Join Granger Whitelaw as he reviews Online Applications, and looks at a variety of games you can play online for Team Building, or just to have fun with friends & family – while we are all at home working and getting through this difficult time.
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Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability.
Listen to the full episode at link here:
Granger Whitelaw: Good morning. This is Granger Whitelaw: with The Lotus Talks Friday morning, March 20th, 2020 20th, 2020. There you go to very interesting plan numbers today. So we’ve made it through another week here in Saigon. There’s been a lot of activity, more virus outbreaks if you’re living in Thao Dien, there was an outbreak at the ascent which was locked down in Sanitized over the last couple of days. So, apparently someone was at the Buddha Bar, last weekend, one or two nights, Friday, Saturday night. And some, a lot of people were there partying going on. So if you were at the Buddha bar last Saturday, please check out your health, check out your friends, be very cautious, really if you were there Tuesday the 17th or Saturday and the 14th, celebrating St Patrick’s day or whatever, you should go quarantine yourself as the recommendation. But I’m not a doctor. So just passing this along with you. The news that has come out.
Granger Whitelaw: Well, we were talking on Monday about video conferencing tools, working at home. I think I gave you quite a list of them and some of the different aspects of them and benefits of them that you could use. So today I am not going to feature a company as I normally would do as we’ve already kind of looked at a number of the companies. I thought we would kind of change it up a little bit. So here we are at home, working from home… teams, remote teams all around the state, the country, the region, the globe, whatever it may be for you. And you’re getting your Slack together, you’re going to your Zoom or your Citrix or whatever your video conferencing is all put together and figure it out if you hadn’t had it before, certainly you’re learning how to do that.
Granger Whitelaw: Getting your Calendly set up, and your calendar integrated and, and really figuring out how you can set up your meetings, have some business continuity and move things forward. Well, after a couple of days at home, I mean you can only have so much wine. Contrary to a couple of my friends who apparently have bought bathtub is full of wine recently. To get through the next two weeks or so. But there are some virtual team building things that you can do as well. And I have done some research on it. It’s pretty interesting thinking about, you know, what can we do to keep in touch with our workers but also you can apply that to your friends and, and your family. As an example, Wednesday evening I set up a group chat with half a dozen or dozen guys who I work with, socially, I shouldn’t say not work with, but I worked with on projects or, am dear friends with socially.
Granger Whitelaw: and we wanted to just kind of keep in touch with each other during this time. It’s important to kind of share what’s going on, filter out some of the noise and have some great laughs. And we just really had some great laughs. It was a lot of fun – kind of vent a little bit. So we set it up at eight 30, after people had time to have dinner, I kind of put their kids down and get settled in and spend an hour on the phone catching up and talking, it was great. And it prompted me to really think about, you know, you can do more of this. I’ve asked one of my friends, Mikey, to set up a, trivia kind of contest. We usually do that and well, he does it all the time. Every Tuesday night they go, and do that at a bar, but since you can’t go to the bar – You can do that online.
Granger Whitelaw: Well, what else can you do? Funny enough, there are quite a number of things that you can do. so let’s talk about those. One idea, is just to have a group lunch together, right? So put your zoom on or whatever video conferencing you have and get your lunch, set a time up for half an hour or an hour, whatever time you want to allot for this and share lunch. You can show each other your lunches, but it’ll give you a time to eat together, share some thoughts, how your day’s going – catch up with your cousin, catch up with your buddies on how they’re feeling, what have you, and just enjoy a meal.
Granger Whitelaw: Another fun one I saw, I thought it was really super interesting was “.GIF Battles”. So this is an asynchronous thing. You can do it together. and you can set a 15 minute or 30-minute time zone and actually Trello – and Trello is a tool that you can use for project management as well. I think I had mentioned that Monday, but Trello has a number of these kind of board templates set up, where you can go in and play games. So with this game you would set four rounds up, like four periods, like with any sporting event – each with its own theme and use giphy.com or Google images to find a .GIF that fits with that theme for that round. And then attach a .gif, a .gif to a card. And once everyone has their gifts, you can vote on the best submission. So, it’s kind of like a .gif battle championship, right?
Granger Whitelaw: This can get pretty crazy depending on what your theme is. it could be food, it could be animals, it could be whatever you want it to be. Greatest golf shots or who knows. But that’s a really neat one. I thought. Another really cool, what I heard about is called “Tiny campfire”. So, you know, just thinking about a campfire when you’re sitting around the campfire and you’re roasting marshmallows. This game, the experience starts with the camp style icebreaker question and trivia. You could follow it up with like historic ghost stories, and you can even mail each other a care package that includes a candle, some matches, and some s’mores. Now, if you’re not worried about opening the mail – that way you can make it a little more interactive. You can take a little candle, roast your marshmallow while you tell your ghost stories around your tiny campfire virtually. And online storytelling. You know, there’s some great online training courses that you can do, show and tell, your remote team workers or friends can bring an item to the call. And you can talk about it, whether it has sentimental value or it’s a personal story or maybe no connection at all.
Granger Whitelaw: And then you can share about it. it’s a pretty cool and I really liked that one as well. Granger Whitelaw: The other thing you can do is, get a Virtual Tour of a Museum. There are, museum hack guides out there who are experts at telling amazing stories. They will take you on tours of museums and tell you all the history about what you’re watching and these actually create learning opportunities for your employees to get better at storytelling, to be creative, and to be more open and able to share with each other, opening up kind of a glimpse into their lives. Right? And that’s a great thing. Just think about
Granger Whitelaw: taking a picture of your desk. So on Thursday we’re all going to take a picture of our desk and whoever has the cleanest desk wins, that day, or you can have the messiest desk – try to describe what is on your desk and why it’s there. Another kind of fun desk, exercise deskersize, if you will. Lots of really neat little things that you can do. Be creative. Think of things that you can do to build teams or just building an environment of sharing, so you’re just not staring at the computer, you know, find some cool music to put on and share your music, your playlists with your friends. That’s always a fun thing to do.
Granger Whitelaw: Oh my phone’s ringing. It’s one of my buddies from the States. I’ll have to FaceTime him back. FaceTime is a great tool as well. To stay in touch. If you don’t have a multi-use interface kind of zoom or don’t need it. You just want to do a one on one or just have two people on it. It’s always fun to just FaceTime somebody and talk about something. And on a deeper note, in a fun way, you can play a game called, “How you Doin”?! You know, I say that a lot. I’m like, “How you Doin” and people are like, what? What are you talking about? You know, it’s always good with that kind of Sopranos accent, right but really it’s a chance for somebody in a lightweight, it kind of break the ice and spent five minutes talking about how are you doing today? How do you feel today? Right Did you do something fun? Are you pumped up about something that happened? you feeling a little distressed or depressed? Anxious?,.. But ask people, Hey, how you doing? – That’s all for today.
This is Granger Whitelaw with the Lotus talks Friday, March 20th, 2020, hopefully for positive results and less bad news, more good news.
Granger Whitelaw: In the meantime, try to find a way to laugh in a way to bring some joy into other people’s lives. Stay up, stay positive. Get some sun and I’ll see you on Monday to find out ->
HOW YOU DOIN?
Granger Whitelaw: It’s Granger Whitelaw for The Lotus Talks…. Have a great weekend!
The Lotus Talks is produced by The Vietnam Group and Hosted by Granger Whitelaw.
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