There’s a lot to be said for showing gratitude in the workplace; and with the end of 2021 insight, it struck us as the perfect time to reflect upon that for which we are grateful.
As passionate advocates of lifelong learning and shameless fans of brainstorming, we’re keen to help you do the same. So we have come up with three simple ways to use GroupMap to finish the year (or any session for that matter) with gratitude.
Checking in or out with Gratitude
Check-ins and check-outs are short activities that happen at the start and end of meetings or collaborative sessions.
They are a perfect opportunity for reflection and are one of the many mechanisms that can be added to your toolbox of useful techniques that help to build team connectedness.
A gratitude check-in or check-out is simply a matter of asking participants for whom or what they are grateful and why. There are a myriad of ways of phrasing this question as well as a number of different mechanisms that can be used to deliver them.
For example, starting with GroupMap’s Blank Wall, add a simple backdrop and invite participants to share who has helped them in the last 24 hours –
Similarly, like a lot of the maps, GroupMap’s Exit Ticket 3-2-1, can be adapted to invite participants to identify examples of gratitude –
If time is limited, adding a survey to your process is an easy way of kicking off or finishing your session with gratitude –
A Gratitude Retrospective
A retrospective is an agile project management tool used to support a review; they are a great way of viewing any event or undertaking through the lens of gratitude.
A member of the Groupmap team adapted our Mad Sad Glad retrospective to help us review our 2021.
Here’s a snippet –
While a Gratitude Retrospective can be run synchronously, we decided on an asynchronous approach so we could each work the retrospective around our end-of-year commitments and not rush our responses.
The responses of the retrospective will be shared amongst the team just before we finish up at the end of the year; this way we will end 2021 on a note of gratitude.
A Gratitude Brainstorm
If you’re looking for a more flexible approach to embracing gratitude, brainstorm could be more your style.
Here’s GroupMap’s Simple Brainstorm being used to encourage people to share –
Last of all
Giving people the opportunity to express their gratitude, fosters positive team connections, an atmosphere of understanding and makes people feel valued.
We’d love to hear how you use GroupMap to foster and showcase gratitude in your organisation.
