The coronavirus has brought global misery and disruption and it’s not over yet.
There might be travel bans in place, but that doesn’t mean business has to come to a standstill. Thanks to VC technologies its possible to replicate business meetings without the fear of being sneezed on or encountering the social embarrassment of refusing to shake hands.. But until now, these technologies have been hopeless for team coaching and team development. Which is where our 'Muster' Software plugs the gap.
Imagine if you and you team could choose to meet in a forest, on an airship, in a French café on the Champs-Élysées, or on a desert island, and change the environment each time you meet.
Imagine if you could see each other as onscreen avatars moving about the on-screen environment.
Then imagine if you could choose to play team games together, drawn from a long menu, and receive feedback on the team’s performance from playing them.
Imagine if whilst doing this you can still talk to each other use on-line chat facilities.
Imagine if team development was no longer a once a year intervention, but a regular occurrence, helping to keep the team learning, growing and expanding its capability.
We already imagined all this and we’re turning it into reality with our Muster programme,
We started to develop our super-creative digital programme for remote meetings last year, because our clients were desperate for it. They’re saying there’s a problem; that they can’t get teams together. We’re saying the solution is nearly ready – we can keep your meetings as dynamic and fruitful as before with our highly interactive and immersive team coaching and learning application.
There will, sadly, be other viruses and global catastrophes that make it difficult for people to travel and congregate in shared physical spaces. And there are powerful environmental arguments for limiting the amount of business travel people do. Add to this the phenomenal cost of getting global (or even national) teams together for face-to-face conferences, meetings and learning events, and it becomes obvious that we need to come up with a better solution than ‘batten down the hatches’.
I’ve been working with global teams for twenty years, ensuring that those precious and infrequent moments when colleagues come together are fruitfully deployed. The work we do at Kay-Lambert Associates helps these teams build powerful connections between its members; strengthen their ways of working together; and assists them in overcoming challenges relating to skills, behaviours, environmental and operational constraints, and relationships with their stakeholders. We build teams and let them flourish.
It hasn’t always been possible to get people together like this, so we’ve drawn upon available technologies to ensure that team learning and development doesn’t have to be consigned to the few occasions when teams meet face-to-face. We’ve worked with Halo, Skype, MS Teams and a variety of webinar applications. We’ve used simple polling and quizzing applications such as Aha and Kahoot. And we’ve designed interactive learning games that can be played together by team members distributed around the world.
Late last year, just as the coronavirus headlines were beginning to hit, we embarked on our ambitious programme to go much further. The solution we are developing means that team members will be able meet each other in a virtual space of their choosing, and engage in creative, educational group activities that are focused on turning them onto a high performing team. The application will contain games, tools, assessments, hints and tips, that teams can access to build their team skills and knowledge, and to address pertinent team challenges. We’re talking about a marriage between the best team meeting software and the best facilitated team learning.
Our partners in the creative and tech industries are working with us to harness the power of immersive technologies and story-rich gameplay; digitising much of our original workshop content to create immersive shared experiences that help teams work on their decision-making, prioritising, communication, problem-solving and much more.If you want to part of this exciting development, we want to hear from you. Remote teams, in particular, are in need of sophisticated solutions that keep them connected, focused and flourishing; and that is exactly what we plan to deliver.
Watch this space.