Now is the perfect time to change how we approach organizational development since there is so much evidence that things are not working smoothly. Now is the perfect time to improve supervisory skills and to make our supervisors better facilitators of improved teamwork, motivation and implementation.
If not now, When? And if not you, Who?

Companies have always done training in isolation from the real workplace, with the real possibilities of only minor improvements. It is but ONE solution…

It seems we have The Perfect Storm for choosing to push training and development efforts and processes in a different direction then things have been “moving” over the past 50 years:

• Organizations are uncomfortable with the way things are, with increasing clarity around issues of productivity of remote workers, trust, teamwork, engagement, quitting, unionizing, etc. Cognitive dissonance around the way things are may be at an all time high.

• Most supervisors are pretty skilled at running Zoom, doing breakout rooms, etc. so that skillset already exists. They have skills in which to communicate effectively with their teams.

• Training and HR departments are spread pretty thin and maybe thinner than ever for delivering training, and they cannot offer much skill development or support to supervisors and managers who really need it.

• We have high levels of employee turnover and low levels of engagement — and some real pain around employee retention, innovation, productivity and development.

• We see real opportunities to do team building within and between departments throughout local operations and across global ones, especially at the bottom levels of organizations.

• Performance Improvement remains a critically important issue and front-line workers do the work.

• Motivation and Engagement remain bright spots on the horizon, accessible but not yet reachable.

• MOST workers ARE interested in “more, better faster” and on feeling more accomplished in their work. The intrinsic motivation already exists but active involvement is low.

• Supervisors ALL need facilitation skills and leadership training, which can apply across so many different developmental needs within their workgroups.

SO, why not reframe organizational development efforts and engagement initiatives around a bombproof, virtual teambuilding exercise that teaches facilitation skills and delivers teamwork and collaboration?

What I am suggesting is that we develop simple and effective facilitation skills training around the delivery of an online teambuilding program, one that will get participants talking about how they can improve collaboration among the workers as well as between teams in their workgroup as well as the other organizations within the company that should be working together more effectively. Here, we are talking about better alignment to shared goals and the decreasing of the competition that is so common that it makes, “Interdepartmental Collaboration” an oxymoron!

My board game on collaboration and planning came out in 1993. My son Jeff has spent the past two years polishing the online version of this exercise which retains the key dynamics of the interactions from face-to-face play and takes the key learning points to a higher place. The design is very easy to learn to facilitate for the delivery and the options for the Expedition Leader to facilitate discussions around issues of change and teamwork is quite straightforward. The supervisor can then devote some time over the next weeks to enable the people to design and implement workplace improvements to impact performance results. This improved teamwork has long-term impacts on so many of the issues that the remote workers of today want to address.

And here is a blog post that celebrates our 30-year anniversary with selling and supporting teamwork and collaboration with our Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine teambuilding exercise. This represents the core of our thinking about supporting supervisors to deliver the game to support their people and increase their engagement and motivation.

You can read more about our ideas for making supervisors more effective facilitators and improving communications, alignment and collaboration a reality at this blog post about supervisors as facilitators: https://performancemanagementcompany.com/2022/08/23/use-supervisors-to-implement-virtual-workplace-teambuilding/

What we are offering is a wonderful, online virtual delivery of a truly outstanding team building game that has been used since 1993 and only recently available as an online training tool.  We still offer the board game version with a great price but we also think that the organizational development capabilities of the virtual version are truly outstanding.

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For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools.
Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who is trying to retire!! He now lives in Cuenca, Ecuador.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Here is a 2-minute overview of our new online, virtual team building game: https://youtu.be/6sFUOTjdUVg

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