Questions are a human superpower. They fuel our sense of discovery starting when we’re young, and help us connect with the world around us and each other. On teams, questions can be a powerful tool for building alignment, fostering discussion, and even building trust.
But like any tool, questions take practice to use well. For example, choosing the right question is important. Imagine a team retro where someone asks “whose fault is this mistake?” You’re not likely to get a lot of discussion. If you posed the question “What could we have done differently?” you may get more earnest responses and engage your team in building a better process and solution.
We love team-building questions at Range — we use them every day and think they’re a key ingredient to effective teams. That’s why we have more than 350 built into Check-ins. When our customers begin to use these questions as part of their daily Check-in habit, they see them strengthen connections across the team. So to help everyone better understand how to put questions to use, we’ve created a free Team Building Questions eBook.
The eBook contains an overview of how to make the most of team-building questions on your own team, and 60 questions that we’ve broken out into three sections:
- Questions for newer teams that will help foster openness
- Questions for established teams that want to maintain and improve their cohesion
- Questions for tight-knit teams that are facing new challenges
Each question is an opportunity for people to share a bit more about themselves, and for the team to learn a little bit more about each other. And while questions are a powerful tool for any team, as so many people have felt the fabric of work fray during the COVID-19 lockdown, they can be especially useful in building connections back up.
When teams are thrown into remote work, the first thing to break down is often communication followed by a feeling of disconnection or erosion of culture. In person, we have a lot of informal opportunities to renew belonging cues. In the absence of these moments we need to intentionally craft interactions that encourage vulnerability (as simple as saying how you are feeling or what you're doing on the weekend), which leads to trust and in turn to belonging.
Fostering trust starts with encouraging everyone to participate by modeling curiosity. In other words, a great way to engage your team is to answer team-building questions together, even when everyone is working everywhere else.
We hope you enjoy this eBook, and if you have any feedback, please let us know on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
And if you want to integrate team-building questions into your daily status updates, sign up for Range and try out Check-ins. You can configure Range to prompt your team with a question teammates can answer at any time (asynchronously), and even integrate it with Slack so you can answer and share your question in team channels. In no time your team can harness the power of questions to build trust every day.
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