Morale Activities

Week 2 has begun and our team dynamic seems to be normalizing once again. Last week there were misunderstandings and miscommunications, but this week we seem to all be jiving and we were even complimented on our team dynamic in class by a faculty member. I don’t think last week will be our only interpersonal road bumps this semester, so I am working hard to constantly huddle everyone together and make sure we are on the same page. In our meeting for today I plan to start up weekly morale activities to help make sure everyone is comfortable talking to each other and to checkin on everyones lives. I have a big document of morale activities I like to do with teams and today’s activity will be the simple “rose, bud, thorn”. In “rose, bud, thorn”, each person in the team shares a rose: something that has been good in their life lately, a bud: something they are looking forward to, and a thorn: something that hasn’t been so good in their life lately. They can share in any order they want, with the only requirements being the responses need to be subjectively substantial and they aren’t allow to talk about work- in this case our game production capstone. I require them not to talk about work because it is my belief that if you don’t want to talk to someone about your life, then you probably don’t want to work with them and communication is being held back. The point of the exercise is to gradually have team members open up to each other, see each other as more than just co-workers and instead as fellow human beings with their own slues of aspirations and struggles. Once everyone is humanized, you start to understand each other better, support groups form, teamwork becomes a lot easier, and productivity increases because people actually want to work with each other. Everyone wants to be heard and valued and I think that is exactly what our team needs right now.