Team Workshop

Question Team Routines

Encourage Personal Initiative by questioning established routines
Team challenge: Personal Initiative
65-75 minutes
3-15 people
Remote & on-site

Background

In this exercise your team gains a better insight on what proactive behavior feels like and how it applies to the team’s context. Team members will learn to identify opportunities for proactive behavior and take away the first ideas on how to transform the teamwork.

Team workshop instructions

Preparation

  • Whiteboard, moderation cards and stickies.
  • Prepare moderation cards with different daily, weekly and monthly routines of the team (number of routines depends on team-size, 3-5 recommended)

Team routines are recurring activities that teams often don’t reflect much about, as they appear so usual. Every routine can entail some aspects that are good for the team and others that are not. Upon closer inspection the latter can lead to long-term problems for the organisation or, when changed, might result in a more effective way of working.

Examples:

  • Daily stand-up meeting (and other Scrum Events)
  • Routine to distribute of tasks within the team
  • Routine of placing documents across the (both digital or on-site) workplace
  • Routine of dealing with accidents or customer complaints
  • Routine of working on tasks in whatever order they come in
  • Quarterly feedback routine which could be way to infrequent for certain issues


Check-In (5 minutes)

  • Welcome the team and use a check-in question to help everyone become present. (Proposal: What’s the most unusual task you’ve done this week?)
  • Introduce the workshop’s goal and overview.

Goal: Create awareness for both visible and unvisible “routines” & create conscious for what could be improved.

Overview: We’ll review some of our routines and (…) Consider changing daily routines proactively by discussing and presenting them to the team.



Step 1 (5 minutes): Split the group

  • Introduce the moderation cards with the team routines you prepared to the team
  • Distribute the moderation cards / team routines among the team to either one person, or pairs of two or three (depending on your team size and the number of daily routines you want to address).


Step 2 (20 minutes): Group exercise

  • Everyone / every group now has about 15 minutes to refelct on the following questions:

    • What is the primary goal of this routine?
    • Which problems or inefficiencies does our current implementation of the routine entail?
    • What other approaches are there to reach the primary goal of the routine more efficiently or with less negative side-effects?
  • Each question should be answered briefly on a sticky note.

Tip: Make sure the questions are visible for the team during that task.



Step 3 (5 minutes/ routine): Presentation

  • Every individual / group now presents their results to the team and shares them on the whiteboard in 2 minutes.
  • After each presentation, leave room for discussion and encourage the team to comment the results and add more ideas (3 minutes or more if needed).


Step 4 (10 minutes): Generate follow-ups

After every routine has been presented, ask the team to talk about:

  • Quick wins: Which small improvement could we implement right away as an experiment?
  • Big wins: Which improvement would be the most helpful one? Even if it might be too big to implement at the moment, it could be worth making it a strategic initiative.
  • Ways of working: What could we change to talk about improvement ideas more often? (e.g. Checkouts after each meeting, regular retrospectives)


Checkout & Ending (10 minutes)

  • Summarize the results of the team’s results.
  • As a checkout, you can ask each team member to share which routines we didn’t address today, that we should also critically reflect in the future.
  • Emphasize how personal initiative is illustrated by this workshop.

Example

“I hope that this workshop has inspired you to use proactive behavior in the workplace to initiate even small changes that can have an impact on future results. Try to make this kind of reflection part of your personal routine and take responsibility to make this workplace the one that you’d like to work in.”

First Aid ⛑🩹

Didn’t go as expected? Check out the following tips.

  • Team can’t think of improvement ideas

    To foster creativity, you can create a thought experiment for the team: Would the routine still work if a) the team was 3x the size, b) there was only half the time for it? Probably not. How would the routine need to be changed to work?
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