Do you want the atmosphere in your company to stimulate creativity? The right atmosphere fosters the generation of new ideas and motivates employees to find new solutions. In the article, you will find up to 10 ways that can help you create a culture of innovation!

Outdoor adventure education as a method of team building How to integrate the team? What to do to maintain a good atmosphere and ensure tasks are performed efficiently? One way to build a team is through workshops in the outdoor adventure education (OAE) approach – more intense and impactful on a deeper level than regular integration (i.e., pleasant time spent together) and not as costly and time-consuming as multi-stage team work with a personal development trainer or coach. OAE (outdoor adventure education): A method of learning and development in close contact with nature, through tasks that require problem-solving by the team. It involves taking risks and real consequences of the actions taken. Its goal is to provoke interaction among participants. In Polish, ‘adventure pedagogy.’ (More about the OAE trend:  here#) It is worth tracing what thoughts arise in a participant of outdoor workshops? What do they learn during them? What are their conclusions and reflections?

A summer morning, Warsaw’s Żoliborz, a rope structure awaits between the trees. (We hung it up in the morning, answering questions from passersby: “Will these be military exercises..?) Participants are arriving. Their faces show various emotions: excitement, curiosity, slight apprehension… Just like the passersby we spoke to in the morning, most are seeing the LRC course for the first time in their lives. LRC (Eng. low ropes course) or rope courses are a popular team-building tool in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Feedback reaches us from all sides. The supervisor comments on the progress of our project, the teacher informs that this month our child has improved behavior, a colleague invites us to an informal team integration, a 360-degree evaluation is conducted in the company, the mother-in-law adds another slice of apple pie and asks for the recipe, a friend discreetly removes the sweater we gave her after fifteen minutes and secretly hides it in her bag… Some of this information we perceive as pleasant, validating, and useful, some are neutral, and others provoke our resistance. And since they provoke resistance, we ignore them or deny their content. Feedback bounces off the wall. In this article, we will focus on one of the mechanisms described in the book by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen “Thanks for the Feedback”, which makes us unable to accept and use feedback. This will help us better understand why sometimes our own feedback does not reach the recipient. Feedback – all the information we receive from the environment about ourselves. They can be verbal and non-verbal, given consciously or not, psychologically correct (e.g., formulated as an “I-message”) or completely colloquial.

In every workplace, employees are responsible for specific tasks, for which they are individually accountable. The most important thing, however, is that individuals are able to collaborate with each other, because without this they are unlikely to fully unleash their potential. Creative group work maximizes employees’ strengths and minimizes their weaknesses. This leads to the creation of a dynamic, productive, and efficient work environment, which in turn leads to greater company profits.

Each of us remembers at least one such meeting: it was loud, we touched on a million topics, a few people gave speeches like nobility at a diet, we ended without specifics, and then everyone started glancing at their watches and returned to their laptops… What to do to make discussions concrete and fruitful? How to stop talkative people and encourage quiet participants to speak up? The following moderation techniques have been personally tested and have helped save many team discussions 🙂

The training market offer can be overwhelming. Under the slogan “team building and communication in the team,” we find a whole range of proposals from paintball and building a Goldberg machine (it lookslikethis) to team coaching and VR games. How to recognize, in this jungle of possibilities, which training will actually bring results?

This is the message sent by many managers overwhelmed with a multitude of tasks. Risky, because – let’s be honest – does it really motivate to find a solution? Not really. It rather suggests something like ‘I don’t have time to deal with this, don’t be a slacker and handle it yourself.’ On the other hand, the manager is also human. In our leadership training, managers repeatedly say that they dream of greater independence and proactivity from their subordinates, which would allow them to take a break from handling matters for them. Paradoxically, many of them respond with immediate help and a proposed solution as soon as an employee reports a problem. All with the best of intentions! The effect is often that the employee is not at all thrilled with an idea that is not their own (after all, we like our own ideas the most!), which the manager – somewhat rightly – perceives as sheer ingratitude… So how do you get a subordinate involved in action? How do you provide support without coming up with everything for them? In the article, we present 5 coaching questions useful when we want to engage an employee in co-creating solutions.

In the past 2 weeks, the realities of our daily lives have been changing day by day before our eyes. The work style that was once enforced by the realities of projects or the job market for a narrow group of specialists has today become a more or less desired reality for many teams. Home office, or working from home, has already become (or will soon become) the daily reality of our teamwork. Permanent remote work for the entire team is a completely different story than home office, where sometimes someone is simply not in the office. This time, we are moving the work of the entire team to the virtual-telephone space. So, it’s about creating new frameworks, ‘rituals’ of teamwork in new conditions. Such frameworks create order and help to adapt more quickly to new situations. What should a manager pay attention to in order to minimize the negative impacts of such a situation on the productivity of each team member and the entire team? Read on to find out what is crucial for maintaining team efficiency during this challenging time.