In periods, people encounter lack of motivation and high-stress environments, which can negatively affect a whole team in a business environment. Increasing tensions and decreasing morale leads to a downward spiral in relationships, productivity and quality of work. 

How can we prevent this negativity to happen? Certainly, ensuring clear visions, goals and rewards is of high importance. Also, increasing meaningfulness, communication and socializing may help turn a downward spiral around.

Especially coming back from summer vacation can create anxiety and stress for some people. Thereof, in the beginning of the fall, it may be useful to plan for extra activities to maintain a good team-spirit and a motivated workforce. With inspiration from an article written by Gale Mote in Corridor Business Journal, here are some activities that may bring value for the team-spirit. 

1. Team-building simulations. The activity forces team-members to collaborate and communicate, resulting in effective decision-making.
2. Social outings including everyone. This activity needs to consider the variety in peoples’ interests. For example, if the primary social outing activity is a padel-tournament, a side-acitivity needs to be incorporated in order to include everyone. 
3. Field trips to a customer or a business trip. A field trip enhance value for peoples’ work efforts, whilst business trips bring colleagues closer to each other. 
4. Professional events and education. For example, if seniors of a company hold education for their junior colleagues. Not only does it improve the overall quality of work and people’s professional development, but it also increases the understanding of colleagues’ work and knowledge.

All these activities mentioned above do require some effort and planning in order to be carried through. The maintenance of small day-to-day activities is also helpful in bringing a whole to the bigger picture. Just as small as short briefings and check-ins (during the pandemic called teams-coffee breaks), brainstorming sessions and continuous feedback is valuable for keeping up a good team-spirit and a motivated workforce. 

Insource have a yearly tradition of an education trip scheduled in the beginning of the fall. The week is filled with inhouse education, where senior management hold multiple workshops in for example accounting, controlling, and consulting. With this arrangement, our more experienced co-workers naturally take part in the leadership at Insource and their competence is recognized and shared. By involving a lot of interaction, the workshops create a great environment for discussions. After the trip, an evaluation is sent out to everyone in the organization. The overall result shows that the trip is very appreciated, generating knowledge sharing, interesting conversations, and a great team spirit. 

This year, the evaluation included a question about which of Insource values that would best summarize the trip. The winning-voted value was #shouldertoshoulder. We have yet again reinforced our team spirit while simultaneously making us better consultants. Inource are now more excited than ever to take on whatever this fall may bring!