Building Team Identified – A Peek Into Our Company Culture
Happy work places are more productive. Seriously! A powerful internal team culture can resonate not only in the individual lives of the workers, but can empower the growth of an entire company. Making a tightly knit team, however, doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen.
At Identified, we work pretty darn hard, so we also need time to play (whoever said that business can’t mix with pleasure should come in for a cupcake sometime). We’re a big believer in the concept of a team, and therefore, we love doing activities that ensure our team is constantly interacting, learning about each other, and making those precious kodak moments.
Don’t believe us?
Feast your eyes on we’ve done recently!
Drum roll please…
The Identified Olympics
In order to inaugurate the world’s premiere sporting event, we decided to hold a ceremony or two of our own featuring sports for only the bravest of hearts (sort of). We embraced our own Kobe Bryants and Kevin Loves and had a battle royal in the form of “Trashketball”, while paying homage to our champion Shawn Johnson by testing our flexibility with the “Human Knot”.
Long story short, we saved the intense athletics for our amazing American champions doing tremendously in London, and jocked up the office space as well as we knew how. Amidst the giggles, the tangles, and the intensive dizzy-spell onset by the whirl of office chairs, it was a great exercise for us to get to know one another better.
The Tower of Terror: Engineer Marshmallow Edition
We’ve got a killer team of truly brilliant engineers, and what better way to test brilliance than with marshmallows? Don’t look so confused. This team activity is a competition that’s now been administered to over half a million people globally. How do you participate? With only 15 minutes on the clock, it is up to your small team to build a tower out of spaghetti, tape, and string with the strength to withstand a fluffy XL marshmallow on top, and build the tallest structure possible out of your competing teams.
You heard us. Fluffy. Extra Large. Marshmallow.
We heard and learned a lot of valuable lessons from the engineers who built their towers, even laughing when watching painstakingly-built constructions topple to the ground. And not to pop our collars too much, but our winning teams happened to do 3X better than the average marshmallow tower contestants. Win.
Amongst my favorite tidbits of advice was a platitude provided by a team with a tower which would’ve overwhelmingly won the competition, had their spaghetti noodles not crumbled. Their advice on building a successful tower? “Don’t start too big — work step by step.”
Well said. It’s great to feel the fire of friendly competition during these team building activities, but the best part is getting to take those steps together as one big, happy family.
Got any ideas for team building? We’d love to hear them. Chime in below, and check out other cool stuff that our team’s done:
That’s my grandson, Zach! What a guy.