How to Organise a Tech Team Day
As with most ecommerce businesses, at MATCHES we’ve embraced hybrid working, which means a lot of our teams have only ever met digitally.
We wanted a reason for everyone to get together outside of a Zoom call, and we happen to have a fancy office in The Shard…
So we organised a Tech Team Day!
How did we do it? Here are some ideas on how you may want to run your own team day.
1. Include some key updates
Use it as a chance to update on business performance and key roadmap items coming up. Keep it short and focussed — this was the first item of our day, and we kept it to 30 minutes.
2. Have a group ice-breaker
Most people had never met each other in person, or at all. Over half of the Tech team actually started during the pandemic.
So we had a little ice-breaker to get people to meet each other— the Network Grid.
This is something I’d played a couple of times before at conferences. The goal is to meet one person for each box. You got one point for every filled-in box (most people filled it in completely!) and one extra point for every team, to encourage everyone to speak to new people.
If you want some inspiration, below is the grid we came up with.
Tech is notorious for having lots of introverted people, so it was fantastic to see everyone getting really into it and going round the room meeting as many new people as they could.
There were fun prizes, like some globe stress balls for whoever spoke the most languages, rub-on tattoos for the person with the most tattoos, and a little Oscar for whoever had met the most famous celebrity (Mariah Carey for us!).
3. Organise a team showcase
If your department is formed of multiple teams, one idea is to get each team to do a short intro presentation. We called it a Team Showcase. The Tech department has about 20 teams, so we kept the presentation time to 3 minutes each. To make sure people didn’t go over, we had a 3-slide template:
- Who’s in your team and what do you look after
- Something interesting about your team, like something exciting you’ve built
- A “talk to us if…” slide, e.g. “talk to us if you want to find out more about Slackbots”
The showcase got great feedback that it helped people realise how they could be collaborating on similar projects, and gave a good overview of all teams so we all knew who to speak to about projects and ideas.
4. Host some organised fun!
We organised a quiz ‘with a twist’, as we’re not a fan of pub quizzes with impossible questions about 70s music and sport facts.
Each team had a mini whiteboard to write down their team name, and we used these whiteboards for some of the rounds. Some ideas:
- A “whoever gets closest round”, like “How much did our top customer spend with us in 2021?” or “How much is the most expensive product we sell?” and whichever team gets closest wins the point
- An anti-family fortunes round, where each team has to write something (like a fruit or a programming language) that no other team comes up with
- A baby pictures round (just request some on Slack!)
- A “features” round, where you create a face with a mash-up of different people’s features, like somebody’s nose, somebody else’s left eye… and teams have to guess who each feature belongs to (note — people found this one really hard!)
- A quick-fire round, where the first team to write the answer in their whiteboard gets the point
Finally, (very self-serving) get the hosts some flowers and champagne to thank them for the fantastic day they hosted! Look how chuffed Joe and I were!
5. Get a survey out
We sent out a survey to get some feedback for future events, e.g. what people would have liked to see more of and less of.
The day got a 4.8 star rating, with 100% of respondents saying they’d like a Team Day every quarter. We’ll happily oblige!
