Companies roll out virtual team activities as employees continue working from home

Employees of IBS Software have been in for a shock once they met on Microsoft Teams Live on June 18. ‘LiveWire’, a worldwide music occasion that includes 16 musicians from the corporate was on and firm CEO, Anand Krishnan, joined them from London, strumming his guitar and singing Ben E King’s ‘Stand by me’. “At LiveWire there were songs in English, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil, with musicians of IBS joining from Sydney, Bengaluru, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Dubai, London, Memphis, Virginia, and Sao Paulo,” says Bhavana Nair, head (Internal Communications and Branding), IBS.

As work from home (WFH) turned the brand new regular, many corporations started initiatives to have interaction and join with employees and their households. In addition to webinars on well being and wellness, corporations have been conducting Zumba and yoga challenges and classes, virtual espresso and tea time breaks, expertise reveals, music occasions, on-line contests and video games, watch events, hackathons, and digital talent growth classes on a number of virtual platforms.

Virtual band

Music is what linked the employees of Finastra as the corporate introduced collectively 20 musicians from over 10 nations to type a virtual music band. Social media challenges have been successful on the corporate’s Yammer channel, which included coiffure experiments and a rainbow cake baking contest for PRIDE month. Sunil Plavians, web site lead, Finastra Trivandrum, says, “Employee engagement is crucial for retaining and attracting talent and this motivates our people to go beyond work. During the lockdown, the technology team of the firm came up with an app to promote social distancing and assisting in locating essential services that won the Kerala CyberDome Hackathon.”

UST Global too is conducting a sequence of activities unfold throughout its workplaces in India and in Malayasia, the UK and Philippines. While the Thiruvananthapuram centre had Google Labyrinth, a digital treasure hunt, tambola was organised by the Hyderabad workplace and a cell images contest on ‘Caring moments that you notice around’ was open for employees within the firm’s Kochi workplace. In addition, Bengaluru centre has an ongoing initiative on celebrating tales of unsung heroes in the course of the outbreak of COVID-19 and the UK workplace is working ‘Community Champions of UST’ by which tales of UST employees lending a serving to hand in the course of the pandemic are collected and revealed. Kavita Kurup, world head (Talent and Organisational Transformation), factors out that the corporate has had programmes anchored round upgrading technical expertise of the employees. “We redesigned our work-from-home policy under which managers were trained to lead their teams virtually. We’ve set up a COVID-19 helpline. Over 25,000 staff across the globe are connected also by our daily newsletter, News @ Noon,” she states.

While SunTec has ‘Happy [email protected]’ on Saturdays the place employees and their members of the family showcase their expertise in dance, music, magic, cooking… over Zoom classes, GES India has been holding ‘Chai time with Manager’, the place 15 senior managers meet up with their groups over tea as soon as each week the place they focus on all the pieces besides work! “We’ve also had an online photography contest on unique and interesting moments of WFH and a video competition on the topic, ‘WFH is interesting’,” says Rani Vinod, head, worker engagement and enterprise partnering, SunTec.

Quiz time

Team-wise initiatives are the fad in some corporations. As within the case of Flytxt, the place the HR team has a quiz session on all working days. “It begins on Skype at sharp 12.45 pm. The team members take turns to be the quiz master. On some days we have ‘Aswamedham’, where you guess a personality through a bunch of questions. These sessions keep us connected and it doesn’t feel like we haven’t met each other for the last three months,” says Suchithra Radha, assistant supervisor, HR, Flytxt.

Talking concerning the initiatives at Allianz, Sonja Kiefer (HR & Change), Allianz Technology/ Services, India observes that it was essential to run healthful initiatives that not solely engages colleagues but in addition their households as they have been all at home. So there was ‘Book Read’ session for employees’ children and an artwork contest for the children. Managers and colleagues became storytellers and actors, enacting and studying out tales for teenagers whereas the mother and father watched or have been at work.

Again, it was for youngsters and oldsters that IBS began Parent Junction, a channel for employees to share recommendations on parenting. The weekly ‘Take a Breath’ initiative in IBS has ‘Deskercises’, reminiscence video games, figuring out characters and personalities by listening to their voice or dialogues and so forth. “The employees were also encouraged to make doodles and share the videos or photos,” says Deepa Rahul Easwar, assistant supervisor, HR. The firm additionally launched Luan Dui (means ‘huddle’ in Chinese), an inside social collaboration channel, a platform for employees to work together by posting photos, movies, concepts, WFH ideas and the like.

All these activities assist in constructing relations, collaborations and, above all, groups really feel being collectively, says Gautam Shankar, vice chairman – operations (India and Japan), GES India.