Team Reflection: Community Engagement Team

The Community Engagement team at the Innovation Hub developed community-building initiatives to engage the team through unique social and professional activities. In this blog post, the team reflects on the impact of community-building in the workplace and beyond, and some surprising benefits they didn’t see coming.

Written by the Community Engagement Team

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Community-building is important to build a workplace culture that is motivational, supportive, and inclusive. As Community Engagement Designers and Event Facilitators, we learned about the importance of cultivating a positive workplace culture to keep team members uplifted and motivated. From hosting fun socials, designing curriculum-driven workshops, and attending events in the community on days of observance, we aimed to bring people together while facilitating learning. During these activities, we noticed some amazing benefits of community-building that surprised us – such as learning from diverse perspectives, building rapport to get work done more efficiently, and unlocking new skills that we never knew we had.

Diverse Perspectives Build Community

Finding ways to socialize with team members can be a key way to bond and get to know them outside of workplace-based conversations. When we got to socialize with people at the iHub, we learned about who they are on a personal level, as well as learning from their perspectives. Through facilitated events, such as team socials, we saw the value of bringing together people of different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, who helped us to think in new ways that we didn’t expect. Ifrah reflected on how team socials are more about just having fun and getting to know people.  

Ifrah: Something I really enjoyed was the #DisplayYourPride social where we built wreaths in pride colours.  When planning for the social, we assumed that iHub members were going to design their wreaths just like the example wreath that we made. However, people started thinking about creative ideas about how to arrange their wreaths that were different from ours. They arranged leaves into flower patterns on the wreath which was something we never thought of. Something as small as that shows that we all think about things in such different ways. We’re all looking at the same materials, but we’re thinking of how to use them in different ways. 

Events like #DisplayYourPride allowed different teams at the Innovation Hub to come together, create and connect, practicing design thinking and innovation in an informal, fun setting. In addition to creative team socials, we occasionally held more guided, informative socials, almost like “field trips.” Getting out of the office as a group was a great way to bond by learning about a new topic together and engaging with equity-centered programming in the U of T community and beyond. Vanessa shared how these socials provided an opportunity for learning from others: 

Vanessa: For Black History Month, we attended an exhibition about the history of Hip-Hop at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Usually, the socials are more informal – focused on conversation and community-building. But this time, the social was more learning-based. At the end of the social, we had a really insightful discussion. It was interesting to hear viewpoints from those who came from different backgrounds. I was really happy that other members learned something about Black History Month.

Team socials aren’t just for bonding – we challenged our own perspectives by learning from others’ experiences. Ultimately, these opportunities to learn and grow from each other helped build community at the Innovation Hub and encouraged meaningful collaboration as a team.

Community Builds Rapport

Team bonding wasn’t just to make friends or to challenge our perspectives and help us grow as people. We learned that feeling connected to our colleagues helped us to build a sense of trust and, ultimately, rapport – which directly impacted how we work. Ifrah reflected on how building rapport is key for staying motivated while at work:

Ifrah: Throughout high school and university, I’ve really tried to take on community building roles. Regardless of what you choose to do academically or career-wise, if you don’t have a sense of community or a sense of belonging, you’re not going to feel motivated to do whatever it is you want to do. 

Having rapport – built on this sense of trust – made us more empathetic in the workplace. It helped us to understand how others think and feel, which, in turn, gave us insight into how to work towards a common goal. By understanding where our teammates are coming from, we worked collaboratively as a community, where everyone felt supported and connected to do their best work. Vanessa shared how building rapport with colleagues helped us to get work done quickly and efficiently. 

Vanessa: Community-building is helpful for building a sense of connection. In terms of the workplace, we spend a lot of hours working together. If we trust our co-workers – if we feel very connected to each other like a family – we are more likely to get the work done faster and more efficiently, and the communication process is much easier. Everyone would know each other and feel comfortable enough to communicate anything they need help with to help each other out.

Having rapport made people feel more comfortable to communicate in their work environments and uplifted them, knowing that they could rely on colleagues to support them. This year, we learned to appreciate the value of investing in opportunities to form connections and establish community to support and motivate our hardworking team.

Unlocking New Skills

We learned that collaborating with others, whether through team socials or team takeovers, helped us to learn new skills and hone transferable skills to take into our future academic and professional careers. Ifrah shared how team takeovers were key to learning design research skills and assessing whether design thinking was an area of interest for them.

Ifrah: When we did team takeovers, we got to work with a team in a fun competition. This change of pace held my attention really well and allowed me to practice some skills. It also targeted some skills that were, for some members, never used before in their roles.

While planning events, we also discovered new skills about ourselves that we didn’t even know we had. We found that working together helped us to unlock these new things as we could learn from each other’s skills and strengths. Vanessa reflected on how she was able to unlock her creativity – a skill that she didn’t think she had – by working with others to add structure to her brainstorming sessions: 

Vanessa: I feel that I’m not a really creative person. I remember when I was working on planning the Orange Shirt Day social and I kind of got stuck brainstorming ideas for different reflection activities to include in the event. I ended up in a cycle of endless questions that were only living in my mind. Are the social activities too boring? Are they too game-based, and not reflective enough? I remember when my supervisor told me to write down everything I was thinking about in my mind on paper. It was really helpful to be able to see all of my ideas together in one document. By adding some structure, I could keep track of my ideas, and build on them to come up with new ones – this helped me to stay in a creative mindset. 

We found that there are many ways to be creative. One way to be creative was to think outside-the-box to find innovative ways to approach event planning. Outside-the-box thinking involved challenging our assumptions and exploring new ways to approach a problem. Amelia reflected on how she got to exercise her creative skills – specifically, outside-the-box-thinking – while event planning: 

Amelia: When planning events, there is a significant amount of contingency planning that is involved. I often had to think about all of the different things that could go wrong during an event to come up with creative solutions to prevent these from happening or to provide a plan to address them in the moment if they do happen. I found myself challenged to think outside-of-the-box to not only identify these worst-case scenarios but also to come up with creative solutions.  

Expanding our creative thinking skills helped us to become better problem-solvers who are quick to react to situations in the moment. And it’s clear that community-building and event planning helped us to build new skills or refine these existing skills – and maybe we even surprised ourselves by discovering what we are really capable of along the way.

Community Beyond iHub

No matter how you choose to build community, there will always be unexpected benefits to getting to know your colleagues. Whether that’s improving your workflow, learning something new, or even making a new friend, feeling the presence of a community at work and beyond helps makes us feel connected, keeping us motivated to not only work harder, but to be the best version of ourselves we can be. We’re so grateful for the wonderful opportunities to foster connection and engagement within the Innovation Hub team – and we’re excited about the amazing lifelong friendships that have formed this year!

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