We value, among other things, three things here at Beacon Cloud Solutions: functional technologies, our Nespresso machines, and company culture. That last one is perhaps as important today as it’s ever been, considering how (socially) distant many of us were forced to be from each other (and our office Nespresso machine </3) for the better part of the last 12 months.
Our desire for cohesiveness motivated us to make some changes. We identified a flaw in our “Overcast” meetings — a straight-laced, biweekly opportunity to disseminate vital company information that admittedly devolved into a series of one-way virtual speeches instead of the collaborative, worthwhile conversations they were intended to be. In their place, we developed a more valuable meeting that inspired more synergistic engagement (while also putting our Thesaurus to good use): The Shenanigans Meeting.
It’s more or less what it sounds like — a monthly opportunity to hit the pause button on our daily tasks that may or may not involve The Beer Fridge on an early Thursday afternoon.
The rules are simple: Our team members take turns hosting the monthly meeting, ultimately responsible for a) deciding on a meal for all of us to enjoy (and coordinating with our All-Star office administrator to make sure our middle-of-absolutely-nowhere remote folks have their meals situated), and b) coming up with a fun, collaborative activity for all of us to participate in.
Following up on BCS CEO Jason Young’s Mexican food + Snake Oil Game pairing in February, this month, courtesy of BCS COO Jesse Jones, brought us barbecue/Chick-Fil-A and an Elizebethan era “Who Done It?” murder mystery. Hosted and facilitated by the great folks over at — wait for it — TeamBuilding (dot) com, our team spent about two hours digging through puzzles and clues to determine the culprit behind a murder in the Queen’s court.
Some key takeaways from our session with the folks over at TeamBuilding, including only a few minor and mostly harmless spoilers:
Almost nobody owns an analog watch in 2021
Beer is never more than a few steps away, whether at home or the office
Chick-Fil-A waffle fries absolutely do not hold up after a 10-minute drive
It helps to have a Jeopardy! hopeful on your team for the trivia round, even if he’s generally opposed to wearing sleeves
Dr. Kari, PhD (Murderology) is a true entertainer
TeamBuilding lives up to its name, offering bonding exercises for organizations all over the globe. Give their website a visit if you’re looking for a quality way to bring your team together. It’s a great chance to connect with coworkers who are often little more than, well, people you just so happen to work with.
“Our mission is for you and your coworkers to love your work,” the company’s web copy reads. “We believe teams are made of extraordinary individuals, and that together we can really shake the world into its best alignment. We obsess over building strong teams, so that yours can achieve its highest potential.”
The need for team building will only grow in importance in the years to come. Working from home appears destined to outlast the COVID-19 pandemic, with many companies soon deciding whether a physical office space is critical to quality output from its workforce (Spoiler: It isn’t). But for all the benefits of working from home, there’s no denying that team building will suffer as a result of not seeing your coworkers on a daily basis. The natural bonds that come from being within close proximity to colleagues may disappear, but that doesn’t mean that company culture has to disappear with it altogether. Team building exercises can help combat that dropoff.
There’s nothing quite like solving a murder or two to get your team feeling like a team again.
But that’s enough about us.
A few Cyber Blurbettes
Amazon is requiring all 75,000 of its drivers to sign a consent form to allow the company to collect biometric data for monitoring purposes while on the job. Click here to check out the original report from Vice.
Slack discovers the concept of harassment just hours after launching its latest feature, Connect DM. The feature allowed users to message people outside of their workspace, which very predictably resulted in harassment and abuse. Slack says it will correct the issue (maybe by, I don’t know, not allowing it to exist at all??). Get a better understanding of the story by reading up on this write-up from ArsTechnica.
Disappearing into the ether that is bankruptcy, everybody’s favorite retailer for obscure electronics is back. RadioShack, is said to be making a comeback — sort of. It’s not entirely clear what RadioShack v2.0 will look like, but it appears to be trending closer to e-commerce than brick and mortar. More details can be found in this story from Gizmodo.
An upcoming Chrome browser update will prioritize HTTPS when users type in an incomplete URL (which is, like, all the time). This is in effort to create a more secure browsing experience. Get more details from the folks over at ZDNet here.
