Ngrane is all about community. About working from the heart. About connecting.
It’s always great when colleagues get along and get to know each other. This creates a better atmosphere, a better work environment and just better team work. But how do we get to know each other better, how do we interact, how do we connect in Covid Times?
Host a Company Wide Expo
At Ngrane, we have a couple of things we do to stay involved. We have an Expo every Friday. What exactly is an Expo, you might ask. Well, an Expo is short for an Exposition (duh), and it could be about everything. The fun part about it: everyone has to do at least one Expo per about two or three months. You choose your topic, you choose whether it’s interactive, more like a TedTalk, whether it’s fun and games or a serious debate about human rights. Wanna talk about space travel and NASA and SpaceX? Sure! Wanna talk about photography and developing film? Of course you should! Wanna give a short HTML workshop? Go ahead! Wanna share your cultural heritage? Please do! Anything is possible.
Play Games
Playing games is one of the most connecting (and sometimes disconnecting if you’re a sore loser) activities a company could think of. We used the online grounds of Gather.town a couple of times to connect after work. You can build your own online office here, and play some of their games. Good at drawing? You will like the ‘guess my drawing’ game. Good at associative thinking? Play an online version of Codenames! They have lots and lots of games you can play and it’s just a fun environment to be in.
Book Club
To dive a little deeper into our human psychologies, Stephen, our CEO, came up with a book club. Together we read Dit ben ik!, written by Lieuwe Koopmans, about Transactional Analysis. Say what? This book is about finding your true self, how to communicate about yourself and with others and how to broaden your perspective.
Transactional Analysis is a type of psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy, where your social transactions you’ve had throughout your life are analyzed. This gives valuable insights in how you communicate, and where some of your behaviours come from.
It’s not really a light read. It’s also about traumatic experiences, and how we’ve overcome them or are still overcoming them. But it does bring you as a team closer together, and helps you understand where someone might be coming from.
Of course, if you want to pick a lighter read before you start this one, do that! But discussing something you’ve all read, brings out more perspectives and will ultimately bring your team closer together.