WeTransfer: Building team awareness & collaboration

This remote / hybrid working thing. It’s still a thing, isn't it. And it’s still not easy for teams to navigate. There are many unanswered questions:

• Why do fresh ideas sometimes seem slow to form?
• Which new tools can we use?
• And as creative humans, how do we stay creative and collaborative in a confusing online/hybrid/IRL/all of the above/wtf world?

Yup, there’s tension. And even the most creative people wrangle with it.

WePresent - WeTransfer's wonderful digital arts and editorial platform - invited us to join their recent team day to help answer some of these questions.

Safe to say, death by PowerPoint was not on the agenda.

We surfaced what gets the team operating at their best, shared a few tips on designing online experiences, and threw in a few essential Wavetable provocations, including:

• How you can use big wave surfing techniques to spot issues in your team
• Why R.E.M's unexpected use of a mandolin can help unlock freshness in our own work
• And UB40’s little known theme song for a 1980s kids TV show (do you know what it is?)

The main event, though? An exciting upcoming project the team were developing.

But rather than working on the project itself, we instead asked them to create the optimal environment to plan and design it.

Yup, a little meta. A workshop brief to design a workshop for the workshop brief.

But this is valuable stuff.

Invest the time and energy to design the space and choose the right tools for the team, and the real work almost takes care of itself.

Sweet.

And watch out for WePresent's curator collaborations - we’re sworn to secrecy, but they're very nice indeed.

What they said...

“After almost two years of getting used to working remotely we needed some inspiration on how to think differently, motivate ourselves and approach challenges in new ways. And Wavetable's Learning Lab did just that! Interactive, informative and fun (yes, really) the workshop changed our team processes for the better.”

Holly Fraser - Editor in Chief - WePresent / WeTransfer

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