Since March last year I’ve run well over 300 webinars with tens of thousands of people from all around the world, and everywhere the themes were similar.
After the initial burst of excitement of working from home, people talk about how relentless work is, and how much they miss some of the more informal, human sides of working in teams.
For many the past year has brought a kind of empathy gap, where work has become more transactional and less human, with many of the informal 2-minute conversations replaced by more formal hour-long Zoom calls.
There is therefore a need for teams to adapt and to think of new ways of protecting the ‘human’ side of office life.
Building on this idea, here are two tools that you can download and use with your teams; The Life Compass and The Key to Me.
Below you can find a brief explanation of each, as well as free templates to use. I hope you find them useful!
Tool 1: The Life Compass
This tool is to help people to understand what really matters to them (even in adversity); what kind of actions move them towards their values, and how stress can sometimes ‘hook’ them away from that direction. It is designed to help guide people through tough times, just like a compass.
How to use the Life Compass
Step 1: Have each person in your team complete their own Life Compass for themselves. You can download the template here.
Instructions for completion are here.
You can see a compass that I completed – and which I sometimes use in workshops – below.
Step 2: Then, the group can complete a shared compass, to help them navigate through the project together.
You can download the Team Compass template here. We’ve also created a template in Mural here.
As with the individual compass, work round each quadrant to identify what matters, how the team gets hooked away from what matters and what course correcting might look like.
Tool 2: The key to me
This tool is useful for helping to build understanding and empathy across distributed teams. It’s also quite a fun exercise to do which can bring people together really well and remind everyone that we’re all just human beings doing our best.
The idea of The Key to Me is to create greater understanding of what gets the best out of each individual, as well as what kind of constraints and limitations homeworking brings.
It is an especially great tool for any team which is newly created or has new members (so long as they feel sufficiently psychologically safe to do so).
Here is a template in Mural for using The Key to Me.
And here is my own example created in Mural:
I really hope you enjoy using these tools – both of them have helped me. Let me know in the comments anything you would add or any questions you have.
Working with ACT 