One way to build camaraderie and teamwork is to reinforce it in your IT staff meetings. My belief is that every monthly staff meeting should have an element of fun and team building.
Watch the sample IT Kickoff Meeting to see an example at the end of this post.
One of the things I like to do is to produce a slide show of my employees working with our clients. It’s very easy to do and takes almost no extra time unless you decide to be really creative. You can even do this without spending a dime if you want to.
People like to see themselves on the big screen. Put some high energy music to the background and you have something within a few minutes that will make most IT organizations stand up and take notice.
Why? Because they probably have not seen anything like it come from their IT manager. It can set you apart from other IT managers plus it’s a lot of fun.
Here is what you do:
- Assign one or two people to take photos of people at work for a month or two. I usually assign one of my employees responsibility to do this for an entire year, , , to get ad hoc photos of IT people working with clients, record special events, , , anything they want to take a photo of in your company.
- Collect the photos and create a slide show.
- Use PowerPoint with background music, , , or
- Use a product like ProShow to create a slide show product with music embedded
- Use high energy music like the theme to Rocky
Be sure to include several photos of each employee in the slide show. I also like to take photos of people waving at the camera or doing things that are funny. The point of this is to take a breather and have some fun with your staff so keep it upbeat and positive.
When you are finished, you can easily create a copy of the slide show file to give to everyone, , , or you could even go as far as to create a nice photo album to award to your people.
This last option will cost a few bucks but the technology available today can give you a professional product at a very reasonable cost. See www.mypublisher.com for one example, , , it’s what I have used to develop several photo albums for my family. There are many similar products to choose from.
These memories can be very special as people get older in remembering the “good old days” of their career, , , you might even like them as well.
Take a look at a 20 Minute IT Manager session titled, Jumpstart Your Year with an IT Kickoff Meeting. In this session I include a short example on Slide #23 of a slide show with music to give you an idea.
Go to:
http://www.20minuteitmanager.com/sessions/090102KICKOFF/
ITLever™ 
Good day, Mike,
I’m IT manager at production plant. The corporation has plants in many parts of the world and main IT specialists are in central office. So our main function is support.
I’m managing the department already 5 years and suppose myself to be not a bad manager, but I understand some of my drawbacks and during last time started working on soft skills. I should admit that this site is very useful – I read all posts and it gave me a lot of things to think about.
What is bothering me is that I understand the importance of meetings, and would like to hold them weekly, or at least monthly. The problem is that 30-50% of staff will always miss the meeting, because we work on 2 locations and in 3 shifts. People are rotating between plants and shifts, but still it very-very rare when we can meet altogether (almost never, I should say). Do you have experience of advising IT departments like ours what will be the best way to share information, make some team-building meetings etc.
Thanks in advance.
Hello Ihor,
Thank you for your comments and question, , , it is a good one.
Trying to hold a meeting when you have multiple shifts of people is a challenge but it can be done. Let’s say you have three shifts of people who work in groups from 8:00am-4:00pm, , , 4:00pm-12:00am, , , and 12:00am-8:00am.
I would hold meetings at the beginning of the first shift (the 8:00am-4:00pm shift) or at the end of the first shift. This way you get two shifts of people to attend. Hold it at the time where you are able to have the most employees attend.
This leaves a shift of people who won’t be there. IF you do not want them to come in on their own time once a month to attend a staff meeting, you can rotate the time of when you hold the meeting, , , or you can hold a separate meeting for this third group to cover the information.
The way I’ve always handled this was to require all employees to attend the staff meeting, regardless of the hours they work. It is only once a month and having everyone on the team be at a staff meeting is important. I schedule the meeting around the times when most of the employees work, , , but there are some who have to make a special effort to come in on their own time. It’s not that big a deal for once a month and the benefits are big.
Another thing I recommend is to hold an off-site meeting once or twice a year for your staff. In this case, there may be a few employees who cannot attend due to their location or nature of their work, , , try to do something that helps them feel like they are part of the event even though they can’t attend.
Hope this helps.
Hello, Mike,
Thank you for answer. We have off-site meetings 2-3 times a year, but usually not everyone is present. I will think about how to involve everyone in future events of this kind.
Regarding the monthly ones – it’s really not possible to make it in one group, because of two locations and constant necessity of support in both places. We simply cannot remove IT from support even for 1 hour – such is the production flow.
I think that doing meeting at shift change when most people are present and sending report about the meeting to everyone by mail can be the way out.
Except this, maybe good idea will be to make off-site quarterly meetings if we succeed to have everyone’s attendance.
Best regards.