this activity, ask your team to reflect on how they are doing on each of nine dimensions – using colored dots to share whether they believe the team is crushing it or needs help. 

Discuss the results and see where your group is aligned or in disagreement. This kind of open discussion and reflection on how everyone perceives themselves and the team can help build both self and group awareness.

7. Debrief and collect insights

Resolving conflicts can be tiring and emotionally demanding in equal measure. Once you’ve finished a meeting to discuss the issue, it might be tempting to call it a day. But as with any process of solving problems, it’s important to solidify learnings, ensure alignment and leave the room on a positive note. 

These activities are designed to not only conclude the session but also help agreed actions stick and help the group get closure. Be sure to use them when you’re finishing up with resolving a conflict. They help create a good atmosphere for progress outside of the meeting.

• I used to think…But now I think…
• Bus Trip
• Thirty-Five for Debriefing

I used to think…But now I think…

Debriefing on a successfully resolved conflict is a perfect place to recap how far you’ve come. Not only does it help everyone cement what they’ve learned, but it can also be useful to ensure alignment before closing the session. 

This activity is great for sharing learning points and helping your group reflect on how their perspective has changed. Give 3-5 minutes of private reflection on the two questions above and then invite everyone to share with the group. You might even want to collect responses on a flipchart to ensure that the takeaways leave the room with every participant. 

Bus Trip

Resolving conflict can be emotionally draining and take a toll, even if the outcome was good. Taking the time to appreciate one another as people and for everyone’s role in the discussion can help create a good feeling at the end of the resolution. 

Start by creating two rows of chairs to recreate the seating inside of a bus. Explain that the bus runs on positive energy and that everyone in the group will have to contribute to keeping the bus going. Next, have the participants in one row give positive feedback to those seated next to them. After 45 seconds, switch roles. Afterward, rotate passengers on the bus so that everyone gets a chance to give and receive feedback from everyone else. 

We love this activity at SessionLab. Particularly at the end of a conflict, it’s great to receive positive feedback for your contributions to resolving the issue. Leaving on a positive, happy note can also help the team get closure and feel good about the session.

Thirty-Five for Debriefing

Some conflicts are more complex than others. When an issue has many moving parts, it can be difficult to keep track of them all. Help your participants recall and share key learnings with this activity from Thiagi Group. 

Start by asking participants to reflect on a part of the conflict management process and write down what they learned on a card. Next, have participants swap cards without looking. After a few minutes, have everyone pair up, discuss and score their new cards. After several rounds, total the points on every card and discuss the highest scoring learnings as a group.

Closing a session by resurfacing key learnings and then emailing them out afterward can help ensure the solution stays front of mind for your participants. 

8. Evaluate progress and follow up

Even after you’ve discussed a workplace conflict, come up with a solution, and implemented it, the conflict management process isn’t complete. You need a process for evaluating the progress of the team and to help ensure the resolution sticks. 

Such an evaluation is also a great time for the group to reflect on their conflict management skills. You might discover there’s more to be done to help the team avoid conflict in the future or that someone on the team has a great method for cooling off when things get heated. However, you’ve chosen to handle workplace conflict, ensure you take the time to check in and evaluate afterward. This way, you’ll ensure your solution is fit for purpose, continue to create space for people to voice concerns, and move forward as a team.

• Project Mid-way Evaluation
• Start, Stop, Continue
• Letter to Myself

Project Mid-way Evaluation

When workplace issues are complicated, the solutions can be multifaceted too. Bringing those solutions home alongside all our other day-to-day work can be difficult. As such, it can be important to evaluate progress and ensure the agreed-upon solution is followed through on. 

This method is designed to help a group of people effectively evaluate where a project is at and find ways to shift gear or change track if necessary. Using one of three visual evaluation methods, you can identify patterns that are helping and hindering the conflict management process.

Remember that solving a conflict is rarely a linear path. Repeating some of the discovery steps and finding space to reflect freely can ensure that any resolution is fit for the team as it continues to evolve.     

Start, Stop, Continue

Keeping things simple is always a useful maxim in facilitation – especially during the conflict management process. Once action steps have been taken and you’re asking your group to assess the landscape, being able to clearly and easily judge what’s working and not can help your group avoid unproductive discussion. 

Use Start, Stop, Continue to encourage a group to celebrate what’s working, what might be hindering the process, and what the team should start doing too. Some solutions are unproven until they are put into action and can also create unexpected results. This method is great at capturing group feeling as a conflict moves towards resolution and helping them suggest simple fixes for what comes next.  

Letter to Myself

When we’ve finally resolved a workplace conflict, it can be tempting to move on and try and forget it happened. This approach can hamper potential solutions and prevent the kind of reflection and action that can help a team truly process and learn from conflicts at work.

With Letter to Myself, end a conflict discussion by asking participants to write down the actions they will take afterward. They’ll also add a concrete date to complete those actions and add those things they would like to have changed by that time. Next, collect those letters and then post them back to the recipients by an agreed-upon date in the future. 

This method is a way of setting some intentions for after the conflict meeting and checking yourself against them later. It means everyone can course correct, celebrate wins or double down on what’s working. 

In conclusion

Conflict can arise even in the most progressive, happy workplaces. Whenever you get a group of passionate and talented people together, opinions can differ. What’s important is that you have a framework for handling conflict in the workplace that allows your team to discuss things safely and productively. No more shouting matches or passive-aggressive emails!

Remember that handling conflict when it occurs is tough, but it’s much easier with activities designed to facilitate a productive discussion and move your group to a resolution. Furthermore, consider taking the time to build a respectful, open culture – that way, you’ll have fewer conflicts at work and be better positioned to work through them when you do! 

So you might be asking yourself, how can I develop my creative thinking skills and think more creatively at work? Whether you want to supercharge your interpersonal skills, advance your career or be happier and more satisfied in the work you do, it pays to learn to think more creatively.

For many people, creative thinking is the key that unlocks solutions, promotes diverse thinking, and leads to better relationships and job satisfaction. So how can you get started with creative thinking? As passionate believers in the value of creative thinking, we’re here to help and truly think unleashing your creativity can be key to your personal development!

In this post we’ll define what creative thinking is, highlight the benefits, explore 19 key creative thinking skills and give you some examples of how to apply them in the workplace. Let’s dig in!

• What is creative thinking?
• Why is creative thinking important?
• What are the benefits of creative thinking?
• What are creative thinking skills? 
• Examples of creative thinking skills (and how to use them)
• How to use creative thinking skills at work?
• How to improve your creative thinking skills? 

What is creative thinking?

Creative thinking is the ability to approach a problem or challenge from a new perspective, alternative angle, or with an atypical mindset. This might mean thinking outside of the box, taking techniques from one discipline and applying them to another, or simply creating space for new ideas and alternative solutions to present themselves through dialogue, experimentation, or reflection.

Bear in mind that the number of different creative approaches is as vast as the number of creative thinkers – if an approach helps you see things differently and approaching a challenge creatively, follow that impulse.

While there are some proven methods and guidelines that can help you be a better creative thinker, remember that everyone can be creative and finding what works for you is what is important, not the terminology or specific framework.

One misapprehension about creative thinking is that you have to be skilled at more traditional creative skills like drawing or writing. This isn’t true. What’s important is that you are open to exploring alternative solutions while employing fresh techniques and creative approaches to what you’re working on. 

You don’t need to be a great artist or even work in a traditionally creative field – we believe everyone is capable of creative thinking and that it enriches your personal and professional lives when you learn to be more creative.

Another misconception about creative thinking is that it applies only to the ideation or technically creative parts of the process. All aspects of our lives and interactions with people and challenges can benefit from creative thinking – from the ability to see things differently.

At work, thinking creatively might mean finding better ways to communicate, improve your working practices, or developing and implementing fresh solutions too.

Creative thinking is important because it drives new ideas, encourages learning, and creates a safe space for experimentation and risk-taking.

Why is creative thinking important?

As organizations and people grow, they often develop tried and tested ways of operating. While it’s important to have solid working practices and processes, unswerving dedication to the norm can lead to stagnation and a lack of innovation and growth. 

Creative thinking is important because it drives new ideas, encourages learning and creates a safe space for experimentation and risk-taking. Simply put, creativity and creative thinking are part of what helps businesses and individuals succeed and grow.

Whether your team or business thinks of itself as a creative one, you can’t afford to miss out on the benefits of creative thinking if you want to grow, deliver change, and help your team bring their best selves to work. 

What are the benefits of creative thinking?

Using creative thinking skills at work creates benefits not only in the ways we solve problems but also in how we approach everything from communication to self-fulfillment, task management, and growth. Bringing a culture of creative thinking into a workshop or group is often the job of a talented facilitator but whatever your role, there are benefits to thinking more creatively. Let’s explore some of the benefits of thinking creatively at work and in your everyday life!

• Build empathy
• Bust assumptions 
• Become a better problem solver 
• Find ways to move quickly and effectively
• Increase happiness
• Discover new talents and promote learning
• Boost resilience and deal with adversity
• Boost your CV and employability 

Build empathy

Empathy and creative thinking go hand-in-hand. By practicing creative thinking skills and regularly looking for new ideas and points of view, you can actively become better at understanding your colleagues, customers, and even your family and friends. One of the major barriers to having productive and meaningful relationships is an unwillingness to see things from a perspective other than your own or failing to understand how another person is feeling. 

By developing this skill, you can engage more meaningfully and honestly with people, ideas, and perspectives in all aspects of life. What’s more, because of the benefits that creative thinking can bring, you’ll actively want to see things from new perspectives and be more empathic: something that’s fundamental to creating real change.

Bust assumptions 

Assumptions can be harmful in both our personal and professional lives. Whether it’s making assumptions about why someone is behaving the way they are in a workshop or what features will make your customers happiest, holding onto incorrect or inadequately formed assumptions can be problematic. It can create difficulty and tension in relationships and what’s more, it can lead to the development or introduction of solutions that are simply unfit for purpose.

Using creative thinking skills to challenge assumptions, build clarity, and see things from new perspectives can be transformative. If an assumption someone else makes feels incorrect, think about why and try to find out more. If someone challenges an assumption you hold, be open and listen.

Become a better problem solver

An example of not being a creative thinker is sticking to a tried and tested approach and sticking to the norm in every situation without considering whether trying something new might not lead to better results.

When looking to solve a problem or create innovative solutions, going outside of what you know and being open to new ideas is not only exciting, but it can create more impactful solutions too. You might even try using problem-solving techniques alongside some of the creative thinking skills below to find the absolute best solutions!

Find ways to move quickly and effectively

Some processes and working practices can be slow, especially in large organizations with many moving parts – but do they all have to be? Thinking creatively can help you find lean, actionable solutions that you can put into practice quickly and test ahead of bigger changes.

Experimentation and a willingness to take risks are vital to growth and change, and creative thinking helps create a climate conducive to finding and trying quick, effective solutions. 

Increase happiness and satisfaction

Finding fresh, appropriate solutions to problems can be incredibly satisfying and is a fast-track to finding happiness both in and out of work. Bringing your whole self to a situation and being enabled to think outside of the box is a great way to feel valued and engaged with what you are doing.

Feeling frustrated with how a situation or process at work is going? Try developing and employing your creative thinking skills alongside your colleagues to find a better, happier way to collaborate! Feel unfulfilled or that not all of your skills and interests are being utilized? Consider how you might creatively deploy the skills or talents that make you happy and scratch that itch.

Discover new talents and promote learning

As children, we are encouraged to see things differently and try new things as part of our learning and growing process. There’s no reason we shouldn’t do this as adults too! Trying new things and learning to think creatively can help you find new skills, talents, and things you didn’t even know you were good at.

Staying curious and following what interests you with an open mind is a prime example of what a small change in thinking can achieve. Remember that creative thinking is a gateway to learning and by actively developing your creative toolset, you can grow and discover more in all walks of life – a surefire path to personal development.

Get better at dealing with adversity

It’s easy to get frustrated when problems seem to come thick and fast and existing solutions or methods don’t work. Adversity is something all of us will face at some point in our personal and professional lives but there are ways you can become more able to handle problems when they arise.

A strong suite of creative thinking skills is an important aspect of how we can build resilience and be more flexible when adapting or creating change. By exploring alternative ways of thinking, you’ll be better prepared to face adversity more openly and find alternative ways to resolve challenges in whatever context they emerge.

Boost your CV and employability 

Creative thinkers are valuable employees at organizations of any size. Whether it’s championing innovation, creating change in policy, or finding better ways to collaborate, people who can effectively solve problems and leverage their creative thinking skills are better positioned for success at work.

Consider how you might plug your skills gap and boost your CV by developing your creative skillset and you won’t just be more successful – you’ll be happier and more engaged at work too! 

Whatever your background or role, you are capable of thinking creatively and bringing creativity into your life.

What are creative thinking skills? 

Creative thinking skills are the methods or approaches you might use when trying to solve a problem differently and explore a fresh perspective. While some of these skills might come naturally to you, others might need a more considered, purposeful approach.

For example, you might be a natural visual thinker who is great at presenting and interpreting visual information but you might not be so good at freely experimenting or creating space for reflection. In this case, you might try some brainstorming exercises to loosen up your experimentation muscles or create scheduled time for reflection in your working routine.

While creative professions like artists, writers, or designers may see more obvious uses for creative thinking skills, all professions can benefit from developing and deploying creative thinking. If you find yourself having difficulty at work or in need of inspiration or motivation, finding space to build on your creative skillset is a way to not only move forward but have fun while doing so.

If you think you’re not creative or have no creative thinking skills, we’re here to tell you that whatever your background or role, you are capable of thinking creatively and bringing creativity into your life: you might just need a little push or to reframe how you think about creativity!

Save time planning your next creative workshop

Examples of creative thinking skills (and how to use them) 

Creative thinking skills come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from things like abstract thinking and storytelling to finding ways to radically plan projects or recognize organizational patterns.

In this section, we’ll explore each of the example creative skills below and talk about how you might use them in your personal and professional practice. We’ll also point out some things to watch out for where appropriate so you can make the most out of your new creative skills and avoid potential setbacks.

We’ll also include a method from the SessionLab library that will help you practice and explore each skill, whether alone or with others.

Feel free to read and explore the creative thinking skill which feels most interesting or applicable to you and come back and experiment with others in the future! 

Some example creative thinking skills include:

• Experimentation
• Open-mindedness
• Lateral thinking
• Pattern recognition  
• Deep and active listening
• Challenging norms
• Lean organization
• Simplification
• Radical planning
• Collaborative thinking
• Data collection
• Interpretation and analysis
• Interdisciplinary thinking
• Frameworks and rulesets
• Micro and macro thinking
• Visual thinking
• Abstract thinking
• Storytelling
• Reflection

Note that this list is not exhaustive, and there are many more ways of thinking creatively – try to see these creative skills as a jumping-off point for seeing things differently and exploring creative thinking at work. 

Let’s get started!

Experimentation

A core creative skill is the ability to experiment and try new things, whether that’s in your personal practice, in a closed environment, or even in the field. It can be easy to fall short of implementing new ideas or following through with creative projects because critical judgment or overthinking gets in the way. A good experimenter is a self-starter who makes informed decisions to kickstart projects and test hypotheses. 

Think of a painter who throws paint at a canvas and introduces new materials without overthinking or being self-critical. While not everything they try will be perfect, that’s the point – not every experiment needs to be successful in order to teach you something useful. By experimenting, you can try things that might prove useful or will lead you towards new solutions and better ideas. Remember that the act of experimentation is generative and often fun so be sure to give it a try!

One thing to watch out for is being sure to effectively capture the results of your experiments and to continue developing and iterating on the results. Experimentation is a great place to start, but remember that it is part of a larger process. Without effective documentation, you might not trace what delivered the best results and be unable to reproduce the outcomes. Experimentation is a great example of why creative freedom should be paired with a strong process in order to be at its best. 

Four-Step Sketch is a great method for promoting experimentation. By following a process that enables quick brainstorming before development, you can help build an experimental mindset that also generates results.

Open-mindedness

Open-mindedness is a critical element of creativity and one of the best creative thinking skills you can try to build if you’re new to the practice. Being open-minded means being receptive to new ideas, different ways of thinking, and perspectives which are not your own. It means not closing down conversations or ideas prematurely and trying to actively explore what is presented to you.

Imagine that a colleague comes up with an idea that is so far out of the status quo it seems off-the-wall and bizarre. Being open-minded means actively engaging with what is presented and to refrain from forming judgments before first understanding where your colleague is coming from.

Your colleagues’ initial idea might not be perfect, but being open-minded and truly attempting to understand their perspective means you can create dialogue, foster creativity, and move forward as a team. 

Being open-minded doesn’t mean accepting every new idea and agreeing wholesale with every different opinion. While you should always try to be open and receptive to new ideas and other perspectives, you should also critically appraise and engage with them as part of a larger creative process. Don’t be so open-minded you have no strong opinions of your own!

Open-mindedness is particularly useful when it comes to meaningfully communicating with others. Whether its developing the ability to walk in the shoes of someone else or building empathy and listening skills, Heard, Seen, Respected is a great method to try when learning to be more open-minded.

Lateral thinking

Lateral thinking is a prime example of how we can creatively solve real-world problems in a measurable and easy-to-understand manner. Deploying lateral thinking means using reasoning or non-traditional logic to find an indirect or out-of-the-box approach to solving a problem. 

A simple example might be a challenge like: we need to increase revenue. Traditional thinking might mean considering hiring new salespeople to try and get more direct sales. A lateral approach might mean engaging more with current customers to reduce churn, working with external partners to get new leads, working to get sponsorship, piloting an affiliate scheme or any number of new ways to solve the existing problem.

Broadly speaking, lateral thinking often means stepping back and considering solutions or approaches outside of the immediately obvious.

One potential danger with lateral thinking is spending time to create new solutions to problems that don’t need them. Not every problem needs to be solved laterally and the best solution might actually be the most straightforward. Be sure to tap into existing knowledge and appraise a problem before trying something radical to avoid wasted time or frustration!  

Developing your lateral thinking skills comes more naturally to some than others. The Creativity Dice is a great method for getting out of linear thinking habits and moving into different ways of thinking.

Pattern recognition 

Pattern recognition is the ability to recognise existing or emerging patterns and make connections based on the patterns you have discerned. While pattern recognition goes back to our prehistoric roots, being able to spot patterns outside of the ordinary and consider what may not be immediately obvious is a vital creative thinking skill for today. 

Consider how meetings between some members of a team might often end in conflict. While it might first seem that these two people just can’t get along, it might actually be that certain emotional triggers are being tripped or the format of the conversation isn’t working. Looking beyond your initial impressions and from a new perspective might let you find a repeating pattern that isn’t immediately obvious.

When trying to spot patterns, try to be mindful of existing biases so you avoid bending what is happening to fit a pattern you might be expecting. Be sure to interpret all data fairly and honestly, even if you believe a pattern is already forming. 

Pattern recognition is a skill that benefits from thoughtful practice. Try starting with a deliberate pattern-finding process like Affinity Map to build the ability to see patterns where they might not first be obvious.

Deep and active listening

While it might not seem like it at first, being a good listener is a creative thinking skill. It asks that a person not only try to understand what is being said but also to engage with the why and how of the conversation in order to reframe prior thinking and see things from a new perspective.

Deep listening or active listening is not only hearing the words that someone is saying but actively seeking to interpret their intent, understand their position, and create a positive space for further conversation. Not only does this create a deeper conversation for both parties, but this act of engagement and understanding leads to more creative and dynamic results too. 

Think of a workplace grievance that one person might have against another. Without actively listening and trying to understand the core issues from the perspective of everyone involved, you might not only fail to solve the issue but actually make staff feel less heard and valued too.

By employing this creative thinking skill in such a conversation you can see things more clearly and find a way to creatively satisfy the needs of everyone involved. 

Trying to be more present in conversations is a great place to begin building your deep listening and active listening skills. Want to supercharge the process as a group? Try a role-play activity like Active Listening to more thoughtfully see and reflect on how important this skill can be.

Challenging norms

Not all established working practices are the best way of doing things. People who practice this creative thinking skill are likely to question the status quo in search of something new which can deliver meaningful change. While any challenge to the established order needs to be conducted respectfully and thoughtfully, thinking of how to go beyond the norm is how innovation occurs and where creative thinkers excel.

When trying to practice this skill, be prepared to question existing methods and frameworks and ask if there might be a better way outside of the limits of the current system. 

As with lateral thinking, it’s important to recognize that not everything is a problem that needs to be solved and so you may need to be selective in which norms should be challenged – otherwise, you may never make it out of the front door!

Additionally, challenging the established order often means questioning the work someone else has already done. While this is a necessary part of growth, it should always be done constructively and respectfully. 

Challenging norms without a considered approach can be ineffective and potentially frustrating. Taking the time to build shared understanding and push in the same direction with What, So What, Now What? is a great way to explore how your existing process is or isn’t working and challenge norms productively.

Lean organization

Creative thinking doesn’t mean being disorganized or chaotic just because you have an abundance of ideas. In order to facilitate creative thinking, it’s important to stay organized and approach the process with the right framework, mindset, and space. As a creative thinking skill, lean organization means considering what you absolutely need to do in order to make things happen, versus what you don’t.

Think of how a large, multi-discipline team might go about organizing themselves for a big project. While it’s vital everyone is aligned and kept up to date, a traditional system of scheduled meetings might not be the most productive. Lean organization means considering the needs of the team, the project and thinking creatively about what you need to stay organized, and keeping unnecessary admin to a minimum.

Thinking creatively about organization is something all leaders should practice but any project can benefit from thinking through the process by which it will be accomplished. 

Lean organization often means being honest and realistic about what is absolutely necessary versus nice to have. MoSCoW is an effective agile framework for planning work and also reframing your approach to organizing time, tasks and more!

Simplification

Simplifying, presenting or decoding any information is a vital skill when working with others. In a creative thinking context, simplification is the act of seeing what is important about a task or piece of data and stripping away the extraneous parts to see things more clearly.

Some problems can feel unassailable because of their complexity or scale – simplification allows you to reconsider a problem in simple terms and reframe it in a way that means you can approach it productively. 

An example of using this creative thinking skill at work might be when presenting the results of a project to the rest of your organization. People working on other teams and in different disciplines could become disengaged if exposed to too many complex moving parts or it might simply be a waste of time to discuss every detail.

By simplifying a project into more succinct terms, you not only can help your group connect with the material swiftly but also boil a project down to its most important elements. This is a great way to creatively re-energize a project and identify where you can make an impact immediately. 

One way of practicing simplification is by summarising or condensing thoughts, ideas of stories into a more concise, compressed form. 6 Words is a method for cutting away extraneous material from ideas that engages creative thinking and reframing approachably – great for groups!

Radical planning

Any major project requires some measure of planning in order to succeed, especially when working with others. But are there times where overplanning or traditional working processes feel too slow or frustrating for the project at hand? This is where these creative thinking skills come in handy! Radical planning is a way of approaching project planning from an alternative angle in order to generate fast, effective results. 

When taking this planning approach, you will often shuffle the order of the normal planning process in order to create alternative outcomes and cut out elements you may not need. For example, with the backcasting workshop activity, the approach is to think of desired outcomes up to twenty years in the future and work backward to figure out how we can make small steps today.

You might also try planning with a mindset of what you and your team can each achieve immediately and in a more experimental fashion with an activity like 15% solutions. 

By approaching planning with a creative thinking mindset, you can surface ideas and plans which may not have come up with a more traditional planning process. Another great benefit is to question the normal manner in which your team or organisation approaches planning and can help your team find a method that works best for you!

Collaborative thinking 

Effective collaboration requires us to bring many different skills together, but consciously considering how to be a more effective collaborator is worth mentioning separately. When a creative thinker approaches collaboration, they will try to think of how to use alternative approaches to make the collaborative process more effective while also helping everyone on the team contribute and be heard.

An example is when it comes to getting work done in meetings – if the current process isn’t enabling everyone to collaborate effectively, you might employ creative thinking to try finding an alternative format, consider working asynchronously, or timeboxing parts of your agenda.

The best collaborators also find ways to champion the work of others and create a safe space for everyone to contribute – it might not be enough to assume collaboration will be accomplished when you get people in a room.

Employing this creative thinking skill can make all the difference when it comes to job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships and group outcomes too! Try approaching your collaborative projects more mindfully and see how it changes things for you!

Working together on a task as a team is an effective way of kickstarting collaborative thinking, especially if you approach the task mindfully. The Marshamllow Challenge with debriefing is a proven method for engaging teamwork and by adding reflection time afterward, your group can share and build on what they learned.

Data collection

Collecting data might seem like a solely analytical skill, but it is another area where creative thinking can lead to productive, unexpected and transformative results. Approaching the data collection process creatively might mean trying new techniques or sources, or simply reconsidering the how and why of your data collection processes. 

Imagine you are running a survey to measure customer happiness. You might try asking traditional survey questions, but find that your response rate is low and furthermore, your approach might be invasive and actively decrease happiness too!

If you were to approach this problem creatively, you might find that using a simplified form, asking for feedback at a different point in the customer journey, or utilizing an alternative measurement scheme delivers the data you are looking for. In many cases, thinking about the questions you are asking from a new point of view is what unlocks a better data collection process.

The key to this creative thinking skill is to try looking at the data collection process from a new, preferably customer-centric perspective while also considering why and how you are collecting data. You will likely find that by asking for input from your customers more creatively, you create space for more creative responses too!

3 Question Mingle is a get to know you activity that does double duty in demonstrating the power of approaching data collection creatively. By creating their own questions, a group can really think about what they want to know, how they ask questions, and how the results differ. Be sure to give it a try!

Interpretation and analysis

Interpretation skills can be varied though in a creative thinking context it means being able to successfully analyze an idea, solution, dataset, or conversation and draw effective conclusions. Great interpreters are people with a desire to listen, understand, and dig deeper in order to make their interpretation fully realised.

One of the ways creative thinking can improve interpretation is in helping us challenge assumptions or initial readings of data in order to consider other possible interpretations and perspectives.

Say your product is having a problem with losing lots of new customers shortly after signing up. You do a survey and people say that they leave because the product isn’t useful to them. Your initial interpretation of that data might be that you’re not the right fit for these customers or that the product needs new features.

If you were to apply creative thinking to the interpretation of this data, you might conduct further research and see that the product is fine, but people didn’t find the right features for them and that your onboarding process needs to be improved.

The key here is interpreting the data from various perspectives and then correlating that with other sources to form an accurate and representative interpretation, rather than going with your initial assumption. By following this process, you might also find that the way you are collecting data is flawed (perhaps not asking the right questions) or that more research and data collection is needed.

So long as you are sure to have data points and analysis to back up your findings, it pays to explore alternative interpretations so you can avoid bias and find the most accurate takeaways. 

Effective interpretation and analysis isn’t possible without a thorough exploration of the problem or topic at hand. Fishbone Diagram is a simple method for not only surfacing insights but framing them in a way that allows for proper and multi-perspective analysis.

Interdisciplinary thinking

Einstein is quoted as saying, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” In this mold, sometimes the best ideas and solutions come from fields and disciplines outside of our own. By considering how someone with a different skillset to your own would solve a problem or deploy solutions, you can often find ideas and techniques you may never have considered. 

Consider being tasked with improving employee happiness. A social media manager with a background in illustration and events management would likely try a very different approach to a sales manager who is used to a culture of incentives and bonuses. If you were trying to develop a new product, think of how a developer would approach deciding on key features versus an academic or a customer success manager? 

The important thing here is to try and use the perspective, skill set, and approach of another field or discipline to first consider and then solve a problem more fully. Where possible, try and include people from other disciplines in the process and try to avoid making assumptions.

As with all creative thinking skills, being open-minded and sourcing the expertise and opinions of others where necessary is vital when creating true innovation.

Interdisciplinary thinking isn’t just for radical academics. By combining ideas from disparate fields in a fast, fun manner, Mash-Up Innovation is great for building creative thinking skills and generating results in one fell swoop!

Frameworks and rulesets

All creative thinking skills are about reframing things in a new way of finding alternative approaches. This can often mean abandoning an existing framework and thinking outside of the box. That said, another way of applying creative thinking is by bringing rulesets, constraints, or frameworks to your approach in order to trigger deeper creative work and tap into a problem-solving mindset. 

Consider a simple task like trying to generate more customers. With free reign, there are innumerable ways to accomplish this. But what happens if you create a rule like, we cannot spend any money, or, these must be driven by social media alone. In order to accomplish your goal under these conditions, you must think more creatively and deeply, deploying more concentrated problem-solving skills than if you could try any approach you wanted. 

Alternatively, you might approach a problem with a framework that forces you to think under specific circumstances or with a rigid set of steps. Six thinking hats is a great workshop activity that asks participants to frame and reframe a problem from six different angles. While it might first seem counterintuitive, the use of rules or frameworks can create fertile ground for creative thinking and lead to more realized solutions!

Micro and macro thinking

Not all problems are created equal. Depending on how much it directly affects you, you might see a given problem as being more or less important than your colleagues, leading to a different response and approach to solving the problem. This creative thinking skill is all about being able to switch between seeing the bigger picture while also considering how something might manifest on a smaller scale.

Think of how frustrating it can be when an executive team makes sweeping changes that affect frontline staff in a way they might not have anticipated. Micro and macro thinking means seeing both problems and potential solutions from multiple perspectives and adjusting accordingly. 

Another key aspect of applying this approach is knowing the limits of your own knowledge and involving stakeholders from all levels of an organization to inform your ideation and problem-solving process.

If you’ve never worked in support and don’t regularly talk to your support team, you might not understand how a change to helpdesk software could impact your team and your clients – remember that a big part of any change in perspective is doing the research and talking to who will be affected! 

Learning to practice micro and macro thinking often starts with first listening to and understanding the needs and perspectives of others. Especially those who have varied positions in relation to the problem, solutions, or organization you are working with. Stakeholder Round Robin Brainstorm is an effective method of surfacing insights and perspectives quickly and productively.

Visual thinking

Of all the creative thinking skills on this list, visual thinking might be one you are most familiar with. Visual thinking is a method of processing, learning, and presenting information and concepts with visual assets such as images.

Visual thinking is often associated with creative thinking because of the consumption and creation of images at its heart. Don’t let this make you think you have to be able to draw in order to be a visual thinker.

Applying this creative thinking skill means being able to interpret visual information, present concepts in an often simple visual manner, and communicate in a way that is more universally understood. Drawing stick people is actively encouraged!

Visual approaches to problem-solving can help foster shared understanding and help people be more succinct or creative in their ideas. Remember: if an idea is too complex to be put into pictures, perhaps it needs further refinement.

While you might be able to jump straight into direct applications of visual thinking, it can help to try an exercise where you and a group explore using images simply and engagingly. Imagie-ination helps unlock the power of visual thinking as a team while also helping generate ideas too!

Abstract thinking

Abstraction or abstract thinking is the art of taking things out of their normal context and presenting them in a radical new light. While most creative thinking skills utilise abstraction in some form, it’s worth noting that actively trying to take an idea from one context and place it in another is a creative approach all on its own.

Think of Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits – by taking something as common as a human face and bringing abstraction to his process, he created something radically different and innovative. You can create a similar effect by recontextualizing ideas, concepts, and problems and by looking at them from different, perhaps even conflicting points of view.

Abstract thinking is often built on engaging with absurdities, paradoxes, and unexpected connections. As such, it can often be fun, wild and surprising, and is a great way to generate creative ideas even in those who might be resistant to other forms of creative thinking. Lean into the weird!

Forced Analogy is a quick, fun activity you can use to promote abstract thinking. Comparing one thing to another seemingly unrelated thing asks for a creative approach to context and metaphor and can really unlock a groups divergent thinking process.

Storytelling

Telling stories or narrativizing a problem can help us not only see things differently but understand where we share common ground with others. Everybody tells stories – whether that’s explaining our employment history, telling colleagues about what happened at the weekend, or when creating user personas and journeys. 

Leverage this inclination to help people not only realize they are creative thinkers by nature but to help them share something of themselves too!

As a creative thinking skill, storytelling is about applying our natural proclivity for stories into new situations or thinking about how to reappraise or present material narratively. Think of the basic storytelling concept like the idea that all stories have a beginning, middle, and end – how might we bring this thinking to a tough challenge, a new product, or when solving a customer complaint?

You might even use storytelling tropes like the hero’s journey when exploring ideas or company conflicts. Whichever way you go, remember that stories are a universal element of culture and you have a rich lineage to dip into if you need a new perspective. 

Telling Stories in a collaborative space is one of the best ways you can approach creative thinking through narrative. By doing this activity as a team, you can help a group see the benefit of applying storytelling approaches outside of more traditional forms.

Reflection

How many times have you had a tough problem that you can’t seem to solve so you get frustrated and leave your desk. Then, when you’re on a walk, standing in the supermarket, or falling asleep, a solution seems to arrive out of thin air? Often, you’ll find that creating space to reflect on a problem is an effective way to find a way forward.

The trick with making reflective space work as a larger part of your working practice is knowing when to take time to reflect, building space into your regular schedule, and finding techniques that allow things to surface effectively.

This might mean going for a walk with the intention to be present in noticing the world around you and gaining insights that can help your situation. It might also mean remembering to take time to rest or simply read and give your brain something good to chew on.

In a creative thinking context, reflection often means giving an idea time to unfurl and to resist the temptation to force it – by creating space to observe and reflect with I notice, I wonder you might see new ways of thinking emerge naturally.

How to use creative thinking skills at work? 

At SessionLab, we’ve found many of the above creative thinking skills helpful when finding better ways to collaborate, handle workplace challenges or generate new ideas. Here are just a few small examples of things we’ve done that have benefited from thinking creatively as a team.

• Using creative thinking to facilitate a site redesign
• Using creative thinking to improve team communication
• Using creative thinking to improve collaboration

Remember that creative thinking needn’t be explosive or radical to be useful – a simple shift in mindset or perspective can be all you need to create meaningful and impactful change.

Using creative thinking to facilitate a site redesign

When we began working on a site-wide redesign, we had to deploy a large number of creative thinking skills to make the process smooth and effective.

When first determining how to approach the project and scope the work, we reviewed how we had worked together on large projects in the past. While we saw there was room to improve, finding the best way to proceed and make the changes we needed was no easy task.

Challenging the entire process from start to finish with a creative thinking mindset and trying to stay open to alternative methods where possible was what unlocked the process for us. By reconsidering how we were running meetings, sharing feedback, and collaborating, we were able to identify where we were going wrong and then try alternative approaches more freely.

When it came to implementing solutions, we were also sure to stay open to experimentation while challenging our core assumptions of what would work and wouldn’t. This really helped us refine the working process and tailor it to our particular team and goals.

Another example came with finding a new approach when work stalled on a specific page. For our features page, we began by following the standard approach we had developed – writing the copy and structuring the page first before then following with illustrations and images.

In this case, our existing approach got us to an impasse: it felt difficult for our designer to be creative and find the best way to translate ideas into images if the copy had already been defined and the structure felt too rigid. What we decided to do was to reverse the workflow completely and allow the designer to create design elements before we wrote the copy and implemented too rigid a structure.  

Throughout the project, creative thinking allowed us to challenge whether the existing way we did something was the right one and gave us scope to experiment and be open when finding solutions. Not only did this help us solve the immediate problems as they arose but they helped us come up with a great new design too! 

Using creative thinking to improve team communication

Creative thinking can come in extremely handy when it comes to communicating. If one form of communication or working process isn’t working, approaching the discussion with a creative thinking mindset can help resolve the immediate issue and create lasting change in how we converse and work together too. 

Like many virtual teams, we faced the challenge of some meetings feeling unproductive. The issues ranged from overrunning, crosstalk, not everyone feeling heard or able to contribute, or getting lost in ancillary discussions that were not productive or necessary. In an online setting, it can be hard to keep everyone on track and for things to run smoothly without accidentally talking over one another or causing frustration. 

When it came to crosstalk, we wanted to avoid the frustration of interruption and disruption but also wanted to ensure people did not feel like they couldn’t contribute. Using the finger rules technique in a remote setting allowed people to easily show when they wanted to speak and what they wanted to discuss without disrupting the flow of the meeting.

We also found that the reason some daily meetings felt unproductive was because the meetings were for the purpose of daily updates and there didn’t always feel like there was a lot to say, thus leading to frustration or unproductive time being spent in these meetings.

In this example, we moved to a weekly format while also ensuring that we continue daily check-ins on Slack. This approach meant that we cut down on unnecessary meetings while still ensuring everyone’s needs were met.

This method is an example of creatively approaching a communication problem by thinking outside of the box and being prepared to challenge core assumptions. While we all wanted to stay informed, it really helped to reconsider the methods for staying informed and whether our current approach was the best way to achieve what we needed.

It was also useful to reassess how we approached meeting agendas and goal-setting – follow the link for more on that if you’re having difficulty with unproductive meetings!

Remember that creative thinking needn’t be explosive or radical to be useful – a simple shift in mindset or perspective can be all you need to create meaningful and impactful change.

Using creative thinking to improve collaboration

Remember that looking to others and being inspired by how they did things can be as transformative as trying to reinvent the wheel!

A final example is how we approached collaborating on creating the new design. While all projects at SessionLab feature collaboration between multiple parties, in this case we wanted to create space for everyone on the team to contribute.

We found that when trying to collectively brainstorm in a live, remote session, it became difficult for everyone to contribute and reflect on what was being shared by other members of the team effectively.

Some people had been able to prepare less than others, other people were less aware of all the circumstances of the project, or others were less able to switch gears during their working day. This led to some contributions being missed, a messier working process, and a feeling of being rushed – all of which lead to less effective outcomes than we might have hoped for.

In this case, we thought of how asynchronous work, reflection time, and some small process changes might help solve the problems we were running into. We wanted to be able to respond to what was being shared more effectively while also creating space for everyone to contribute in a way that was most productive for them.

Starting the brainstorming session in personal MURAL boards asynchronously and on our own time meant everyone was able to ideate at the time that was best for them and without any distractions. By then encouraging review and reflection on other people’s boards ahead of the main session, we were able to properly take in ideas and let them develop without feeling hurried.

This approach reduced the amount of time we actively spent working together in a meeting while improving the quality of the work. It helped people engage with the process, reduced potential frustration, and also meant we were more able to respond fully to the suggestions of others. This was a great example of how thinking creatively and learning from others can help create better outcomes and a more streamlined process. 

It’s also worth noting that reflecting on our conversation with Anja Svetina Nabergoj regarding asynchronous learning and finding inspiration there was part of what helped this process along. Remember that looking to others and being inspired by how they did things can be as transformative as trying to reinvent the wheel!

Creative workshops and meetings made easy

How to improve your creative thinking skills? 

Whether you find that creative thinking doesn’t come naturally, if your skills need some attention, or even if you just want to try new ways of working, it can be difficult to know where to begin.

Thinking about the creative thinking skills above and considering which you might be missing or could benefit from purposeful attention is a great place to start, though there are also some concrete ways you can approach the process and improve your creative thinking abilities in a pinch. Let’s see how! 

• Practice
• Be present and aware of how you feel
• Create space for new ideas
• Be open
• Look to others for inspiration
• Throw yourself into new things
• Encourage creative thinking in others

Practice

All skills get better with practice and creative thinking is no exception. Whether it’s active listening, experimentation or any other creative thinking style, it’s okay to not get it right the first time. The very act of being open to new approaches and perspectives is itself a way to improve your creative thinking skill set. However you try to implement creative thinking, know that exploration, iteration, and practice are fundamental parts of the process.

Try starting small and practice your creative thinking skills in your interpersonal relationships and collaborative projects. Take note of how it goes and try building up to larger and larger implementations of your creative thinking approaches. 

Be present and aware of how you feel

A key part of cultivating or improving any new skill is to be fully present and aware when utilizing that skill. Consider how a sculptor needs to be aware of their materials, how they handle the material and place them on the board in order to be truly successful. Being present in the moment is important for any collaborative process, but is an especially vital aspect of creative thinking.

If you find yourself frustrated, excited, engaged, or stuck, make a mental note of how you are feeling and consider how you might do things differently. Staying present and actively engaging with how a situation makes you feel before responding is one of the most effective ways of cultivating and improving your creative thinking – be sure to give it a go! 

Create space for new ideas

As with many aspects of creativity, it’s not always effective to force it. Good ideas and finding new approaches can take time and an important part of the creative thinking process is creating space not only for reflection but to rest and allow things to surface. This might mean building more quiet, mindful time into your routine, reading and finding new inspiration, or simply learning to take a break. 

While this can be difficult to get into the habit of, it does get easier with time. Try blocking out reflective time in your calendar or letting others know that you are taking the time in order to make it stick and avoid interruptions. Reflective space is important and useful, and by treating it as such, you can help ensure it happens and doesn’t get discarded or forgotten about.

Be open

One of the biggest barriers to thinking creatively is simply not being open to what is in front of you. Whether it’s rushing to use an existing solution without investigating alternatives, failing to listen or be present when something new is being presented, or sticking with your existing assumptions, a failure to stay open and reserve judgment can kill creative thinking.

Try to stay open and apply creative thinking without pressure or being overly critical in order to improve those skills and let more creative approaches surface in the future. 

Look to others for inspiration

One of the best ways to find new perspectives and alternative ways of thinking is by looking to others. Whether it’s finding inspiration from other creative thinkers via conversation, reading and researching new sources, or simply listening and observing, looking outside of yourself is one of the most effective ways you can jolt your creative thinking. 

Try finding sources outside of your normal circles, whatever the medium. It can be very easy to get into creative bubbles that might unwittingly exclude new forms of thinking. By broadening your social, creative and critical circles, you can be exposed to all kinds of potentially inspiring or creatively engaging ways of thinking and doing.

Throw yourself into new things

It’s hard to create space and an opportunity for new ways of thinking if you stick to the same routines and activities. You’ll often find that trying new things and exposing yourself to new hobbies, skills and approaches can be massively engaging and exciting too.

An important aspect of creative thinking is applying the learnings from one discipline or approach to another. If a developer were to throw themselves into learning how to dance, they might learn something they can apply to their role as a developer.

An open and honest desire to explore new experiences in and outside of your working life is a vital ingredient in the creative thinking process. Try saying yes to doing new things wherever you can find them – being alive to possibility and engaging in the world is a great way of supercharging your creativity! 

Encourage creative thinking in others

Creativity is even better when shared. Whether it’s crowdsourcing new ideas, iterating together, or helping others build their creative thinking skills, sharing the experience is often a useful and generative process for all involved.

Try bringing a group together to explore thinking creatively together or run a workshop on developing creative thinking skills in the workplace. Not only will it help your participants with their own creative discovery, but it will also help you develop your own creative skills. 

Over to you

As facilitators and advocates of the power of workshops, we’re passionate about how creative thinking can improve many aspects of a group’s personal and working lives. At its heart, creative thinking is an empathic, generative act, and by bringing those concepts to the fore, we believe everyone can see better outcomes when solving problems, generating ideas or communicating with others. 

We hope we’ve given you some great examples of creative thinking at work and how you might discover and nurture your own creative thinking skills. That said, this list is by no means exhaustive and there are many more ways you might try thinking creatively. Think of this post as a jumping-off point for further exploration and creative development!

Do you have any concepts or approaches you’ve used to become a better creative thinker? Did you find any of the creative thinking methods above particularly helpful? We’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below!

Helping a set of people progress from being strangers to becoming a cohesive, well-oiled team can be a tricky process but thankfully there are team development frameworks, activities, and exercises that can help! 

In this post, we’ll explore Bruce Tuckman’s theory of team development while also offering practical advice, actions, and team building activities you can take to help your group grow and work together more cohesively. Let’s get started. 

• What is team development?
• The stages of team development
• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning

What is team development?

Broadly, team development can be understood as a framework or series of actions designed to improve the way a group works together. 

The process of team development is often synonymous with the five stages of group development posited by Bruce Tuckman, which are: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning. The idea is that every group or team goes through a process by which they get to know each other, find ways to work together after a period of adjustment, and set up ideal ways of working together before reaching their full potential. 

Facilitating team development effectively means not only understanding the various stages of team development and identifying where your team is at within the process but also taking practical steps to progress to the next stage efficiently. 

A note on the Tuckman model: in our experience, while the Tuckman model is a helpful framework for understanding how many groups change and grow, it is a theoretical model and does not always offer the most practical help to actually grow and develop a group.  

While most teams progress through the stages of the Tuckman model of team development in a linear fashion, it is not inevitable. Without attentive leadership, well-designed processes, and teamwork, groups can become stuck in the earlier stages of the development process. 

Effective team development is a combination of process, action, and growing the self-knowledge of everyone in the team. In short, knowledge of the Tuckman model alone is unlikely to help your group develop into an effective team. By going further and building better processes and taking specific actions to strengthen your team can you progress more effectively.  Let’s dive in!

The stages of team development

In this guide, we’ll not only explore the stages of team development but also explore how you can move your team through them productively with practical tips, activities, and exercises. 

Starting with Forming, we’ll then move through Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning, offering a breakdown of what to expect at each stage while also including some key actions you should take in order to support the development process.

Looking for a wider range of methods to help promote teamwork? You’ll find an assortment in our post on effective team building activities!

Forming

Forming is the first stage of team development and is where a team first comes together, gets to know one another, and becomes oriented with the goals and purpose of the team.   

During this stage, team members can often be excited, anxious, or uncertain of their place within a team and will try to figure out their role in the group. The role of the team leader is especially vital during Forming, as group members will look to them for guidance, direction, and leadership.

Practically, a manager or facilitator can help progress a group through the Forming phase by facilitating exercises that can help the team get to know each other, clarify roles and expectations and build relationships that will help the team succeed.

Key actions to support Forming

• Help a team get to know each other
• Build relationships
• Clarify team purpose 
• Set individual roles and expectations

Help a team get to know each other

All new groups get to know each other organically through the process of getting together and working as a team. That said, without direction and consideration, this process can be time-consuming, messy, or even frustrating and alienating for some team members. 

In virtual teams, the need for activities to help teams get to know each other is even greater, as some of the usual spaces for mingling and forming bonds are unlikely to be unavailable to them. Let’s take a look at some activities designed to help teams get to know each other in the Forming Stage.

3 Question Mingle

For some groups, the idea of getting to know you activities elicits a collective groan. Overly prescriptive or unimaginative exercises can frustrate a team, particularly if it’s not their first rodeo. In this activity from Hyper Island, group members create their own questions on post-its and trade them with other group members as they mingle and break the ice. 

At the end of the exercise, all the questions go up on a whiteboard to encourage further conversation throughout the day. By encouraging the group to take ownership of this part of the team development process, you can meaningfully impact the Forming stage. 

Build relationships

All groups are built on relationships. During the first stages of group development, you can help a team come together by creating space to build relationships with get to know you games and deeper exercises around empathy, trust, and group dynamics.

It’s also worth noting that during the Forming stage, people are often on their best behavior, keeping their cards close to their chests and familiarizing themselves with the group before fully coming out of their shells. Effective managers will often take the opportunity to help people get to know each other in a safe environment and share themselves meaningfully. 

9 Dimensions Team Building Activity

Effective relationships between team members goes beyond work. To truly get to know your colleagues and build strong relationships requires honest self-appraisal, deeper sharing, and clear communication. This activity is a great way of quickly and efficiently helping a team share themselves with the group and go beyond the scope of some standard activities. This team development exercise also helps promote self-appraisal and personal development, which becomes even more important as the team continues to grow and develop – it’s a great way to use the opportunity to get to know each other meaningfully.

Clarify team purpose 

To effectively move forward with team development, a group first needs to understand their purpose and overall goals. Frustration or conflict can arise if the group doesn’t agree on or understand the reason for the team’s existence and how success will be measured. Being sure the team is aligned on team goals early on means that you can develop as a group swiftly and efficiently. 

Team Canvas Session

The team canvas session is a complete framework to help teams align on their goals, values, and purposes, and also help everyone find their role on the team. By methodically approaching this process with a step by step framework, you can not only move your group through the whole Forming stage but be productive while doing so. One of the other benefits of the team canvas is the creation of a living reference point that can also serve as the basis for further growth – online or offline! 

Set individual roles and expectations

The Forming stage of team development is where group members first get to grips with their roles and responsibilities within a team. It’s vital to remember that every team is made up of individuals, all with their own skill sets and specific interests: by engaging your group as individuals, they can each be more productive and engaged and contribute to the team’s success. Be sure to clarify individual roles and expectations for every team member early so that people can feel secure in what they’re doing and get started effectively.

Alignment and autonomy

After delineating the roles of everyone in the team, it’s important to clarify expectations for how they should work autonomously and together. This exercise is an effective way of clarifying how your team should work together while also setting clear expectations around personal responsibility, reporting, and individual action. Used alongside exercises that help clarify team purpose and culture, this activity can ensure everyone on your team is positioned for success.

Storming

The second stage of team development is Storming. Storming can be a difficult to manage part of the process, as it’s often where conflict, differences of opinion, and accepted norms can be challenged. At this stage, the group may begin to understand the largeness of a project or task at hand and become disheartened. Additionally, misalignment on goals and working practices can come up, creating clashes of personalities.

While Storming can be tricky for a group to navigate, it’s also an opportunity to surface issues, create solutions and learn from different ways of doing things. One vital thing to remember is that it’s important to accept that personal differences in working style or goal perception are part of being in a team. Only by discussing and working on those things together can you move forward and progress to the next stage of team development. 

In our opinion, the severity of the Storming stage directly correlates with the effectiveness of your Forming stage – in other words, if you take the time to align a team and meaningfully get to know each other in the Forming stage, you can avoid some of the more unpleasant or time-consuming aspects of the Storming stage. Disagreements and differences of opinion will always happen when passionate and talented people get together – the key is to not get bogged down and find productive ways to navigate those differences.

Key actions to support Storming 

• Improve team communication
• Agree on how to handle conflict productively as a team
• Articulate team and individual needs

Improve team communication

One possible misconception is that to move a group through the Storming stage, you have to prevent differences in opinion from emerging. The ideal situation here is not to avoid discussions and conflicts from happening entirely, but to ensure they are productive, respectful, and result in practical takeaways. This way, your group can feel safe to surface any areas of concern while also being sure to avoid making things too personal or getting bogged down in blame or the potentially messier parts of the discussion.

Team communication is key in ensuring that a group can move through the Storming stage while also not avoiding potentially productive discussions around working practices or different perspectives.

Heard Seen Respected

Empathy is one of the cornerstones of effective communication and in this exercise, encourage your group to ensure they consider how to make others feel heard, seen, and respected in future conversations. As with all the best activities for team development, this method helps improve team dynamics across the board: while it will be especially effective if your group is in the Storming stage, effective team communication is vital for any point in the group development process.

Agree on how to handle conflict productively as a team

All teams are made up of individuals with varying skill sets, perspectives, and needs. As groups work together, conflicts in thinking, approach, or working practices can and will arise. While conflict can be unpleasant, this often stems not from the fact we have differences of opinion but that our methods of articulating or responding to conflict can create friction or the feeling of being attacked. 

As with any aspect of teamwork, it can be easy to fall into a pattern and not consider how you might improve your process until it becomes a problem. Having an agreed-upon method of raising concerns and discussing them productively is a great way to ensure that your group is prepared to handle such difficulties when they come up.

Conflict Responses

Group reflection is an important part of improving on how you collectively and individually manage conflicts. In this exercise, you and your group proceed from reflecting on how you’ve managed conflicts in the past to develop a shared set of guidelines for managing conflict in your team. By including the team in this process, buy-in and follow through on these guidelines is improved while also giving space for effective reflection on previous conflicts.   

Articulate team and individual needs

Conflict can often arise if members of a team don’t feel as if their needs are being met by others on the team or the regular give and take of effective teamwork breaks down. Conflicts around how teams work together often come from misunderstandings in responsibilities or how roles interrelate. You can help a team move towards more effective working practices by ensuring every team member is able to articulate what they need from other members and leaders and be heard and understood in this process.

What I Need From You (WINFY)

Most teams are comprised of people from different disciplines, backgrounds, and skill sets. Particularly when people with vastly different roles work together, expectations around needs, dependencies, and how to ask for help can be very different. Avoid misunderstandings and conflicts in this area by using this exercise to help everyone in a group coordinate around what they need to succeed and find ways to articulate those needs effectively. Where this exercise also excels is in giving everyone in the group room to respond and find better ways to work together in practical terms.   

Norming

Norming is the third stage of the team development process. This is where groups begin to settle into a working pattern, appreciate one another’s strengths and become more effective as a team. 

In this stage, groups often become more comfortable asking for what they need in a productive manner and offering feedback on team and leadership performance. It’s important to remember that teams in the Norming stage may not yet have gotten everything right and still need guidance and consideration as they move towards becoming an effective team. It’s vital to stay alert to team dynamics and both individual and group performance – you may want to course correct or further strengthen certain aspects of how your team works together. 

Key actions to support Norming

• Build team spirit
• Give the group room to grow 
• Surface and analyze problems and opportunities effectively

Build team spirit

As your team settles into a more regular pattern, it’s vital that you continue to take opportunities to celebrate one another and keep team spirit high. Happy teams are productive teams and so taking the time to improve team bonds through the team development process can help improve overall efficacy. Whether this means doing virtual team-building activities, away days, happy hours, or taking structured time to bond the team, be sure to keep an eye on team morale and continue the good work you began in the earlier stages of group development.

Appreciations Exercise

Building team bonds and creating space for your team can be about simply having fun together, though structured time to give appreciation to your colleagues can be effective in not only boosting morale but improving motivation and communication too.

In this method, invite participants to write a few words of what they most value about their colleagues on a piece of paper before passing it along to the next person. After going around the circle, invite each person to share which comment they liked the most. By sharing what everyone values about each other, you can build self-confidence and team bonds that can help the group move from Norming to Performing effectively.

Give the group room to grow 

One of the key ways to move from Norming to Performing is enabling your group to do their best work through refining processes and priorities and giving everyone space to grow and work on what most excites them. This might mean doing regular one to ones to develop and empower your team members or engaging in thoughtful group discussion around priorities and tasks. 

Circles of Influence

A large part of giving your team members room to grow is by allowing them to focus on where they can have the most impact and refining priorities to remove or minimize extraneous concerns. Circles of Influence is a great method to help your group reflect on what affects them and the team and see how they can meaningfully impact what concerns or influences them. 

While you will have discussed and considered team and individual priorities earlier in the group development process, this is an iterative process that should be revisited and improved upon as the team grows. Giving each team member the space to focus on what is best for both them and team can be a vital part of moving from Norming to Performing – so be sure not to rest on your laurels and keep pushing!

Surface and analyze problems and opportunities effectively

Moving from Storing to Norming likely means many problems or difficulties will have been surfaced and resolved. This doesn’t mean your team won’t see additional challenges or that there won’t be opportunities to improve.

In fact, moving from Norming to Performing often involves further refinement and reappraisal of working methods as your team grows and develops. Even on a limited-time project, taking time to analyze team effectiveness and working habits during the project is important in ensuring you can maintain productivity and course-correct where necessary. 

Team Self Assessment 

Self-assessment is an important part of the team development process and using a structured framework can help ensure a productive conversation that doesn’t overspill or create further conflict. This team development activity helps guide a group through a structured discussion by focusing attention on six different areas, surfacing any challenges, and then voting on what is most important to the group. The learnings from this activity can then be used to resolve issues, strengthen the group and help move the team from Norming to Performing. 

Performing

The fourth stage of group development is Performing. This is the ideal team state any group or organization wishes to reach: everyone in the group is motivated and aligned on goals and purposes, is operating at peak efficiency and the team is moving towards success at full speed. 

Sadly, without concerted effort and an awareness of working practices, many groups don’t reach this stage, and it’s important to remember that moving into this stage of peak performance isn’t guaranteed. The key thing to recognize as a manager or team leader is that you can positively affect this process and there are things you can do to help your team achieve this state throughout the group development process. Remember: all the work you’ve done during the Forming and Storming stages informs how you’ll effectively reach and operate during the Norming and Performing stage. 

Key actions to support Performing

• Capture and document learning points
• Continue to build team spirit (yes, again)
• Encourage proactivity and autonomy

Capture and document learning points

When your team is performing well, it can be easy to get caught up in the moment and assume that things will remain at this high level indefinitely. As teams grow and change they can move back into the Norming, Storming or even Forming stages of the group development process. 

Don’t worry – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! You might start a new project and mix up your team make-up or try new things that result in some conflicts in perspective but also allow your team to grow. While it’s important to accept that remaining exclusively in the Performing stage – particularly for long-serving teams –  is unrealistic, it’s also worth remembering that this is the ideal state. As such, it’s vital you document learning points and strategies that have worked for you and your team while Performing so you can apply them again in the future. 

I used to think…But now I think…

Reflecting on how perspectives and working practices have changed and been positively affected by individual and group effort can reveal great learning points for the future. Though this activity can be used as a debriefing exercise at the end of a project, it can also be effective at surfacing the positive outcomes of initiatives like moving a team from Norming to Performing. It’s also a great way of reinforcing how far you’ve come as a group and to celebrate how you’ve grown. By documenting the individual and group responses, you can begin to chart how attitudes have changed and improved and thus understand how you can do so again in the future. 

Continue to build team spirit (yes, again)

We can’t stress enough how important it is to take opportunities to strengthen team bonds and ensure everyone in the group is given space to share and feel seen. While you might perform more structured appreciation exercises, it’s also vital your team has space to have fun together, especially in a remote environment where time to increase team happiness is more limited. Happy teams are often more productive and able to support one another both in and out of work: a vital ingredient to helping a team maintain effectiveness in the Performing stage.

Blind Square – Rope Game

Having fun together can be an often overlooked element of team development. Seeing your colleagues as more than their job roles is something that should happen in the early stages of the Forming process but it’s important to keep engaging these muscles. This method is a classic facilitation method designed to bring a team together to solve a seemingly simple task that teaches and reinforces the importance of planning, communication, collaboration and problem solving. Even as a team improves in performance, it’s vital to keep improving and engaging these skillsets in the name of better cooperation and team development. 

Guess the Desk

Creating space for meaningful team building online can be tricky, but is arguably even more important for those people who work remotely and may feel especially distant from their colleagues. With this virtual friendly activity, encourage the members of your team to share their working set-ups in a photograph and guess whose desk is whose. Not only can this help your team feel closer to each other but it can also help share best practices and improve everyone’s remote working set-up too: ideal for helping your virtual team maintain peak performance!

Encourage proactivity and autonomy

A large part of moving from Norming to Performing is empowering the members of your team to do work that excites and engages them individually as well as a group. Even when a team is performing at a high standard, there are often opportunities for individual action and proactivity that can help maintain growth and keep everyone in a group happy. Remember that a group is strengthened as its individual members do more of what matters to them and are engaged in creating the change they want to see.

15% solutions

One of the stumbling blocks many individuals and groups face when making change is knowing how to start while also being intimidated by the potential largeness of the task. One of the key ways to influence proactive change in a group is to empower your team to make small but meaningful changes incrementally and experiment to find what works. With this method, you can invite your group to identify small changes they can make now and work towards better working practices as both individuals and a team. 

Adjourning

The fifth and final stage of team development is Adjourning. This step was added to the existing model of group development by Tuckman in 1977. Most teams will arrive at the Adjourning stage naturally as a project comes to an end or a group is disbanded though as with the other stages of the process, approaching Adjourning thoughtfully and with a mind to making the most out of time spent together can ensure your groups success in future projects.

Key actions to support Adjourning 

• Find time to reflect and collect learning points
• Celebrate one another!

Find time to reflect and collect learning points

The end of a project is naturally a great time to reflect, collect final learning points and think about what you might improve or do differently in the future. For an adjourning team, this can be an important step in enabling further growth and supercharging future projects and ensuring everyone is well positioned for whatever they do next. Crucially, you and your team should find some way to share learning points through reflection and then document them effectively. 

History Map

Purposeful reflection often means tracing the entire journey of a team or project and pinpointing moments of success, difficulty and change. With History Map, you can help your team consider all the major learning points of a project or time period while also celebrating highlights and bringing the project to an effective close. The creation of a shared resource for future sharing and reflection is also a massive benefit, especially for virtual or asynchronous teams! 

Celebrate one another!

While it’s important to reflect on the development of the group and the finer points of a project or general working practices during the Adjourning stage, it’s also vital to take the time to celebrate team members as individuals. Personal connections and the relationships between the members of a group are a massive part of why a team succeeds and all the good work you’ve done together as part of the team development process should be reiterated and celebrated here!

Bus trip

Quick-fire appreciation exercises can be great for generating energy and fun during a retrospective meeting or reflection session. Bus Trip is a great method for helping a group meaningfully celebrate one another while also keeping things moving. In this exercise, invite participants to imagine they are seated in a bus together and give them just 45 seconds to share appreciative comments with the person sat next to them before the other person returns the favour. Rotate seats and in a short period of time, everyone has shared feedback, celebrated one another and likely had some fun while doing so too! 

Wrap up

Tuckman’s model of group development can help you understand how a team might theoretically grow, but alone it isn’t sufficient to help your team succeed and meaningfully develop. Being conscious of the process is a great place to start, but it’s worth remembering that reaching the performing stage isn’t a given and many teams get stuck early on. 

By combining the team development model with practical action and teamwork focused methods at each stage you can help your team move through the process effectively and better enable personal and group growth.

Over to you

Have you employed Tuckman’s stages of team development model when working with your own team? We’d love to hear about how you helped your team grow and what methods you employed while doing so! Get in touch in the comments section below and share your experiences with the community. 

Creating remote teams with employees globally distributed can be challenging, but comes with many benefits. As a fully remote company, we at SessionLab are passionate about celebrating what working remotely can bring to both employees and the organizations employing them.

I’ve worked fully remotely with several organizations including SessionLab for over five years. I’ve faced many of the challenges of remote working and while it’s been a learning curve, I believe working remotely has changed my life for the better! I’m excited to share what I’ve learned and hopefully guide you through the challenges of working from home.

In this post, we’ll explore what remote working is, explore the benefits, and provide some tips for working remotely that we’ve learned at SessionLab. Let’s dive in!

• What is remote working?
• What are the benefits of working remotely?
  • Flexibility
  • Save time and money
  • Work-life balance
  • Reduce stress, improve productivity
  • Access to higher salaries
• What are the challenges of remote work?
  • Potential isolation
  • Maintaining work-life balance
  • Self-motivation
  • Managing distractions
• Key skills for remote working
  • Motivation
  • Proactivity
  • Communication
  • Tech-skills
  • Organization
  • Task management
  • Being flexible
  • Discipline
  • Big picture thinking
  • Varied skillset
  • Curiosity
• Tips for working remotely
  • Have a separate workspace
  • Stay in contact, stay connected
  • Start your day the right way
  • Create opportunities for fun
  • Limit distractions
  • Develop radical candor – ask for what you need
  • Invest in good equipment
  • Use collaboration tools
  • Create your own routines and working patterns
  • Take regular breaks and get away from the screen
  • Don’t feel guilty about doing light chores
  • Be empowered to work flexibly
  • Take care of your mental health

What is remote working?

If traditional work usually means going to a centralized place of business and doing your job at that location every day, remote working turns that on its head. A remote worker will work outside of a traditional working arrangement such as an office, studio or warehouse by doing their job online and collaborating with their colleagues remotely.

Remote workers may still go into a central office a few days a week. They may work from a co-working space or from a home office, or be a digital nomad and move around during their working week. The key here is that remote workers are not constricted by needing to come to the same place of work from 9-5 every day, and are empowered to find an arrangement that works for both them and their employers.

One of the hallmarks of remote working is flexibility. This can mean flexibility in working location but also working hours. While some roles such as customer support likely require set working hours in a regular working week, other roles can be much more flexible. If a developer does their best work in the evening from their home office, why not empower that employee to deliver the best work they can while also being happy and arranging their own schedule?

Online meetings made easy

What are the benefits and challenges of remote working? 

If you’re new to remote working or considering working remotely, you might be wondering about the benefits and potential drawbacks of remote work.

Remote working isn’t for everyone, and though you might find that you have a natural proclivity for remote work, it’s good to consider the benefits and challenges and develop working methods to deal with them. Let’s take a look.

Benefits of remote working

Newsflash: I love working remotely! We’re a fully remote company at SessionLab and truly believe in the benefits that working from home in a virtual team can bring to both the company and our personal lives.

Here are some of the key benefits we see in working remotely.

Flexibility

Being able to work in a way that suits you and allows you to do your best work is one of the most attractive parts of remote working. Being a remote worker who can set some of their own hours or work flexibly is empowering and can improve job satisfaction. In Buffer’s 2019 report, a flexible schedule was the biggest benefit noted by remote employees, followed closely by working from any location.

Save time and money 

Working from home saves time and money in the commute, at lunch, and in many other small ways throughout your working day. You will likely have zero or reduced commuting time as a remote worker. Remote working often has the benefit of reducing time spent in meetings or some of the other busywork associated with working in an office environment.

According to stats from Tecla, remote work can save you thousands of dollars a year. While some benefits are more abstract or related to general wellness or job satisfaction, do not underestimate the value of sheer monetary savings to your wellbeing.

Work-life balance 

The flexibility and time-saving benefits that working remotely can bring also has benefits for work-life balance. The time saved on commuting can enable time to be spent on wellness, with your family or simply resting! Choosing some of your working hours also means you can take time out of the day to do life admin and structure your work accordingly. 

Being able to reduce the pressures of work and the time spent in the office can have a massive effect on your personal wellbeing both directly and indirectly. Free time to exercise, eat better, engage in hobbies or spend time with your loved ones can make your free time richer and improve your outlook at work too. 

Reduce stress at work and improve productivity

Having some control over your work-life can help reduce stress and prevent burn out. By placing some control in the hands of remote workers, companies can empower staff to be happier and more productive. 

An American Psychological Association report found that having control over a schedule helped reduce stress in workers and that workers found great value in having larger degrees of autonomy and independence.

Stress is one of the largest contributors to low productivity and diminished job satisfaction and by reducing stress as a virtue of remote work job design, you can be more productive and happy at work too!

Access to higher salaries and awesome companies

Just as companies that hire remote teams have access to global talent, as a remote worker you have access to great companies, jobs and salaries wherever you live.

In a remote work statistics report from OwlLabs, they found that remote workers earn salaries higher than $100,000/year, 2.2x more frequently than on-site workers.

Great talent and work ethic should be rewarded and remote companies know this most of all. Benefit packages for remote workers are often generous and help make the prospect of remote work even more attractive! 

Challenges of remote working 

Though the ability to work from home or a co-working space can be hugely beneficial, it can come with challenges too. Remote work can be tricky to adjust to, and having the ability to choose your own schedule also means you need to take responsibility for it too.

Here are some of the main challenges you might face when working remotely.

Potential isolation

Working outside of a traditional office environment can have the downside of being lonely or isolating. Depending on how your life is structured and where you work, you might not see face-to-face contact in your working day. Buffer noted that the biggest struggle for 19% of remote workers was loneliness.

Everyone works differently though the isolating effects of remote working can be mitigated by using co-working spaces, liaising with your colleagues on live-chat software throughout the day or by using some of the free-time created by remote working for hobbies like team sports or socializing. 

Timezone differences between team members, disconnected communication channels or working practices can all contribute to feelings of isolation or loneliness while remote working though remember that you can work with your team to find ways to remedy the situation or change your working pattern to have more facetime with people.

I’ve found that having a mix of days where I work from home, from co-working spaces and coffee shops works for me. I get to spend time with people when I need a boost and work from home when I feel like I will be more productive being alone. I also make sure to speak to co-workers on Whereby and on Slack every day and connect with people wherever I can.

Maintaining work-life balance 

Yes – this is both a benefit and a challenge of working remotely. While working online can be hugely beneficial to work-life balance when done right, taking your work home with you can present challenges to keeping your life in balance.

Buffer report that many employees note the difficulty of switching off after work and in our experience, this is most pronounced for those who work from home, often in the same space where they do other tasks IE – the living room or kitchen.

Being able to work flexibly can sometimes create situations where you choose to work late or at the weekend. While this may be suitable for some, be wary of creating situations where you can work at any time and take your work to bed or to family time with you. 

As with any working scenario, a division between when you’re on the clock and between your working and living spaces is important to keeping your work-life balance intact.

This has been one of my greatest challenges when working remotely. Working for awesome companies and doing work I enjoy means I regularly enjoy working extra hours, but in the long run this is not entirely healthy. I’ve taken steps to make certain areas of the house no-work zones and I use time tracking apps to not only keep track of my working hours but ensure I don’t overwork myself.

Self-motivation 

Working remotely does not mean you are working alone, but the reality is that you are likely responsible for motivating yourself throughout your working day. Even with daily stand-ups, company Slack channels and collaboration tools – much of your work will be self-directed and you will be working without an ‘in-the-flesh’ team to provide motivation. 

Depending on your personality type and the work you are doing, you might find this is not an issue, but it’s worth bearing in mind that this is something you are responsible for and you may want to design your working pattern to help keep your motivation high.

For me, self-motivation is generally a non-issue, though it becomes a consideration when other aspects of my work or life aren’t in order. If I’m unhappy or there are some work or life stressors, this is when my motivation suffers. This is normal though it can feel more pronounced for those working from home. 

As noted in the SHRM report – remote workers often feel more guilty when their work rate suffers and are worried about how their product is perceived by onsite coworkers.

Remember that whatever you do and however you work, there will be some days and some projects that you are more or less motivated to complete. You might have a low mental health day or the work might be extremely complex or difficult. Share your concerns with your team, ask for help and acknowledge what is in or out of your immediate control. 

Managing distractions

More than 80% of remote working staff that responded to Buffer’s survey stated that they preferred to work from home rather than co-working spaces or coffee shops.

Working from home has huge potential benefits though it’s worth noting that your workspace is then also the space where you eat, sleep, do laundry, spend time with loved ones, watch Netflix and much else besides. Having discipline, maintaining work-life balance and managing distractions are all challenges you should bear in mind when working from home.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do laundry during the working day if you’re working at home (IMO, you should!) but it means structuring your day and working pattern so you can do the things you need to but not the things you shouldn’t.

Remote working often gives you the flexibility to do tasks during the day that might otherwise have to wait – it’s up to you to determine whether they are helping you be a happier, more productive worker or are simply distracting you from the work at hand.

In honesty, I believe distractions are an issue whether you work in an office environment or from home and in truth, offices are often more distracting places than anywhere else. Traditional work often asks that we take steps to eliminate distractions from the workspace and you can benefit from taking this approach when remote working too.

Key skills for remote working

Every job requires a strong and varied skillset from its workers. Every role – whether you’re a developer or marketing guru – has its own set of tools, requirements, and proficiencies you need to become familiar with in order to be effective.

When you work online or transition to remote working, it pays to learn new skills or to develop and adapt existing ones in order for you to be successful.

Here are the nine key skills you need in order to be an effective remote worker.

Motivation

Self-motivation and being able to maintain motivation when working alone is one of the most important skills a remote worker has. A big part of helping yourself be motivated and work effectively is by nailing down the job design with your employer and creating systems and processes that help with motivation. Some organizations have reward schemes or find that effective feedback is the best approach to helping teams stay motivated.

If you need to be around people in some way to maintain motivation, go to a co-working space. If you find roadmaps and long term planning helpful in staying motivated and getting excited about tasks, then you should work with your team to put one together and share this with the company. 

Remember that if you’re having difficulty with motivation, it might be because of other factors such as distractions, job design or support systems. This can be one of the trickiest remote working challenges and is one we’d suggest being open about and communicating to your managers where possible. 

Proactivity 

In a remote working context, being proactive means working intelligently, finding tasks and jobs where you can contribute effectively. It also means being able to work independently and without direct oversight. If your manager needs to prompt you to begin work every day, that’s not a great look! Similarly, if you’ve finished your main tasks for the week by Thursday, be proactive and find places where you can contribute or add value. 

Being a proactive remote worker also means being aware of your working process and taking steps to improve it where possible. You have responsibility and ownership over your working day – within reason, you can be proactive and change this to make it the perfect process for you. 

Remote working is a young field. Share best practices, try new things and develop your process. Not only will you find yourself being more productive but you’ll have greater job satisfaction too!

Communication

Effective communication is vital for any employee, though even more so when working remotely. Being able to communicate efficiently via email or video chat software can ease many of the potential friction points for a remote team.

Staying in communication requires an effort from both managers and staff so be sure to reply to emails, be present on Slack and participate in online meetings and workshops where possible.

Tech-skills

Working remotely requires some basic tech skills by necessity. You need to be able to create and maintain your working environment, as well as ensure that you can get online and troubleshoot basic issues that might prevent you from working. This will likely include becoming proficient with collaboration, administrative tools, and productivity apps in order to be an effective team member.

Your company will no doubt help you learn what you don’t know, but certainly, it is part of your job to become literate in all of the skills you need to do the job while working in a remote environment. Any time saved working remotely is wasted if you spend an age figuring out your VPN or haven’t correctly configured your KeePass. 

Organization 

Working remotely means often working without direct oversight. While there will likely be several systems in place for organizing workload and assigning tasks (Trello, Asana, etc), working remotely often means being able to create some of your own working processes and finding ways to self organize that work for you.

Your responsibility is to not only use the process your organization has in place but to organize your time and working patterns so you can be both effective and happy in your work. Flexibility does not mean doing things on the hoof and not taking steps to organize your time and workload – in fact, great organization means being better prepared to be flexible when the need arrives. 

Task management

Going hand in hand with organization, task management is another key skill of the remote worker. Being able to self direct your working day and to an extent choose how to best spend your time means taking responsibility over that time and the tasks you prioritize. If you spend too long on certain tasks, how does that affect others? If your marketing team needs to draft content before they can move forward, perhaps that task takes priority.

Keeping yourself on task while working from home is a big responsibility. Use tools like Kanban, Asana or Trello to organize yourself and be accountable to your team. Outline your tasks and priorities at the beginning of the week as well as every day, so you can keep track and adjust your course where necessary! 

Being flexible

Flexibility is king when it comes to remote working. Not only is it one of the great benefits of working remotely, but it’s also a skill you need to demonstrate. Remote teams are often global in nature and distributed across many timezones. Being flexible might mean changing your working hours based on the needs of the team or to help high priority customers on the other side of the world.

Working with a distributed team and different environments might mean being flexible in your preferred forms of communication or working. Think about what’s best for the group and the task at hand and be flexible where you can.

Discipline

Working remotely means you have some self-direction over your day. Depending on your workload, role, and team policies, you can likely work when you want, where you want and how you want.

This freedom comes with the potential for distraction and as a remote worker, you need to be disciplined. Create good habits and stick to them. Working from home shouldn’t mean that you wake up just a few minutes before starting your working day. Have discipline and create productive working patterns that mean you can stay on task while enjoying the benefits of working remotely.

Bonus skills

While these are not integral to being a successful remote working employee, these can be extremely helpful in being a valued and effective member of a remote working organization.

Big picture thinking

Companies with a partial or fully remote workforce are often progressive, agile and innovative organizations. Think of fully remote companies like Automattic, Zapier or hybrid companies such as Basecamp. These organizations hire remotely because they are looking for staff who are exceptional, wherever they are in the world.

Part of being an exceptional employee in these companies is being able to see the big picture and to think of how the company might grow and develop and contribute to achieving those changes.

Remote work is still a nascent field and as a remote worker, you are uniquely positioned to help change the way you and your team works.
Take advantage of that opportunity!

Varied skillset

In some remote organizations, the ability to wear many hats and contribute to various teams or areas of the company can be important. Being able to help out in customer support if your timezone is overloaded with tickets or being able to chime in with the marketing team is a huge boost to your organization.

Some remote teams are smaller and leaner by design and being able to contribute wherever you can be most effective is an added bonus. This is hugely dependent on your organization and sector, though having extra skills in your toolbox is never a bad thing!

Curiosity 

Remote working in large organizations means you are unlikely to directly interact with teams outside of your own very often. This might mean that you simply don’t know some of your colleagues or how other parts of your organization operate.

Being curious as a remote worker means being aware of what other teams are doing, being active in company discussions, seeing future opportunities and asking lots of questions.

Remote workers can sometimes face the challenge of feeling unknown or unseen in their organization. By being curious and getting involved with the company and teams outside your own, you can not only put yourself on the company map but be better positioned for success in your own role. 

Tips for working remotely

Remote work is still new to many of us, and we’re still working out how to operate efficiently while also take advantage of all the benefits. Collaborating online, maintaining communication and staying happy while working online are all things we need to be aware of. A virtual team should remember to share best practices where they can. We’re all in this together! 

When you work from home, some things you may never have thought can present challenges and obstacles to your productivity and mental health. This is nothing new: all jobs and working environments present their own challenges.

Here are our tips for working from home or in a remote team. 

Have a separate working space

Unplugging after work was the biggest struggle with working remotely for respondents to Buffer’s survey on remote work. Personally, this has been one of the trickiest parts to get right in my own remote working practice. It can be very easy to take your laptop to the sofa with you after working hours are over and continue to reply to the odd email or work up some copy.

Have a separate workspace in your home so you can keep your work/life balance in check while working from home. If you have a spare room or a home office, great. If you don’t, try having a dedicated corner or table away from your living space. It can be so beneficial to have a workspace that is delineated and separate from the rest, even if that’s just a spot on the kitchen table.

Co-working spaces can also be great in this regard. Not only is this effective in keeping your work life and home life separate, but face-to-face human contact is beneficial too. Coffee shops and cafes can also be a good way to separate your spaces and have that face-to-face contact, though does come with the added potential for distraction and cost. I like to work from a cafe once a week as a treat. Having a chai latte and a slice of carrot cake can help take the sting out of a difficult working day.

Wherever you choose to work from, find what works for you though bear in mind the needs of your role and team. If you’re doing sales calls with clients, being in a noisy cafe isn’t the best idea. Mix it up where necessary but try to avoid working from your sofa or your bed – this makes it difficult to unplug and stop working when you should. 

Stay in contact, stay connected

Particularly when working on big projects or to a deadline, remote work really enables you to put your head down and focus. This can be super-effective when it comes to being productive, but can also present a challenge of losing contact with your colleagues. I’ve had periods where I’ve felt so busy that I don’t have time for meetings, chats or catch-ups.

This is not a sustainable practice and can lead to increased feelings of isolation or lower connectivity between teams. Be sure to stay in contact as much as possible, whether that’s through email, over Slack or in video chats. Being connected to your team always has value, even if you cannot put a direct dollar value on it.

If you’re working with a colleague or team on a project, why not use Zoom to work alongside each other virtually? You might not be chatting all the time, but being able to simulate some of the face-to-face conversation that goes on when sitting around a table online is a nice way to spend a few hours.

At SessionLab, we use Zoom for large or customer-facing meetings, but we also have a Whereby meeting room for impromptu chats that come up throughout the day. No need for sending invites or collating calendars – we just revisit our room URL and we’re chatting face-to-face instantly.

This can be super-useful for connecting quickly on an issue that is too complicated for Slack, or just to spend some time working together when our schedules open up. You can achieve this with many tools, and I’d recommend getting into the habit of hopping on a quick call when necessary!

Good organizations should have processes in place for helping teams stay in contact. Additionally, try to put time into your schedule for replying to emails, for having chats and staying in contact. If you’re feeling disconnected, remember that you have the power to change that.

Start your day the right way

Working from home means you often have the possibility of rolling out of bed and starting work in your pajamas. Not only can this habit be problematic if you have a meeting first thing, but it can also be bad news for your mental health and productivity.

I try and start the day as if I was going into the office and working with colleagues. Get up early, take a shower, have breakfast and wear nice, clean clothes. The benefit to my routine and mental health is especially noticeable when I let those things slide for a few days. It’s easy to take these things for granted – build them into your routine!

Another great tip is to outline what you’re going to do for the day when you start. This might be in a daily stand-up you post in Slack, or just for yourself. I’ve found it massively useful to write down everything I want to do that day in order of priority and to go back to it throughout the day. Working flexibly means there are possibilities for distraction – by having this list, I have something to go back to if I lose track of what I’m doing.

Create opportunities for fun

Virtual teams are no different from live teams – they are made up of people for whom morale, team culture, and connection are important aspects of job satisfaction. We spend a huge amount of our lives with our colleagues and while it’s vital that you work together effectively, having fun and engaging with your remote teammates is also integral to your remote working life.

At SessionLab, we have Slack channels for GIF battles, music recommendations, and general laughs. I’ve seen organizations that have channels for sharing pictures and videos of pets, recounting fun things they’ve done, or time spent with their children.

It’s also great to have rooms for specific TV shows, sports or hobbies. At a previous organization, we had a channel for Game of Thrones discussions with the tagline: For the chat is dark and full of spoilers! It was a brilliant way to get to know team members I didn’t regularly work with and feel connected while sharing theories and memes about something we were all engaged with.

At SessionLab, we have daily stand-ups that are primarily work-related in nature. We also have team lunches once a week where we get to just chat and have fun together. Particularly for remote workers who are new or are working in difficult circumstances because of travel bans, these opportunities to connect and talk about something that isn’t work and have fun can be instrumental in making remote work enjoyable. 

Why not have a movie night where your team all watch the same movie and chat about it in Slack? Or hang out after work and have your favorite alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage? Remember that remote work is more isolating by its nature: take opportunities to engage with your remote team and have fun where possible.

Limit distractions

Distractions are something you will often have to deal with when working remotely or working from home. If you have young children, pets or work from co-working spaces, there are times where you will be necessarily taken away from your work and that’s okay – it happens all the time in a live office environment too.

What you do want to limit or remove are those unnecessary distractions. Take your social media tabs down and don’t be tempted to put a TV show you really want to watch on in the background. If you have other people in the house, let them know you’re working and create a system where you can be productive.

This doesn’t mean don’t check social media or talk to your housemates – it means having dedicated working time where you don’t interact with those things unless necessary. On the subject of TV, some people find having something light on in the background on low volume is helpful.

I’ve seen The Office: An American Workplace so many times it’s like having an amusing podcast on, with the added bonus of occasionally looking up to see Jim’s reaction face. Whatever you do, be honest with yourself. If having the TV on quietly helps you work and keeps you happy, go ahead. If you know that having housemates or coworkers near you will make you less productive, find a quiet space on your own.

For me, I use music to block out distractions, particularly when working in shared spaces. In our co-working space, we have a “headphones on = do not disturb” policy. If you want to chat, leave them off. If you want to get undisturbed work done, put them on. Similarly, mark yourself as busy in Slack if you don’t want to be disturbed.

Develop radical candor – ask for what you need

Working remotely has its own challenges and every worker can see issues that can affect both their work and home life as a result of remote working. These are often all surmountable, though one of the dangers for distributed teams is that such challenges or concerns remain invisible.

Being seen, heard and feeling valued is vital for job satisfaction and this is no different for remote workers. Part of this responsibility lies with management teams and organizations though for remote working employees it pays to be able to voice concerns, raise your hand and most importantly, ask for what you need. Whether that’s in support to pay for a co-working space or developing systems and processes to improve the remote experience for you and your co-workers.

Part of the onboarding process at SessionLab is to take a look at Kim Scott’s book on Radical Candor. This is just one of many tools you can use to help you and your team to develop a mindset of asking for what they need and being proactive in improving the workplace.

Being honest is advantageous in any role though even more so in a remote environment where you may not have as many organic opportunities for others to intuit your needs. 

Invest in good equipment

Working from home means you are often shifting from a centralized office workspace to your home. This requires a change in thinking but also, having the right equipment and resources to do your job in this new environment. Having a laptop computer might be sufficient for some, but how about your desk, your audio equipment, and other resources? 

Depending on your role, you may require specialized equipment or software in order to work from home effectively. Conducting online meetings with clients might mean you want higher quality audio equipment. As a developer, you may require two screens in order to be truly productive.

You might also find that a standing desk, monitor or wireless keyboards all help make your remote work more productive and enjoyable. It’s easy to forget the value of a good chair!

These kinds of devices and provisions are often made available in an office environment and depending on your role, time spent working from home and other factors, they may be useful in a home setting too.

Many remote companies help with the cost of such equipment or software. Talk to your managers and see how they can help if you need equipment to work remotely.

Use collaboration tools

In an SHRM report, 98% of employees stated that collaboration tools made them feel connected to coworkers and helped to get to know them, with two-thirds of remote workers stating that their favorite co-workers worked in different locations.

Being a globally distributed team with remote workers separated by distance, timezones or other factors does not need to be a barrier if the right tools and processes are in place. Use tools that are provided by your organization or suggest your own. Slack is great, but could you also benefit from video conferencing software?

You know the challenges of your own remote working role the best, so be sure to communicate with your manager and find the best tools and practices that will help resolve the issues you face with working remotely.

At SessionLab, we use a mix of tools to stay connected and work together on projects and tasks. Google Drive works for a lot of coworking tasks, and when we’re designing meetings or workshops we use our own planner tool.

Create your own routines and working patterns 

Working flexibly does not mean working haphazardly. Something I’ve learned over five years of working remotely is that while I love being able to choose my own schedule and work from where I want, I still massively benefit from having a routine and patterns I follow throughout the week.

Knowing yourself and what works for you is vital in any job, though even more so when working remotely. You might need the company of people in a co-working space in order to be productive, or find that spending one day working in a coffee shop and treating yourself helps keep you happy.

When it comes to managing tasks, you may find that you are productive at different times or need to create a habit or routine in order to get things done effectively.

In my role at SessionLab, I touch a lot of different areas across my working week and work on a large number of different tasks and projects. I structure my day so that complex tasks and projects are tackled in the mornings when I have a good deal of creative energy and leave data or analytics-oriented tasks for the afternoon. I also found that at the end of the week, some of my emotional reserves tend to be used up and so we moved management 1-1s to earlier in the week.

Working routines are great for being productive and adding structure to your remote working time and being a remote worker gives you permission to design these in a way that is unique to you.

Take regular breaks and get away from the screen 

Remote working requires you to be on your computer for much of the day. Often, those transitioning to remote work end up spending more time looking at their screen than their counterparts in the office, for whom meetings and discussions often mean getting away from their screens.

When taking breaks, try to get away from the screen where possible. This might mean going outside, doing a little exercise, doing some light chores or meditating. Whatever you do, any chance you get to relax your eyes and brain is valuable. Spending your break watching youtube videos or scrolling through Twitter might not give you the mental break you need to feel refreshed.

It’s also worth noting that you should take regular breaks and if necessary, set yourself a timer so you actually take a break. I find that I can often disappear down a rabbit hole of work and forget to take a break, then wonder why I have a headache. Setting a timer on my phone at two-hour intervals helps me step away and come back feeling recharged.

Don’t feel guilty about doing light chores

Reducing stress is one of the biggest benefits of working remotely – don’t let the worry or guilt of doing light chores increase your stress level. Performing light chores like cooking and cleaning your desk are part of having a productive work environment. Letting these slide can really affect your work productivity and remember when you’re working from home, this is your workspace! Sometimes, this means putting a load of laundry in or washing the dishes after you’ve had lunch. 

Remote workers often feel guilty about whether they’re being perceived as doing enough work and as such, let some of these tasks slide and become stressed as a result. This isn’t good for you or for your company. Light chores in the home that allow you to keep working productively are okay to perform – just ensure you’re not disappearing for three hours to clean out the attic!

Be empowered to work flexibly 

Working from home often means that organizations are providing you with the flexibility to work at your best while also improving your work-life balance.

If you need to go out for groceries or medicine, communicate with your team and go do it. Most organizations offering flexible work operate on the idea that you work X hours a day. If you need to pick up your kid from school or go to the dentist, that should be okay so long as you communicate in advance, ensure that your team can cover you and that you keep your weekly hours at their correct level.

Every organization will have its own policies on flexible working and some roles, such as customer support may require certain working hours to be covered. That doesn’t mean you can’t communicate your needs. Talk to your supervisor if you want to work more flexible hours and see what can be done. 

Take care of your mental health

This is one that’s particularly close to my heart as someone who suffers from various mental health challenges. Depression, anxiety and many other mental health conditions can be problematic for people in work, and they can become even more pronounced when working remotely.

As conditions that are often invisible, it can feel difficult to justify taking time off or scheduling your workload around your mental health when working from home or as part of a virtual team. This is wrong: you should absolutely take time when you need to, communicate to your superiors freely, and develop systems that help you cope when your mental health is suffering.

All of the tips outlined above can help, but there will be times when you simply need to take time off or change up your working pattern.

I’ve personally been guilty of not communicating what I’m going through or adequately taking care of my mental health when working remotely. I’ve said I’ve had a cold when really, I’ve felt too depressed to work or just come into work regardless of how I’m feeling without saying anything.

Equally, it’s been very easy to justify going into work even when feeling terrible, just because I’m working from home. In my experience, none of these are the right solution and it’s been a big learning curve for me to find what works for me.

The best advice I can give is to be completely honest with your co-workers and managers where you feel able, to be kind to yourself and to take time when you need to. Sometimes, getting deep into a new project or work task can be beneficial and it’s worth noting that every person’s experience of mental health is different – the appropriate response should be similarly nuanced. Ultimately, good organizations take mental health seriously and you should too!

Over to you

Being able to work from home or work remotely can be life-changing for individuals and hugely beneficial to businesses too. In tough circumstances such as travel bans or self-isolation, remote working can be the difference between a company shutting down or being able to continue to operate efficiently.

Working remotely is not without its challenges. By developing a routine and a set of productive habits, you can make the most of working from home or a co-working space and be more effective at work too!

Are there any tips for remote work you’d like to share? What’s been your biggest challenge when working remotely? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

To truly understand a problem and develop appropriate solutions, you will want to follow a solid process, follow the necessary problem solving steps, and bring all of your problem solving skills to the table.  

We’ll first guide you through the seven step problem solving process you and your team can use to effectively solve complex business challenges.

We’ll also look at what problem solving strategies you can employ with your team when looking for a way to approach the process.

We’ll then discuss the problem solving skills you need to be more effective at solving problems, complete with an activity from the SessionLab library you can use to develop that skill in your team.

Let’s get to it! 

• What is a problem solving process?
• What are the problem solving steps I need to follow?
• Problem solving strategies
• What skills do I need to be an effective problem solver?
• How can I improve my problem solving skills?

What is a problem solving process?

Solving problems is like baking a cake. You can go straight into the kitchen without a recipe or the right ingredients and do your best, but the end result is unlikely to be very tasty!

Using a process to bake a cake allows you to use the best ingredients without waste, collect the right tools, account for allergies, decide whether it is a birthday or wedding cake, and then bake efficiently and on time. The result is a better cake that is fit for purpose, tastes better and has created less mess in the kitchen. Also, it should have chocolate sprinkles.

Having a step by step process to solve organizational problems allows you to go through each stage methodically and ensure you are trying to solve the right problems and select the most appropriate, effective solutions.

What are the problem solving steps I need to follow? 

All problem solving processes go through a number of steps in order to move from identifying a problem to resolving it.

Depending on your problem solving model and who you ask, there can be anything between four and nine problem solving steps you should follow in order to find the right solution. Whatever framework you and your group use, there are some key items that should be addressed in order to have an effective process.

We’ve looked at problem solving processes from sources such as the American Society for Quality and their four step approach, and Mediate‘s six step process.

By reflecting on those and our own problem solving processes, we’ve come up with a sequence of seven problem solving steps we feel best covers everything you need in order to effectively solve problems.

1. Problem identification 

The first stage of any problem solving process is to identify the problem or problems you might want to solve. Effective problem solving strategies always begin by allowing a group scope to articulate what they believe the problem to be and then coming to some consensus over which problem they approach first. Problem solving activities used at this stage often have a focus on creating frank, open discussion so that potential problems can be brought to the surface.

2. Problem analysis 

Though this step is not a million miles from problem identification, problem analysis deserves to be considered separately. It can often be an overlooked part of the process and is instrumental when it comes to developing effective solutions.

The process of problem analysis means ensuring that the problem you are seeking to solve is the right problem. As part of this stage, you may look deeper and try to find the root cause of a specific problem at a team or organizational level.

Remember that problem solving strategies should not only be focused on putting out fires in the short term but developing long term solutions that deal with the root cause of organizational challenges. 

Whatever your approach, analyzing a problem is crucial in being able to select an appropriate solution and the problem solving skills deployed in this stage are beneficial for the rest of the process and ensuring the solutions you create are fit for purpose.

3. Solution generation

Once your group has nailed down the particulars of the problem you wish to solve, you want to encourage a free flow of ideas connecting to solving that problem. This can take the form of problem solving games that encourage creative thinking or problem solving activities designed to produce working prototypes of possible solutions. 

The key to ensuring the success of this stage of the problem solving process is to encourage quick, creative thinking and create an open space where all ideas are considered. The best solutions can come from unlikely places and by using problem solving techniques that celebrate invention, you might come up with solution gold. 

4. Solution development

No solution is likely to be perfect right out of the gate. It’s important to discuss and develop the solutions your group has come up with over the course of following the previous problem solving steps in order to arrive at the best possible solution. Problem solving games used in this stage involve lots of critical thinking, measuring potential effort and impact, and looking at possible solutions analytically. 

During this stage, you will often ask your team to iterate and improve upon your frontrunning solutions and develop them further. Remember that problem solving strategies always benefit from a multitude of voices and opinions, and not to let ego get involved when it comes to choosing which solutions to develop and take further.

Finding the best solution is the goal of all problem solving workshops and here is the place to ensure that your solution is well thought out, sufficiently robust and fit for purpose. 

5. Decision making 

Nearly there! Once your group has reached consensus and selected a solution that applies to the problem at hand you have some decisions to make. You will want to work on allocating ownership of the project, figure out who will do what, how the success of the solution will be measured and decide the next course of action.

The decision making stage is a part of the problem solving process that can get missed or taken as for granted. Fail to properly allocate roles and plan out how a solution will actually be implemented and it less likely to be successful in solving the problem.

Have clear accountabilities, actions, timeframes, and follow-ups. Make these decisions and set clear next-steps in the problem solving workshop so that everyone is aligned and you can move forward effectively as a group. 

Ensuring that you plan for the roll-out of a solution is one of the most important problem solving steps. Without adequate planning or oversight, it can prove impossible to measure success or iterate further if the problem was not solved. 

6. Solution implementation 

This is what we were waiting for! All problem solving strategies have the end goal of implementing a solution and solving a problem in mind. 

Remember that in order for any solution to be successful, you need to help your group through all of the previous problem solving steps thoughtfully. Only then can you ensure that you are solving the right problem but also that you have developed the correct solution and can then successfully implement and measure the impact of that solution.

Project management and communication skills are key here – your solution may need to adjust when out in the wild or you might discover new challenges along the way.

7. Solution evaluation 

So you and your team developed a great solution to a problem and have a gut feeling its been solved. Work done, right? Wrong. All problem solving strategies benefit from evaluation, consideration, and feedback. You might find that the solution does not work for everyone, might create new problems, or is potentially so successful that you will want to roll it out to larger teams or as part of other initiatives. 

None of that is possible without taking the time to evaluate the success of the solution you developed in your problem solving model and adjust if necessary.

Remember that the problem solving process is often iterative and it can be common to not solve complex issues on the first try. Even when this is the case, you and your team will have generated learning that will be important for future problem solving workshops or in other parts of the organization. 

It’s worth underlining how important record keeping is throughout the problem solving process. If a solution didn’t work, you need to have the data and records to see why that was the case. If you go back to the drawing board, notes from the previous workshop can help save time. Data and insight is invaluable at every stage of the problem solving process and this one is no different.

Problem solving workshops made easy

Problem solving strategies

Problem solving strategies are methods of approaching and facilitating the process of problem-solving with a set of techniques, actions, and processes. Different strategies are more effective if you are trying to solve broad problems such as achieving higher growth versus more focused problems like, how do we improve our customer onboarding process?

Broadly, the problem solving steps outlined above should be included in any problem solving strategy though choosing where to focus your time and what approaches should be taken is where they begin to differ. You might find that some strategies ask for the problem identification to be done prior to the session or that everything happens in the course of a one day workshop.

The key similarity is that all good problem solving strategies are structured and designed. Four hours of open discussion is never going to be as productive as a four-hour workshop designed to lead a group through a problem solving process.

Good problem solving strategies are tailored to the team, organization and problem you will be attempting to solve. Here are some example problem solving strategies you can learn from or use to get started.

Use a workshop to lead a team through a group process

Often, the first step to solving problems or organizational challenges is bringing a group together effectively. Most teams have the tools, knowledge, and expertise necessary to solve their challenges – they just need some guidance in how to use leverage those skills and a structure and format that allows people to focus their energies.

Facilitated workshops are one of the most effective ways of solving problems of any scale. By designing and planning your workshop carefully, you can tailor the approach and scope to best fit the needs of your team and organization. 

Problem solving workshop

Great for:

• Creating a bespoke, tailored process
• Tackling problems of any size
• Building in-house workshop ability and encouraging their use

Workshops are an effective strategy for solving problems. By using tried and test facilitation techniques and methods, you can design and deliver a workshop that is perfectly suited to the unique variables of your organization. You may only have the capacity for a half-day workshop and so need a problem solving process to match. 

By using our session planner tool and importing methods from our library of 700+ facilitation techniques, you can create the right problem solving workshop for your team. It might be that you want to encourage creative thinking or look at things from a new angle to unblock your groups approach to problem solving. By tailoring your workshop design to the purpose, you can help ensure great results.

One of the main benefits of a workshop is the structured approach to problem solving. Not only does this mean that the workshop itself will be successful, but many of the methods and techniques will help your team improve their working processes outside of the workshop. 

We believe that workshops are one of the best tools you can use to improve the way your team works together. Start with a problem solving workshop and then see what team building, culture or design workshops can do for your organization!

Run a design sprint

Great for: 

• aligning large, multi-discipline teams
• quickly designing and testing solutions
• tackling large, complex organizational challenges and breaking them down into smaller tasks

By using design thinking principles and methods, a design sprint is a great way of identifying, prioritizing and prototyping solutions to long term challenges that can help solve major organizational problems with quick action and measurable results.

Some familiarity with design thinking is useful, though not integral, and this strategy can really help a team align if there is some discussion around which problems should be approached first. 

The stage-based structure of the design sprint is also very useful for teams new to design thinking.  The inspiration phase, where you look to competitors that have solved your problem, and the rapid prototyping and testing phases are great for introducing new concepts that will benefit a team in all their future work. 

It can be common for teams to look inward for solutions and so looking to the market for solutions you can iterate on can be very productive. Instilling an agile prototyping and testing mindset can also be great when helping teams move forwards – generating and testing solutions quickly can help save time in the long run and is also pretty exciting!

Break problems down into smaller issues

Organizational challenges and problems are often complicated and large scale in nature. Sometimes, trying to resolve such an issue in one swoop is simply unachievable or overwhelming.

Try breaking down such problems into smaller issues that you can work on step by step. You may not be able to solve the problem of churning customers off the bat, but you can work with your team to identify smaller effort but high impact elements and work on those first.

This problem solving strategy can help a team generate momentum, prioritize and get some easy wins. It’s also a great strategy to employ with teams who are just beginning to learn how to approach the problem solving process. If you want some insight into a way to employ this strategy, we recommend looking at our design sprint template below!

Use guiding frameworks or try new methodologies

Some problems are best solved by introducing a major shift in perspective or by using new methodologies that encourage your team to think differently.

Props and tools such as Methodkit, which uses a card-based toolkit for facilitation, or Lego Serious Play can be great ways to engage your team and find an inclusive, democratic problem solving strategy. Remember that play and creativity are great tools for achieving change and whatever the challenge, engaging your participants can be very effective where other strategies may have failed.

LEGO Serious Play

Great for:

• Improving core problem solving skills
• Thinking outside of the box
• Encouraging creative solutions

LEGO Serious Play is a problem solving methodology designed to get participants thinking differently by using 3D models and kinesthetic learning styles. By physically building LEGO models based on questions and exercises, participants are encouraged to think outside of the box and create their own responses. 

Collaborate LEGO Serious Play exercises are also used to encourage communication and build problem solving skills in a group. By using this problem solving process, you can often help different kinds of learners and personality types contribute and unblock organizational problems with creative thinking. 

Problem solving strategies like LEGO Serious Play are super effective at helping a team solve more skills-based problems such as communication between teams or a lack of creative thinking. Some problems are not suited to LEGO Serious Play and require a different problem solving strategy.

Card Decks and Method Kits

Great for:

• New facilitators or non-facilitators 
• Approaching difficult subjects with a simple, creative framework
• Engaging those with varied learning styles

Card decks and method kids are great tools for those new to facilitation or for whom facilitation is not the primary role. Card decks such as the emotional culture deck can be used for complete workshops and in many cases, can be used right out of the box. Methodkit has a variety of kits designed for scenarios ranging from personal development through to personas and global challenges so you can find the right deck for your particular needs.

Having an easy to use framework that encourages creativity or a new approach can take some of the friction or planning difficulties out of the workshop process and energize a team in any setting. Simplicity is the key with these methods. By ensuring everyone on your team can get involved and engage with the process as quickly as possible can really contribute to the success of your problem solving strategy.

Source external advice

Looking to peers, experts and external facilitators can be a great way of approaching the problem solving process. Your team may not have the necessary expertise, insights of experience to tackle some issues, or you might simply benefit from a fresh perspective.

Some problems may require bringing together an entire team, and coaching managers or team members individually might be the right approach. Remember that not all problems are best resolved in the same manner.

If you’re a solo entrepreneur, peer groups, coaches and mentors can also be invaluable at not only solving specific business problems, but in providing a support network for resolving future challenges. One great approach is to join a Mastermind Group and link up with like-minded individuals and all grow together.

Remember that however you approach the sourcing of external advice, do so thoughtfully, respectfully and honestly. Reciprocate where you can and prepare to be surprised by just how kind and helpful your peers can be!

Mastermind Group

Great for:

• Solo entrepreneurs or small teams with low capacity
• Peer learning and gaining outside expertise
• Getting multiple external points of view quickly

Problem solving in large organizations with lots of skilled team members is one thing, but how about if you work for yourself or in a very small team without the capacity to get the most from a design sprint or LEGO Serious Play session? 

A mastermind group – sometimes known as a peer advisory board – is where a group of people come together to support one another in their own goals, challenges, and businesses. Each participant comes to the group with their own purpose and the other members of the group will help them create solutions, brainstorm ideas, and support one another. 

Mastermind groups are very effective in creating an energized, supportive atmosphere that can deliver meaningful results. Learning from peers from outside of your organization or industry can really help unlock new ways of thinking and drive growth. Access to the experience and skills of your peers can be invaluable in helping fill the gaps in your own ability, particularly in young companies.

A mastermind group is a great solution for solo entrepreneurs, small teams, or for organizations that feel that external expertise or fresh perspectives will be beneficial for them. It is worth noting that Mastermind groups are often only as good as the participants and what they can bring to the group. Participants need to be committed, engaged and understand how to work in this context. 

Coaching and mentoring

Great for:

• Focused learning and development
• Filling skills gaps
• Working on a range of challenges over time

Receiving advice from a business coach or building a mentor/mentee relationship can be an effective way of resolving certain challenges. The one-to-one format of most coaching and mentor relationships can really help solve the challenges those individuals are having and benefit the organization as a result.

A great mentor can be invaluable when it comes to spotting potential problems before they arise and coming to understand a mentee very well has a host of other business benefits. You might run an internal mentorship program to help develop your team’s problem solving skills and strategies or as part of a large learning and development program. External coaches can also be an important part of your problem solving strategy, filling skills gaps for your management team or helping with specific business issues. 

Now we’ve explored the problem solving process and the steps you will want to go through in order to have an effective session, let’s look at the skills you and your team need to be more effective problem solvers.

What skills do I need to be an effective problem solver?

Problem solving skills are highly sought after, whatever industry or team you work in. Organizations are keen to employ people who are able to approach problems thoughtfully and find strong, realistic solutions. Whether you are a facilitator, a team leader or a developer, being an effective problem solver is a skill you’ll want to develop.

Problem solving skills form a whole suite of techniques and approaches that an individual uses to not only identify problems but to discuss them productively before then developing appropriate solutions.

Here are some of the most important problem solving skills everyone from executives to junior staff members should learn. We’ve also included an activity or exercise from the SessionLab library that can help you and your team develop that skill. 

If you’re running a workshop or training session to try and improve problem solving skills in your team, try using these methods to supercharge your process!

Active listening

Active listening is one of the most important skills anyone who works with people can possess. In short, active listening is a technique used to not only better understand what is being said by an individual, but also to be more aware of the underlying message the speaker is trying to convey.

When it comes to problem solving, active listening is integral for understanding the position of every participant and to clarify the challenges, ideas and solutions they bring to the table.

Some active listening skills include:

• Paying complete attention to the speaker.
• Removing distractions.
• Avoid interruption.
• Taking the time to fully understand before preparing a rebuttal.
• Responding respectfully and appropriately.
• Demonstrate attentiveness and positivity with an open posture, making eye contact with the speaker, smiling and nodding if appropriate. Show that you are listening and encourage them to continue.
• Be aware of and respectful of feelings. Judge the situation and respond appropriately. You can disagree without being disrespectful.   
• Observe body language. 
• Paraphrase what was said in your own words, either mentally or verbally.
• Remain neutral. 
• Reflect and take a moment before responding.
• Ask deeper questions based on what is said and clarify points where necessary.
    

Analytical skills

All problem solving models require strong analytical skills, particularly during the beginning of the process and when it comes to analyzing how solutions have performed.

Analytical skills are primarily focused on performing an effective analysis by collecting, studying and parsing data related to a problem or opportunity. 

It often involves spotting patterns, being able to see things from different perspectives and using observable facts and data to make suggestions or produce insight. 

Analytical skills are also important at every stage of the problem solving process and by having these skills, you can ensure that any ideas or solutions you create or backed up analytically and have been sufficiently thought out.

Collaboration

Trying to solve problems on your own is difficult. Being able to collaborate effectively, with a free exchange of ideas, to delegate and be a productive member of a team is hugely important to all problem solving strategies.

Remember that whatever your role, collaboration is integral, and in a problem solving process, you are all working together to find the best solution for everyone. 

Communication  

Being an effective communicator means being empathetic, clear and succinct, asking the right questions, and demonstrating active listening skills throughout any discussion or meeting. 

In a problem solving setting, you need to communicate well in order to progress through each stage of the process effectively. As a team leader, it may also fall to you to facilitate communication between parties who may not see eye to eye. Effective communication also means helping others to express themselves and be heard in a group.

Creativity

Creative problem solving skills can be some of the best tools in your arsenal. Thinking creatively, being able to generate lots of ideas and come up with out of the box solutions is useful at every step of the process. 

The kinds of problems you will likely discuss in a problem solving workshop are often difficult to solve, and by approaching things in a fresh, creative manner, you can often create more innovative solutions.

Having practical creative skills is also a boon when it comes to problem solving. If you can help create quality design sketches and prototypes in record time, it can help bring a team to alignment more quickly or provide a base for further iteration.

Critical thinking

Critical thinking is one of the fundamental problem solving skills you’ll want to develop when working on developing solutions. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, rationalize and evaluate while being aware of personal bias, outlying factors and remaining open-minded.

Defining and analyzing problems without deploying critical thinking skills can mean you and your team go down the wrong path. Developing solutions to complex issues requires critical thinking too – ensuring your team considers all possibilities and rationally evaluating them. 

Data analysis 

Though it shares lots of space with general analytical skills, data analysis skills are something you want to cultivate in their own right in order to be an effective problem solver.

Being good at data analysis doesn’t just mean being able to find insights from data, but also selecting the appropriate data for a given issue, interpreting it effectively and knowing how to model and present that data. Depending on the problem at hand, it might also include a working knowledge of specific data analysis tools and procedures. 

Having a solid grasp of data analysis techniques is useful if you’re leading a problem solving workshop but if you’re not an expert, don’t worry. Bring people into the group who has this skill set and help your team be more effective as a result.

Decision making

All problems need a solution and all solutions require that someone make the decision to implement them. Without strong decision making skills, teams can become bogged down in discussion and less effective as a result. 

Making decisions is a key part of the problem solving process. It’s important to remember that decision making is not restricted to the leadership team. Every staff member makes decisions every day and developing these skills ensures that your team is able to solve problems at any scale.

Remember that making decisions does not mean leaping to the first solution but weighing up the options and coming to an informed, well thought out solution to any given problem that works for the whole team.

Dependability

Most complex organizational problems require multiple people to be involved in delivering the solution. Ensuring that the team and organization can depend on you to take the necessary actions and communicate where necessary is key to ensuring problems are solved effectively.

Being dependable also means working to deadlines and to brief. It is often a matter of creating trust in a team so that everyone can depend on one another to complete the agreed actions in the agreed time frame so that the team can move forward together. Being undependable can create problems of friction and can limit the effectiveness of your solutions so be sure to bear this in mind throughout a project. 

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an important skill for any successful team member, whether communicating internally or with clients or users. In the problem solving process, emotional intelligence means being attuned to how people are feeling and thinking, communicating effectively and being self-aware of what you bring to a room. 

There are often differences of opinion when working through problem solving processes, and it can be easy to let things become impassioned or combative. Developing your emotional intelligence means being empathetic to your colleagues and managing your own emotions throughout the problem and solution process. Be kind, be thoughtful and put your points across care and attention. 

Being emotionally intelligent is a skill for life and by deploying it at work, you can not only work efficiently but empathetically. Check out the emotional culture workshop template for more!

Facilitation

As we’ve clarified in our facilitation skills post, facilitation is the art of leading people through processes towards agreed-upon objectives in a manner that encourages participation, ownership, and creativity by all those involved.

While facilitation is a set of interrelated skills in itself, the broad definition of facilitation can be invaluable when it comes to problem solving. Leading a team through a problem solving process is made more effective if you improve and utilize facilitation skills – whether you’re a manager, team leader or external stakeholder.

Flexibility 

Being flexible is a vital skill when it comes to problem solving. This does not mean immediately bowing to pressure or changing your opinion quickly: instead, being flexible is all about seeing things from new perspectives, receiving new information and factoring it into your thought process.

Flexibility is also important when it comes to rolling out solutions. It might be that other organizational projects have greater priority or require the same resources as your chosen solution. Being flexible means understanding needs and challenges across the team and being open to shifting or arranging your own schedule as necessary. Again, this does not mean immediately making way for other projects. It’s about articulating your own needs, understanding the needs of others and being able to come to a meaningful compromise.

Honesty

Working in any group can lead to unconscious elements of groupthink or situations in which you may not wish to be entirely honest. Disagreeing with the opinions of the executive team or wishing to save the feelings of a coworker can be tricky to navigate, but being honest is absolutely vital when to comes to developing effective solutions and ensuring your voice is heard. 

Remember that being honest does not mean being brutally candid. You can deliver your honest feedback and opinions thoughtfully and without creating friction by using other skills such as emotional intelligence. 

Initiative 

The problem solving process is multi-faceted and requires different approaches at certain points of the process. Taking initiative to bring problems to the attention of the team, collect data or lead the solution creating process is always valuable. You might even roadtest your own small scale solutions or brainstorm before a session. Taking initiative is particularly effective if you have good deal of knowledge in that area or have ownership of a particular project and want to get things kickstarted.

That said, be sure to remember to honor the process and work in service of the team. If you are asked to own one part of the problem solving process and you don’t complete that task because your initiative leads you to work on something else, that’s not an effective method of solving business challenges.

Impartiality

A particularly useful problem solving skill for product owners or managers is the ability to remain impartial throughout much of the process. In practice, this means treating all points of view and ideas brought forward in a meeting equally and ensuring that your own areas of interest or ownership are not favored over others. 

There may be a stage in the process where a decision maker has to weigh the cost and ROI of possible solutions against the company roadmap though even then, ensuring that the decision made is based on merit and not personal opinion. 

Leadership

Being a good leader means getting a team aligned, energized and focused around a common goal. In the problem solving process, strong leadership helps ensure that the process is efficient, that any conflicts are resolved and that a team is managed in the direction of success.

It’s common for managers or executives to assume this role in a problem solving workshop, though it’s important that the leader maintains impartiality and does not bulldoze the group in a particular direction. Remember that good leadership means working in service of the purpose and team and ensuring the workshop is a safe space for employees of any level to contribute. Take a look at our leadership games and activities post for more exercises and methods to help improve leadership in your organization.

Mediation

In the context of problem solving, mediation is important in keeping a team engaged, happy and free of conflict. When leading or facilitating a problem solving workshop, you are likely to run into differences of opinion. Depending on the nature of the problem, certain issues may be brought up that are emotive in nature. 

Being an effective mediator means helping those people on either side of such a divide are heard, listen to one another and encouraged to find common ground and a resolution. Mediating skills are useful for leaders and managers in many situations and the problem solving process is no different.

Planning 

Solving organizational problems is much more effective when following a process or problem solving model. Planning skills are vital in order to structure, deliver and follow-through on a problem solving workshop and ensure your solutions are intelligently deployed.

Planning skills include the ability to organize tasks and a team, plan and design the process and take into account any potential challenges. Taking the time to plan carefully can save time and frustration later in the process and is valuable for ensuring a team is positioned for success.

Prioritization

As organisations grow, the scale and variation of problems they face multiplies. Your team or is likely to face numerous challenges in different areas and so having the skills to analyze and prioritize becomes very important, particularly for those in leadership roles.

A thorough problem solving process is likely to deliver multiple solutions and you may have several different problems you wish to solve simultaneously. Prioritization is the ability to measure the importance, value, and effectiveness of those possible solutions and choose which to enact and in what order. The process of prioritization is integral in ensuring the biggest challenges are addressed with the most impactful solutions.

Project management

Some problem solving skills are utilized in a workshop or ideation phases, while others come in useful when it comes to decision making. Overseeing an entire problem solving process and ensuring its success requires strong project management skills. 

While project management incorporates many of the other skills listed here, it is important to note the distinction of considering all of the factors of a project and managing them successfully.
Being able to negotiate with stakeholders, manage tasks, time and people, consider costs and ROI, and tie everything together is massively helpful when going through the problem solving process. 

Record keeping

Working out meaningful solutions to organizational challenges is only one part of the process.  Thoughtfully documenting and keeping records of each problem solving step for future consultation is important in ensuring efficiency and meaningful change. 

For example, some problems may be lower priority than others but can be revisited in the future. If the team has ideated on solutions and found some are not up to the task, record those so you can rule them out and avoiding repeating work. Keeping records of the process also helps you improve and refine your problem solving model next time around!

Research skills

Conducting research to support both the identification of problems and the development of appropriate solutions is important for an effective process. Knowing where to go to collect research, how to conduct research efficiently, and identifying pieces of research are relevant are all things a good researcher can do well. 

In larger groups, not everyone has to demonstrate this ability in order for a problem solving workshop to be effective. That said, having people with research skills involved in the process, particularly if they have existing area knowledge, can help ensure the solutions that are developed with data that supports their intention.

Remember that being able to deliver the results of research efficiently and in a way the team can easily understand is also important. The best data in the world is only as effective as how it is delivered and interpreted.

Risk management

Managing risk is an often overlooked part of the problem solving process. Solutions are often developed with the intention of reducing exposure to risk or solving issues that create risk but sometimes, great solutions are more experimental in nature and as such, deploying them needs to be carefully considered. 

Managing risk means acknowledging that there may be risks associated with more out of the box solutions or trying new things, but that this must be measured against the possible benefits and other organizational factors. 

Be informed, get the right data and stakeholders in the room and you can appropriately factor risk into your decision making process. 

Team-building 

No single person is as good at problem solving as a team. Building an effective team and helping them come together around a common purpose is one of the most important problem solving skills, doubly so for leaders. By bringing a team together and helping them work efficiently, you pave the way for team ownership of a problem and the development of effective solutions. 

In a problem solving workshop, it can be tempting to jump right into the deep end, though taking the time to break the ice, energize the team and align them with a game or exercise will pay off over the course of the day.

Remember that you will likely go through the problem solving process multiple times over an organization’s lifespan and building a strong team culture will make future problem solving more effective. It’s also great to work with people you know, trust and have fun with. Working on team building in and out of the problem solving process is a hallmark of successful teams that can work together to solve business problems.

Time management 

The problem solving process is designed to lead a team from identifying a problem through to delivering a solution and evaluating its effectiveness. Without effective time management skills or timeboxing of tasks, it can be easy for a team to get bogged down or be inefficient.

By using a problem solving model and carefully designing your workshop, you can allocate time efficiently and trust that the process will deliver the results you need in a good timeframe.

Time management also comes into play when it comes to rolling out solutions, particularly those that are experimental in nature. Having a clear timeframe for implementing and evaluating solutions is vital for ensuring their success and being able to pivot if necessary.

How can I improve my problem solving skills?

Improving your skills at problem solving is often a career-long pursuit though there are methods you can use to make the learning process more efficient and to supercharge your problem solving skillset.

Remember that the skills you need to be a great problem solver have a large overlap with those skills you need to be effective in any role. Investing time and effort to develop your active listening or critical thinking skills is valuable in any context. Here are 7 ways to improve your problem solving skills.

Share best practices

Remember that your team is an excellent source of skills, wisdom, and techniques and that you should all take advantage of one another where possible. Best practices that one team has for solving problems, conducting research or making decisions should be shared across the organization. If you have in-house staff that have done active listening training or are data analysis pros, have them lead a training session. 

Your team is one of your best resources. Create space and internal processes for the sharing of skills so that you can all grow together. 

Ask for help and attend training

Once you’ve figured out you have a skills gap, the next step is to take action to fill that skills gap. That might be by asking your superior for training or coaching, or liaising with team members with that skill set. You might even attend specialized training for certain skills – active listening or critical thinking, for example, are business-critical skills that are regularly offered as part of a training scheme.

Whatever method you choose, remember that taking action of some description is necessary for growth. Whether that means practicing, getting help, attending training or doing some background reading, taking active steps to improve your skills is the way to go.

Learn a process 

Problem solving can be complicated, particularly when attempting to solve large problems for the first time. Using a problem solving process helps give structure to your problem solving efforts and focus on creating outcomes, rather than worrying about the format. 

Tools such as the seven-step problem solving process above are effective because not only do they feature steps that will help a team solve problems, they also develop skills along the way. Each step asks for people to engage with the process using different skills and in doing so, helps the team learn and grow together.

Group processes of varying complexity and purpose can also be found in the SessionLab library of facilitation techniques. Using a tried and tested process and really help ease the learning curve for both those leading such a process, as well as those undergoing the purpose.

Effective teams make decisions about where they should and shouldn’t expend additional effort. By using a problem solving process, you can focus on the things that matter, rather than stumbling towards a solution haphazardly. 

Create a feedback loop

Some skills gaps are more obvious than others. It’s possible that your perception of your active listening skills differs from those of your colleagues. 

It’s valuable to create a system where team members can provide feedback in an ordered and friendly manner so they can all learn from one another. Only by identifying areas of improvement can you then work to improve them. 

Remember that feedback systems require oversight and consideration so that they don’t turn into a place to complain about colleagues. Design the system intelligently so that you encourage the creation of learning opportunities, rather than encouraging people to list their pet peeves.

Practice

While practice might not make perfect, it does make the problem solving process easier. If you are having trouble with critical thinking, don’t shy away from doing it. Get involved where you can and stretch those muscles as regularly as possible. 

Problem solving skills come more naturally to some than to others and that’s okay. Take opportunities to get involved and see where you can practice your skills in situations outside of a workshop context. Try collaborating in other circumstances at work or conduct data analysis on your own projects. You can often develop those skills you need for problem solving simply by doing them. Get involved!

Use expert exercises and methods

Learn from the best. Our library of 700+ facilitation techniques is full of activities and methods that help develop the skills you need to be an effective problem solver. Check out our templates to see how to approach problem solving and other organizational challenges in a structured and intelligent manner.

There is no single approach to improving problem solving skills, but by using the techniques employed by others you can learn from their example and develop processes that have seen proven results. 

Try new ways of thinking and change your mindset

Using tried and tested exercises that you know well can help deliver results, but you do run the risk of missing out on the learning opportunities offered by new approaches. As with the problem solving process, changing your mindset can remove blockages and be used to develop your problem solving skills.

Most teams have members with mixed skill sets and specialties. Mix people from different teams and share skills and different points of view. Teach your customer support team how to use design thinking methods or help your developers with conflict resolution techniques.

Try switching perspectives with facilitation techniques like Flip It! or by using new problem solving methodologies or models. Give design thinking, liberating structures or lego serious play a try if you want to try a new approach. You will find that framing problems in new ways and using existing skills in new contexts can be hugely useful for personal development and improving your skillset. It’s also a lot of fun to try new things. Give it a go!

Read

Encountering business challenges and needing to find appropriate solutions is not unique to your organization. Lots of very smart people have developed methods, theories and approaches to help develop problem solving skills and create effective solutions. Learn from them!

Books like The Art of Thinking Clearly, Think Smarter, or Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow are great places to start, though it’s also worth looking at blogs related to organizations facing similar problems to yours, or browsing for success stories. Seeing how Dropbox massively increased growth and working backward can help you see the skills or approach you might be lacking to solve that same problem. Learning from others by reading their stories or approaches can be time-consuming but ultimately rewarding.

Rest 

A tired, distracted mind is not in the best position to learn new skills. It can be tempted to burn the candle at both ends and develop problem solving skills outside of work. Absolutely use your time effectively and take opportunities for self-improvement, though remember that rest is hugely important and that without letting your brain rest, you cannot be at your most effective. 

Creating distance between yourself and the problem you might be facing can also be useful. By letting an idea sit, you can find that a better one presents itself or you can develop it further. Take regular breaks when working and create a space for downtime. Remember that working smarter is preferable to working harder and that self-care is important for any effective learning or improvement process.

Want to design better group processes?

Over to you

Now we’ve explored some of the key problem solving skills and the problem solving steps necessary for an effective process, you’re ready to begin developing more effective solutions and leading problem solving workshops.

Need more inspiration? Check out our post on problem solving activities you can use when guiding a group towards a great solution in your next workshop or meeting.

Have questions? Did you have a great problem solving technique you use with your team? Get in touch in the comments below. We’d love to chat!

Nowadays, it is even tougher when our capacity for attention is lower than a goldfish’s.

The digital noise around us is so high only the extremities get through. Most of us have gotten used to this “new normal”, and we expect so much more from an article, a movie or a brand to get our attention. Likewise, we expect no less from our trainers.

The burden of engaging participants during a training event always falls hard on the trainer. It’s not the participants’ responsibility to get engaged immediately, it is the trainer who needs to persuade the audience.

Of course, it is always easier if you know that the people listening to you made the choice to participate, and it’s much harder if none of the participants really wanted to take part in a training required by HR or a superior.

No matter what the case, follow our tips on engagement and training will become easier.

Different people – different learning styles

To engage the room you have to keep in mind that people learn in different ways. Some are visual learners who prefer pictures and diagrams; others are physical learners who like to use their body and sense of touch to understand problems.

When putting together the agenda for the training, make sure to incorporate both group exercises and individual ones. Put in varying activities where participants need to watch a video or read a story, move around the room or discuss a task.

Create an environment where all the different learners are welcomed and engaged.

Relevance

We can’t expect participants to pay attention to a session that doesn’t connect with them.

They want to learn about a concept or problem that resonates with them and can potentially make their situation, behaviour or current situation better.

The key to delivering relevant content is by asking some questions first!

Do some preliminary research on your participants, or send them a survey before the training to tailor content according to their needs. However, sometimes you don’t get the luxury of getting to know your audience beforehand. In these situations don’t get discouraged!

Call a contact person who might know the participants and ask some questions that would help you design the session.  Schedule a quick phone interview with 2-3 participants.

If all else fails you can still ask participants questions right at the beginning of the training. What do you hope to get out of this training? What do you expect in these 3 hours? What are your expectations for the day? The answers will give you some direction.

Make it a dialogue

Isn’t it hard to pay attention to someone for 45, 90 or 120 minutes continuously? Especially considering the average human attention span these days is said to be around 8 seconds. Although the above-mentioned situation might happen more often during university lectures or big conferences, there is always room to improve in training situations as well.

To avoid long talks or explanations during a session (and thus keeping the attention alive) formulate theories, concepts or bigger topics into a conversation. There are several reasons to do so.

First, the session will be more enjoyable for everyone.

Second, you can leverage the group knowledge on topics you wanted to present and check if something is no longer interesting or needs to be clarified.

Third, having a dialogue allows participants to express their opinions, which could lead to hearing several different opinions, making the session more inclusive and diverse.

A simple way of start a discussion is to keep the answers to yourself, meaning when a participants ask something instead of answer it yourself, involve the whole group of giving an answer.

Tell a story

Stories are powerful. We connect to each other through stories. We buy certain things because the stories they tell are appealing to us, and we pay for movies, theatre tickets, and books to read. Our own realities are created by our narratives, the stories we tell ourselves each day.

So why don’t we use stories in the training environment? It has been proven that hearing a story releases chemicals in our brains making us more focused, relaxed and creative. Plus people better remember facts presented in story form than in a diagram or chart.

For instance ask participants to share a story of a challenge they’ve overcome to enhance group cohesion.

If you are crafting public speaking or leadership sessions, introduce the concept of public narrative.

It is a powerful framework for telling stories that inspire action. It consists 3 stages: the story of self where you share the values that are calling you to act. The story of us where you communicates the values that are shared by those you want to motivate to act. Finally the story of now share the challenge that demand action right now.

Whether you are delivering your session within this framework or encourage your participants to create their own stories following these steps it will result in high engagement.

Plus, try to use metaphors, case studies, real-life examples or your own stories to engage your participants!

Gamify

Games are providing a natural learning setting. They are involving, interactive, improving competencies and building skills. That’s why they are fun and engaging.

When you feel like energy and engagement goes down and participants start to stare out of the window or at their phones, introduce a game. It makes people move, compete, think, and usually brings laughter and fun into the session.

A more advanced version of incorporating games into trainings would be to explain or shed light on a topic through a game. Would you like to introduce participants to strategy thinking? Or emphasize the importance of active listening? Have them learn to give effective feedback? If you don’t know where to find games for these topics, don’t worry! SessionLab has a free, open source workshop library with more than 400 training games and activities.

Do you have more tips on how to engage participants during training events? Or have you already tried one from the library? Tell us in the comments; we are genuinely curious.

Stay tuned for more posts for facilitation and training inspiration, tips and tricks from the makers of Sessionlab! If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe to our blog! And if you have an opinion on any of the subjects, share it with us in the comments. We would love to hear from you!

Or that the feedback was actually more like a conversation than your superior just listing all the things you’ve done wrong? Even when feedback is mostly constructive and positive it can be stressful getting it.

…or you dread it? You are not alone.

For instance, in large companies 62% of employees say that they don’t ever see changes occur from feedback they give during reviews. That’s why big companies have been eliminating reports and performance reviews.

Some of this feedback frustration could come from a lack of transparency or consistency, subjectivism and the absence of actionable steps after feedback, and misused or inadequate forms and methods such as the infamous “feedback sandwich”, often referred to as the sh*t sandwich, where you get one positive, one negative and then one positive feedback at the end.

The problem with this technique it that you either don’t take the negative feedback seriously, or you don’t believe the positive ones (thinking they just there to make you feel a bit better for getting the negative ones).

But before you completely abandon feedback, when done right, it is still one of the most powerful tools for, and influences on, learning and performance.

It can provide the opportunity for people, teams, and companies to modify behaviours, go in new directions, reinforce good practices, increase motivation and get recognition.

It also enhances psychological safety which is the most crucial element to have in team settings according to a research by Google.

Interestingly, according to a survey from the Harvard Business Review about performance feedback, people want to hear negative more than positive feedback.

When asked about their preferences for receiving feedback from managers, two thirds of the respondents said that they are more open to corrective feedback as it helps them grow and improve. (However, it’s important to note that humans are wired to choose the answers that are considered “desirable” in any situation even when responding anonymously.)

Below we highlight 3 constructive feedback methods you can try instead of the feedback sandwich. These methods will help you concentrate on specific situations/behaviours, helping you boost your authenticity and avoid generic statements.

Let’s not give up on feedback just yet; let’s fix it!

Smarter tools = smarter meetings

The Situation – Behavior – Impact Feedback Tool

SBI is an acronym for Situation, Behaviour and Impact. This tool helps focus your comments on specific and defined behaviours and situations and how these have affected others in your environment. Given the objectivity of SBI it is highly likely that the recipient would receive it in a nondefensive manner.

Situation – Start with a situation. Define the exact situation you want to discuss: “Today at the stakeholder meeting you were talking with John…” .

Behaviour – Identify the behaviour you want to talk about. “And you were questioning him on the numbers of our last report..”. The key and challenge here is to not make assumptions or judgements. Don’t listen to gossip or others’ opinions on the matter as these could undermine your feedback.

Impact – Explain the impact another’s behaviour had on you or the environment. “I noticed that all the members who were present at the meeting were listening to you and John arguing about the numbers. I felt embarrassed by this, and I fear that it might affect our team’s reputation in the stakeholders’ eyes.” (As a general rule, always use I-statements when giving feedback to someone.)

Let the other person absorb the information, reflect on it and find actionable steps to improve the behaviour that caused problems.

CEDAR Feedback Model

Another great framework to use when giving feedback is the CEDAR model. What makes the model unique is that it encourages the individual to take the lead in discussing his/her performance rather than just getting “orders from above”. This model is credited to Anna Wildman.

Context – Set up the environment for feedback. Check if the person you are talking with also understands the importance of feedback and sees its place in, and impact on, the work they do.

Examples – Encourage the individual to identify specific examples of when and where things went wrong or not according to plan. Explore the situation(s) and behaviour together.

Diagnosis – This part is about finding out why the person acted the way they did and what could have lead to the mentioned behaviours. Try not to put words in the other person’s mouth or let your assumptions affect their answers. Ask open-ended questions to help identify the root causes of the behaviour.

Action – When deciding on actionable steps to avoid a certain behaviour, let the ideas come from the person who is receiving the feedback. It generates bigger commitment and motivation toward carrying out these actions.

Review – The final step is to check if the person understood both the feedback and the suggested actions.

The IDEA Model

IDEA is yet another acronym standing for Identify, Describe, Encourage and Action. It has the same essential bricks of delivering effective and constructive feedback as the aforementioned models.

Identify – A specific behaviour that you want changed. We cannot stress enough how important it is to be as precise as possible.

Describe – How the behaviour patterns affected either the environment or the outcome of a situation. Emphasise here how a change or correction of the behaviour would have a positive impact.

Encourage – The change. It is vital for the individual to know that you are standing beside him/her instead of judging. It can boost motivation, trust and commitment and cohesion.

Action – Make sure no one leaves the room without knowing what their next steps are. Again, aim for specific, measurable steps so the next time you meet with the person you can decide on objective indicators for evaluating feedback implementation.

The Essentials

Reading these constructive feedback techniques, some similarities may have caught your attention. The core structure of each of them is naming a specific situation or behaviour, explaining the impact or aftermath of that certain situation and then looking ahead, and discussing actions to avoid or reinforce the behaviours or situations.

This is because the majority of feedback lacks precision, objectivism and system-thinking, and fails to take into consideration the direct environment, dealing mainly with the past instead of looking to the future to make sure bad patterns in behaviour are improved or changed.

Feedback plays a big role in organizations and teams as a primary source of evaluation and performance assessment. When hard work is rewarded and recognized, it helps managers recognize employees and create a welcoming work environment.

That’s why it is crucial to give feedback that is precise, easily understandable, and implementable by anyone who receives it. Implement these models at meetings and one-on-one conversations and you will provide effective feedback, every time.

Have you encountered feedback models you would recommend to the SessionLab community? Which of the presented models would you use? Tell us in the comments!

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