(Re)connect with colleagues after two years of screen time

There is no ready-made formula, and fortunately so! Of course, the pandemic has somewhat disrupted the way we interact socially. Two years of staring into our screens, and poof (!) we are all just a bit rusty on a social level, a little confused about our own goals. So how do we get back on our marks?

As Émily, our event coordinator, confided in us: “I felt social anxiety at the idea of meeting, in real life, the new people who had been hired during the pandemic”. While some of us can manage to deal with this new reality (hybrid work, 4 day workweeks, etc.), others are still attempting to readapt to social interaction, and sometimes their batteries are a little drained, says Émily!

Develop a user guide in an informal setting

If your team’s lifeblood begins to flow outside of preconceived frameworks, destroy that framing, create new spaces (fictional or real), and let everyone’s “crazy” roam free. It’s time for us to relearn how to work together.

The Lulu Experience
Following a period of strong growth, Lulu’s team experienced an unprecedented wave of hiring. Brand new smiles were added to the company’s organizational chart, and as the events waltz played on, our team members were busy taming one another professionally.

In order to build trust and consolidate all the new relationships between Lulu members, our team members took advantage of a moment of calm to recharge their batteries in a natural setting! La Dolce Vita, yes – but not just that! Thinking differently implies entirely readapting former behaviours, and this also requires team moments in an informal setting.

A team building exercise organized by Lulu’s management, focusing on discussions and experiences centered around each team member’s personality, allowed for the creation of a user guide. You may well be thinking to yourself: “what is this invention?” Well, the user guide is not just a tool that you store in a closet and only unleash during yearly evaluations, but rather a blueprint that we all maintain preciously in memory and integrate into our practices. Thus, a user guide can allow team members to put themselves in one another’s shoes by closely considering their teammates’ core values. “It was a powerful experience and it helped me understand the team by meeting with them in a different context,” says Émily.