Bringing our mission and values to life through a bespoke creative team activity.

Introduction

At Team Activity Group, we love nothing more than to run an innovative and exciting team building event. Our client was part of Abbvie, and we delivered something truly original. Read on to find out how we worked with his team to ensure our activity brought their team mission to life.

About AbbVie

AbbVie is a pharmaceutical business with several different teams and a mix of working arrangements which includes people who are office based as well as out in the field. Team building is therefore important to them when it comes to ensuring strong relationships and good collaboration throughout the business.

The AbbVie team we worked with recently worked hard to establish a team internal mission and values, which were the subject of their team building event.

Event objectives

AbbVie contacted us to help them bring together three of their regional teams within which many team members spend time with customers in offsite roles. Their key message was to communicate that these people are an important part of the puzzle that makes up the business and they wanted a way of communicating and reinforcing this while also enabling people to de-stress and have some fun.

A key part of the brief was to establish an activity that removed any hierarchy creating a level playing field for everyone to interact on.

Katie Smith from AbbVie explained that working with TAG Events “…felt very, very straightforward and there was an immediate understanding of what we were trying to do. We had a very specific brief, and we knew what outcomes we wanted and Sarah immediately understood which activity would work for us.”

Planning and preparation

Our masterpiece activity is a fun and creative opportunity to encourage team members to work together. In fact, a successful outcome can only be achieved when teams are strong on their communication and collaboration.

Each delegate is given a small individual canvass which, when painted, will combine to create the ‘bigger picture’. Instructions are given to show them which parts of the large canvas they're responsible for and it is then their responsibility to find the artists responsible for the neighbouring pieces.

We engaged a professional illustrator to depict AbbVie’s chosen theme and ensure all the required components were reflected in an image that could be used at the event, meaning that this exercise was truly bespoke.

Event execution

Katie described the event running smoothly, saying “The TAG Events team were excellent on the day. Sarah and her team worked really hard and yet we hardly knew they were there. We had all the equipment we needed and despite the opportunity for chaos our objectives were clear, and the potential mess involved with such a creative task was kept to a minimum, so we could keep track of our progress and really see how things were coming together.”

Kate illustrates how successful the activity was in achieving the desired outcomes: “We will be bringing the artwork to the next conference as it has become something that lives and breathes now we're back at the office. Being able to bring our purpose to life in this way has been so valuable. I’d describe TAG Events as a very professional organisation that were able to deliver a truly bespoke team building day.”

“As well as bringing our mission and values to life we experienced some fascinating insights during the session as to how people were interacting and engaging others. Different approaches included collaborative outreach where participants went in search of their neighbouring artists as well as more directive approaches where individuals expected others to come to them. For this reason, the Masterpiece activity is insightful and informative or many levels.”

Results and feedback

Reflecting on the whole experience of working with Team Activity Group, Katie is very complimentary and it says that the only changes would be to the way they approached the brief given the flexibility they now know is available with the Masterpiece activity.

Key to a successful experience for AbbVie was the neutrality created by the choice of an artistic activity.

“Nobody in our group was a natural artist so it immediately put everybody on one level and meant we had to communicate well in order to succeed. We felt strongly about everyone participating equally on the day so this was a key success factor for us. Because of the size of the task, Masterpiece was ideal for enabling people to work with and communicate with those that they wouldn't normally. It really gave an excellent opportunity for everyone to meet people that they wouldn't come across on a weekly, monthly or daily basis.

Also, because the output from the event is so visual and tangible, we feel we can still use it in many ways. We’ve considered sending printed postcards to participants and we will use the imagery in our branding and slide decks. So often team building events are ‘in the moment’ and people revert to type as soon as they get back to their day job. In this case we feel the legacy of what we learned and experienced can continue.”

“I'd strongly recommend TAG Events to anyone needing team building. They are a very professional organisation and took a flexible approach to ensure we got what we wanted from the activity. Their communication was excellent and their knowledge of what was possible meant they laid on the perfect opportunity for us to get the outcomes we wanted.”