Program
As the organisation navigated through the Pandemic, one of the challenges Avery Dennison, like every other organisation, faced was to keep the momentum going for the team. Avery Dennison looked to run an APAC-wide initiative, sustained for six months. The format that emerged was that of a competitive, high-profile, team-based, sport-like event. The intent of the event was to create engagement, excitement and high spirits at times, where virtual connects replaced in-person employee interactions.
Objective
The brief that was shared with us was this: “Create an opportunity for cross-cultural relationships & collaboration through a sustained campaign of fun, team building engagements for a 3000+ employee base, spread across many countries in the Asia-Pacific region.”
The objective was based on the following premises:
Engagement – With so much changing so fast each day in these times, boosting morale and bringing the team together have become all the more important. When a team exhibits good morale, there is excitement and enthusiasm generated. Engagement in that sense becomes critically important.
Collaboration – When relationships between employees are strong, they are better able to communicate, work together, problem solve and manage conflicts. The activity is hence to be designed to strengthen relationships and collaboration in these challenging times.
Team building – Virtual team building can reinforce positive behaviour when working from home. A remote team building event gives employees the time to get inspired and come together as one team. It gives teams an hour to forget about the outside world and motivates the team to keep calm and carry-on working.
Solution
Engaging a large base of employees spread across different geographical regions has its own challenges. At the design stage, we gave ourselves a few broad guard rails within which to design the intervention:
• Something that would be ongoing for 6 months
• It couldn’t be one-off events. There had to be an all-encompassing story.
• The excitement had to be sustained in the period between the actual events too
• All activities had to work for a multi-cultural audience spread across APAC
• The whole intervention had to end on a high!
And hence was conceived, The Avery Dennison Premier League (APL)
APL was a 6-month long tournament where representatives from seven team came together once every month, to engage in a virtual team engagement activity. Like any large-scale sporting event, a live leader board was put up on a common virtual platform accessed through an app, to keep the individual and team scores ticking, along with their heartbeats! The platform also served as a buzzing social-media like channel for the entire Avery Dennison APAC employees. Apart from the live leader board, there were challenges, photos and videos that got posted after each event and employees were engaged by liking and commenting, thus sustaining the buzz.
Executiion
• The entire APAC team was divided into 7 Teams for the whole year – each with their own unique branding, logo & war cry!
• Team Leaders were encouraged to create a video clip for inspiring their teams!
• Nominations were sought for the position of team captains.
• The chosen captains were tasked to weave their teams together and motivate them with a Unique War Cry!
• Branding was accentuated with badges, Templates etc.
• Every month on a scheduled day, these teams would virtually compete with each other over different team engagement activities that were lined up for that day. Whoever from the team was nominated, would play that day.
• A Dynamic Leader-Board would keep track of team scores on the year-to-date basis, keeping the competition always alive!
• The entire engagement would culminate with a day-long Grand Finale & Award ceremony!
The Teams:
To keep the excitement going, exciting logos were designed for each of the teams for them to engage with and build pride around their shared team identity.
