TEAM Is Everything!

One of the most important things right now at Proteus is that we are there to support each other physically and mentally, and so we continue to look for, and share ways, to help that goal be achieved. With our head office in Melbourne, we need to do this even more right now.

So, this is what we are doing to keep the spirits of our team up.

We are currently using Microsoft TEAMS and Salesforce Chatter for all of our daily communication between team members.

Every morning when people sign on to TEAMS, they greet each other with good morning and maybe even send a funny Gif or comment. They also comment on other people’s posts and send pics of interesting things that have happened, both personally and professionally. It really does create an amazing sense of team every day.

Each Monday at 10am we have a team ZOOM session called – ‘The Proteus Wellness check’. There are two people rostered every week to run the session (not management).

The first person starts us off by going around the team and finding out what has been happening in their lives over the past week. We keep the comments away from work and the discussion is often very revealing, giving us lots of laughs, but also giving us a sense of who is struggling.

The second person is given the responsibility of delivering a five to ten-minute inspirational talk to encourage us all to keep going and to keep building HOPE. This has been very powerful both for the team, and also to the person delivering their thoughts.

We also have a person dedicated to sharing a weekly inspirational podcast or TED talk with the whole team and we are all encouraged to take time out to watch it and take personal notes.

At the end of our session I have the privilege of sharing the latest business news, our achievements for the week and our plans for the next week.

Our Wellness Check has now become something that no-one wants to miss.

Throughout the week we schedule all of our meetings on TEAMS and try to keep things as normal as possible.

Every piece of news, or reason to celebrate, is posted on TEAMS and other platforms we use, such as Chatter, so that everyone is involved.
It’s not just up to management to constantly keep people motivated, so one of the ways to ensure that staff have ‘buy in’ is to be open, honest and vulnerable, that is when they will get on board. We really are in this together.

I am very blessed at Proteus to have such an amazing group of people on our team and they are all putting in over and above what they need to. So, last week we sent all of our team a ‘thank you’ hamper, because sometimes, thank you is all you can say.

Why am I telling you this? Because the situation we are in will not be going away any time soon, so we need to shift our focus away from the problem to finding ways to keep the team motivated and together, so that when we do come out the other side we do not have to pick up the pieces and start again, but in fact we will be stronger than when we went in.

We need to change our focus to the things we can change and develop, rather than letting the bigger picture overwhelm us.

There are small things that we can all do right now that will make a huge difference to the culture and sustainability of our teams and businesses and one of those is to stay connected and keep everything as normal as possible.

So, my challenge this week is to identify 3 things that you can introduce over the next week to help build and maintain your team. Keep them simple and meaningful.

Please continue to share your thoughts and ideas with us at info@proteusleadership.com as we would like to learn from you as well.

Have an awesome week.

Des Penny - Co-CEO
Proteus Leadership