Five communication activities we use to help our teams

Here are some of our favourite activities you can run with your team to improve their communication skills and help them get the most out of their work.

At Code for Australia, we run a number of regular workshops with our teams to help them in their careers. Some of these workshops are technical (Writing Good Bug Reports, Accessibility 101) while others are centred around what many refer to as “soft skills” — communication, organisation etc. If you ask us though, these are pretty “hardcore skills” 😎.

Our Fellowship program sees us pair purpose-driven designers and developers with government innovators who are wanting to explore new ways of working using technology for roughly six months at a time. This means we consistently have new teams working with us so it’s important that we set them up for success.

One workshop we do with every new team is our Effective Communication workshop. While folks might not initially grasp the importance of some of the skills and tools we cover, we get consistent feedback that our teams do end up implementing their learnings in their work.

So with that, here are just some of the communication activities our teams have found useful.

1. Four sentences to get your point across clearly

Image via unDraw

One thing we find quite often is that people struggle to get their point across in a clear and concise way which can lead to misunderstandings and many headaches down the road. This activity provides a useful framework folks can utilise.

How run this activity:

• Get everyone to pick a topic each (some topic suggestions are listed below, but go wild!)
• Introduce the framework, and provide the example listed below
• Give everyone 5 minutes to plan/prepare
• Everyone to take turns to share to their sentences back to the group and the group provides feedback on how well they’ve utilised the framework and gotten their point across.

Framework — Four sentences:

1. Define what you’re talking about
2. What’s good/useful/important about it?
3. How does it relate to the person/wider conversation?
4. Make a suggestion/call to action (bonus tip — phrase like it an open question)

Example: Team calendar

1. We’ve created a team calendar for recurring events.
2. This new calendar will stop people double booking themselves for our retros.
3. More people will be able to attend, which will streamline communication for everyone.
4. Are there any other scheduling issues I can help with?

Topic suggestions:

• Stand-ups
• Focus groups
• User testing
• Sprints
• HTML
• The Cloud

2. The five whys

This activity helps participants understand how questions help with better understanding of a problem. The idea is if you ask ‘why’ five times, the nature of the problem, as well as its solution becomes clear.

How to run this activity:

• Start with getting the group to watch the funny video above.
• Run through the example listed below.
• Then, as a group, start with a statement or problem and interrogate it with five whys questions.
• The group can brainstorm what questions to ask or people can take turns.
• Allow time after for discussion.

Example: The car wont start

Why? — The battery is dead. (First why).

Why? — The alternator is not functioning. (Second why).

Why? — The alternator belt has broken. (Third why).

Why? — The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (Fourth why).

Why? — The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (Fifth why, a root cause).

Topic suggestions:

• I prefer phone assistance over online assistance
• There are too many people to survey
• “We don’t have enough participants for our user testing

3. Pet peeves

Image from Shutterstock

This one is always a hit. It’s about how to really listen to what someone is saying and cut out the noise. It helps you to genuinely listen to what someone is saying and to read between the lines, sift through the information and get to the real point or concern they are talking about.

How to run this activity:

• The facilitator/s rave on for 1 full minute on a pet-peeve (think, traffic in peak hour or people walking too slowly in crowded places) while everyone else listens. The facilitator should go off on some tangents and make things a little confusing.
• At the end of each rant, the group brainstorm what the person:

1. Really cares about
2. What they value
3. What matters to them

Example:
Topic: Someone rants about how annoying pop-up ads are when they’re just trying to visit websites. They talk about an unrelated example, a story about their grandma getting pop-ups and the one and only time a pop-up was useful.

What they really care about: smooth user experience on the internet;

What they value: clarity and transparent in advertisements;

What matters to them: getting work done, doing their online shopping in peace, or a more intuitive, user-friendly adblocker.

4. How to speak up in meetings

An example of some of the solutions one of our teams came up with.

We’ve all been in meetings with people who love to go off on tangents and tend to get carried away. Or perhaps they’re not so great at letting you get a word in. This activity asks teams to identify some of the reasons that it can be hard to speak up, and gets them to workshop solutions together.

How to run this activity:

• Ask the team to each add a few post its around why it can be hard to speak up in meetings.
• Once everyone has finished, group themes together.
• Talk through what folks have listed down for a few minutes.
• Then as a group, go through each topic group and find solutions for each reason it’s hard to speak up. Check out the example in the image above.

5. How to disagree

Image from English Live

This activity is about how to respectfully disagree or express a differing viewpoint — something we all constantly do at work. It can be tricky to navigate the line between not expressing your ideas, and being antagonist so the framework below provides some helpful ideas for how to do so in a respectful and empowering way.

How run this activity:

• Get everyone to pick a topic each (some topic suggestions are listed below).
• Introduce the framework, and provide the example listed below.
• Give everyone 5–10 minutes to plan/prepare their response.
• Everyone to take turns to share to their sentences back to the group.

Framework — Five sentences:

1. Acknowledge their viewpoint
2. Say something good about it (this shows you listened)
3. State your different viewpoint
4. Give evidence of what’s good about it
5. Make a suggestion/call to action (bonus tip — phrase like it a question)

Example:Less or more survey content

1. I hear what you’re saying in respect to adding more content to the survey.
2. You’re right that it’s really important to ensure people have enough context about what we’re doing.
3. My perspective is we need to keep it lean enough,
4. So that people want to complete the survey in the first place though.
5. Let’s look at best practice for how much people can read before they check out, then we can decide together. Does that sound like a good solution?

Topic suggestions:

• Two week sprints over a full release plan
• Websites over apps
• Online surveys over phone surveys
• Chatbot over a search bar
• Phone assistance over online assistance

Ultimately, good communication makes for happier and more successful teams so we hope these activities come in helpful. As we said, these are just some of the tools we use, but let us know what’s worked well for you as well!

You can reach out to us via Typeform, email or join our Slack!