Lets get digital – Smells like team spirit

There’s nothing like escaping a locked room to build team spirit! The Local Matters team did just that recently, with ‘team prison break’ finishing the real life ‘Great Escape’ game first, during a staff team building day last month.

We had to work together to solve a series of puzzles in order to release the keys to escape different themed rooms. Our team did have an unfair advantage with the winning skills of a digital editor, sales rep, graphic designer and cartoonist/videographer (pictured L-R). We quickly formed with the combined aim of getting out before two other teams.

There wasn’t much time to overthink or over-talk, send lengthy emails or have meetings about meetings, we just had to use our brains, tell each other what we were doing and work together to get it done.

But we can’t all do team building exercises, and when we do it’s not uncommon to forget the lessons in our daily busy-ness.

Teams work

Whether you are planning a work or passion project, at some stage you will need to collaborate with other people to make your fantasy a reality.

Sometimes a cuppa and conversation will do the trick, but other times more planning is needed for a greater chance of organisational bliss. The to-dos and deadlines that seem obvious to you, might not be so clear to others. Conversations can be too casual and emails or messaging can get long winded and confusing.

Teamwork.com is an easy way to plan and communicate stuff you need to do and when.

With TeamworkProjects you can create milestones and collaborate on smaller to-dos by creating tasks, assigning tasks to team members, commenting as you go, getting email alerts, adding deadlines, progress reports and attaching documents, pictures or links and more. You can use it on desktop or an app on your tablet or phone, so it’s easy to track progress wherever you are.

Just like any digital tool, it still has to be used by people. In my experience teamwork seems to work intuitively well with varying ages and stages of digital literacy and has saved time in wasted over-communication, or costly lack of organisation.

So give team work a go to improve productivity with colleagues, and avoid a tangle of tears with your loved ones next time you are planning a big day.