Our Social Media team at work took some time yesterday to get together and have a “Pinterest pinning party.” That means we grabbed our laptops, found a spot away from our office cubes, grabbed a beverage and then all worked together on helping get our company’s Pinterest page up and running by pinning (linking and uploading) a number of items to our boards.
What could an insurance company put on Pinterest boards? Lots of things! So far our categories include recipes for well-being, motivation, animal therapy, live well, family time, work healthy, healthy home, gardening tips, health infographics, grandparents, volunteerism, healthy kids, fitness, and views from the office. We’ll add more before we start officially promoting the site, but you can get a sneak peak now at pinterest.com/humana.
While it was great just to sit together, have fun, laugh and make some serious strides on getting the site ready, the lesson learned from the experience has to do with the value of scheduling time as a team to focus and work together on one specific thing that’s been hanging out there to get done for a few months. We’re all busy and the person on the team who has been working on this project has way too many other things to get done every week to focus on just this. So it really helped for us to set aside 2.5 hours as a team to all work together on it. It won’t be the last time we do that, I’m sure, as it was enjoyable and successful. In fact, we’ve previously talked about picking some night to pull an all-nighter in the office to knock off a crazy amount of work together, complete with middle-of-the-night run to White Castle. Count me in on that experience, too.
Each of us has more on our plate than we can possibly get done as soon as we’d like. How nice is it just to carve out some time and all focus together on getting one thing done in a fun atmosphere ? Good, caring, focused, compassionate, determined teams can do that. I’m proud to be part of one.
Leap year lesson #334 is Schedule team time to focus on one task.
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