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A retrospective meeting is helpful to learn from the pitfalls and hick-ups of the past. It enables your team to adapt its processes to changes and new paradigms. Building upon team process is useful but a solid tool without happy workers is useless.

We had a tough project for the team stability and well being last year. In our retrospective, it appeared that the most potent force of the team is the cohesion. The team praised the help that everybody receives from other team members. As a team leader, I am grateful for what the team achieved. But my strongest satisfaction is to see that despite the challenges the team member continued to help and support each other.

I wanted to show them how much they rely on each other to succeed. I wanted to thanks them. I dug into Management 3.0 for advice. Management 3.0 advice that appraisal is better received when they are not coming from the hierarchy but colleagues. Peers want to genuinely wanting to reward the help they received from other colleagues.

Management 3.0 recommends to follow 6 rules:
1 — Don’t promise rewards in advance;
2 — Keep anticipated rewards small;
3 — Reward continuously, not once;
4 — Reward publicly, not privately;
5 — Reward behavior, not outcome;
6 — Reward peers, not subordinates;

Following these recommendations, I used a whiteboard to create a wall of fame presenting the names of all the team members (rule 4). I gave to each team member 2 yellow sticky notes (rule 6). I asked them to vote for there peer to reward some help they received or an attitude they appreciated (rule 5). The team members were allowed to vote secretly if they wanted, they had several days to drop there vote without being seen.

I didn’t inform them what would be the reward (rule 1). I waited for all the yellow sticky notes to be posted on the wall. I purchase a small token of appreciation, a small voucher card (rule 2) for a local mall.

When all the team members were available, I called everyone to deliver the token of appreciation, I delivered the gift card in the name of the team, not in my name. I explained that the Kudo wall will be reopened in some weeks but keeping it unplanned (rule 3).

On Friday 7th December 2018, PeopleBlendIT organized a collaborative workshop. During the workshop, the guests discovered the board game “Kitchen Rush”.

Each player has 2 house glass token available to execute actions. Before the sand of the token is expired, the player can’t use it for a new action. This creates a sense of the time running. Being pressed by the time the players need to support each other to unlock their next move while the sand flows. The time is counted for each round of service. 4 minutes to serve as much customer meal orders as possible. The team has to pay attention not to take any order which will not be compleated.

Between each round, the players elaborate strategies to increase the number of dishes served. During the first round, you can observe that players are focusing on delivering by themselves and are not helping each other so much, resulting in orders which are not delivered. Moving on with additional rounds, new ways of working are appearing. Strategies like having a Kitchen chef, somebody specialised in providing supply have demonstrated good results.

The evening was not only fake food, Aurore, the cook of Alliance Merode offered to the players her famous Korean vegan meal: ” Bibimbap”. The guest of PeopleBlendIT also enjoyed a nice selection of beers curated by the owners of the place. The dinner was also a great occasion for networking.

During the second game, the two tables started a competition to get as many Michelin stars as possible. Each was running a different restaurant. Between the two games, they confronted their strategies to select the most successful one, and elaborated even more advanced strategies before starting the second game. The players experienced the power of retrospectives of AGILE project management.

The workshop was organised in collaboration with Geek Attitude Games (GAG). In the end of the second game, the players voted for the best team player. GAG offered some gift for the best team player.

The best team player received the game “Pocket Ops” and an extension for Kitchen Rush, both edited by Geek Attitude Games.

GAG also edits Dicium, a box containing four games based on the same core mechaniscs. It might be one of the next game experience offered by PeopleBlendIT during a workshop.