OverviewSynergy is a remote team-building and bonding platform for professionals. This application allows users to discover activities, plan events, and host team building and bonding sessions all in one place. Team facilitators, our target users, are provided with the tools needed to help their teams to learn and grow while building bonds. The virtual sessions offer multiple ways to interact with members during sessions while preserving and closely mimicking real-life interactions.
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Questions we asked managers 💼
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Questions we asked employees 👔
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Team Bonding vs Team Building 🫂
When pitching the general idea that we wanted to create something for remote working professionals, many were unsure if we wanted to create something fun or something productive. We made sure to take a step back as a team and identify that we were trying to do both, which became easier to express once we understood the differentiation ourselves.
Team Building activities are designed to teach your team new skills, while Team Bonding is all about having fun together and strengthening interpersonal relationships. The primary objective here is fun, with little to no emphasis on skill development. With this understanding, we included these definitions into our initial product proposal as many people (including ourselves) oftentimes combined the two together which created confusion. We wanted to be inclusive of skill building activities and fun, bonding activities. |
Team Dynamics 🪢
We took a moment to understand some important dynamics of teamwork for the team building aspect of our platform.
One thing we learned about is Tuckman's four stages of group development - forming, storming, norming, and performing. Understanding this model helped us understand in which ways we could help teams become more effective, which would be through activities that might help in all of these stages revolving around things like communication and collaboration. I specifically did some research on some characteristics of ineffective vs effective teams. Some characteristics of effective teams were supportive and collaborative relationships, solution-oriented decisions, participative atmospheres, and chances for achievement as a group. Some characteristics of ineffective teams were relationships based on need or liking, motivation based on coercion and pressure, and creativity controlled by power and not solutions. |
More in-depth with activities 🧩
Due to time constraints, our team was only able to demonstrate a few team bonding and building activities as previews in our final product (mixology class, blind drawing, and escape room previews). In the future, we'd love to finish designing out the entirety of these virtual activities so one could see what it's like to go through one end to end. Along with this, we would want to show more range of activities that could be included in our platform, as it would show the different types of experiences we have to offer and allow us to make a more fully functional prototype.
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Larger Sample Sizes 📝
Our team could benefit from gathering research from a larger pool of people. We were working with limited time and resources, so we interviewed and gathered as much information that we could do ourselves with the people that we had access to. In the future, we hope to get more people to interview and test our product to validate our design choices and make the product better and more fit for the target audiences.
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