Make your monthly team meetings memorable

Team meetings – everybody in the corporate world knows and attends them – whether they like or loathe them. Over the course of more than five years with the adidas Group I´ve attended countless team and department meetings, and two years ago the scepter of hosting the Retail & Franchise Monthly Team Meeting was handed to me.

I love running these meetings – welcoming my team, getting them away from their desks and making them forget about their day-to-day jobs for about 90 minutes.

Naturally, after some time I started asking myself if we were getting in a rut – something I want to avoid at all costs. So I began to wonder:

• How can I make it more engaging for my audience?
• How can I use the great facilities of the adidas Group campus?
• Which ingredients could I add to spice up a decent dish and turn it into an explosive experience?

Have you ever thought of bringing your office to the gym?

And then it hit me. All components – the answers to my questions – were right in front of my nose.

Like the majority of my team, I love a good workout. Going to the gym is a fixed part of our agendas. In addition to individual training, our team has been participating in team workouts for over a year. Now I just needed to mix those elements together!

Fortunately I work for a company that provides its workforce with the freedom of experimenting with such ideas and whose employees are open for changes and challenges.

The date of the MTM approached and all I told my team beforehand was the time, the location and to be dressed in sports clothes – very few details that put their trust in me to the test.

The moment my team came into the Indoor Cycling room, saw what we were going to do and started to share my enthusiasm for my experiment it was clear that it was going to be a fantastic team meeting and all initial concerns of potentially making a fool of myself vanished into thin air.

And then we started to spin the wheel. Between every update presentation, we cycled fast and slow and on high and low resistance, finishing off with a 20-minute full-steam bike ride. The energy in the room was palpable and we were pushing each other through the most powerful team meeting ever. In the end we were exhausted and energized at the same time and we took that energy back to our offices. Suffice it to say that I got the thumbs up from my team.

“Not only did the combination of working out and having a business meeting save time in our busy calendars, it also strengthened our team spirit by creating a sense of achievement and last but not least we simply had great fun!”

From now on sporty MTMs will be an integral part of our team meeting landscape. In conclusion I can honestly say: we came, we spun, we conquered!

Have you ever created an out-of-the-box team meeting experience?