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Brands Group. Interactive team day!

Based in Deurne, Brands Group handles the distribution of various consumer electronics brands within Europe. Brands is a bold and dynamic company. The pace is high and the growth is exponential. Brands manages such a pace by investing heavily in the international team. One example is the team day we provided from Scrum Academy. In this article you can read how we set up the team day. The result: a visible increase in mutual trust and ambition. This brought the team out of the Comfort Zone into the Learning Zone once again.

The situation at the Brands Group team

The past period of working from home has not been ideal for mutual communication. You will probably recognize it: the threshold to seek each other out is a bit higher and chance meetings are rare. Fortunately, the Brands team started working Agile six months ago, which did keep the mutual consultation going during the lockdown. But the team’s ambition is higher than just keeping mutual communication going. The team wants to make more use of each other’s qualities. Moreover, the team’s energy could use another boost. Time for action and an energetic Agile team day,” thought the international B2C team of Brands Group.

The question: facilitate an interactive team day online

A live Agile team day was not yet possible. So Brands Group asked Scrum Academy to organize an online workshop. The goal: to bring the team closer together by discovering each other’s ambition and motivation.

Scrum Academy’s practical approach

Interactive and directly applicable. That’s what we as Scrum Academy stand for. The energetic workshop consisted of a sequence of interactive work forms. These methods always had two parts. A part to sort things out for yourself, followed by discussions in small groups. The three most important themes? Psychological safety, mutual qualities and intrinsic motivation. At the end, we shared insights in the large group. What stood out, for example, was that Scrum had a remarkably positive impact on everyone’s intrinsic motivation.

The result of the interactive team day

Big smiles! You could see those in every break, when participants took a break from the session. In the beginning it was a bit uncomfortable to talk about one’s own qualities. But as everyone started supporting each other more, self-confidence grew. Despite the different cultures and nationalities, everyone felt at home in the team.

Afterwards, the reactions were, “Overall, we experienced this very positively,” “I feel like I can contribute much more to the team’s goal outside of my discipline,” and, “For in a morning, we achieved quite a bit of depth.”
In the end, the session created considerable growth in ambition and mutual trust. The team discovered that the bar could safely be raised, without stress. The team was ready to move back out of the Comfort Zone into the Learning Zone.