The Staff Party

Tired of the awkward pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey office party? Or is the morale in your workplace suffering from the fact that your co-workers don’t socialize outside of work? Maybe you do go out for a movie or appetizers – but is that enough?

Welcome to the Improv Party. Where hierarchies are broken (even if just for one night), and you see your co-workers in a whole new light.

Not only is the event fun, but the exercises double as training in professional skills – such as listening, problem-solving, spontaneity, empathy, and confidence. Perfect for sales, presentations, teaching, networking, and whatever else you do on the job. Workshops can be customized to highlight any skill.

The experience is unique to every company, but here are some details:

Location: Laurentina can come to you – or rent a beautiful location in downtown Toronto
Length: Can be any length from 1 hour to a full day or night.
Benefits: Improved work morale; increased team-building skills; better problem-solvers; improved spontaneity and confidence; more motivated and happy employees.

Sample Workshop:

Warm-up – Employees get to know each other; or, if they already do, learn something they don’t know about each other. A physical exercise brings the energy up and increases the comfort level. Around the circle, participants clap while making eye contact to connect and build up a rhythm together. Participants come up with a category, and think on their feet of 7 things that fit into each other’s assigned category. Then each participant is made an expert at something non-existent, and asked to speak on it with confidence. Other participants question or challenge them. After these exercises, we have a discussion on how these exercises relate to work situations.

Scenework – In the next part of the workshop, we create scenes and stories together to build trust and camaraderie amongst employees. The first game is called Gibberish, and in it we create scenes by communicating without speaking a real language. After that a few players are each given a genre, and together create a story by finishing each other’s sentences. Participants are then divided into groups and given a work-related object they have to “sell” in a commercial. After the presentations, we play a game of freeze, where two actors get “frozen” in the middle of a scene and another takes over from one of them, starting a new scene.

Wrap-up – At the end of the workshop, we do some cool-down exercises, and finish with a group discussion. Participants recap what was learned and what we will take away from the workshop. Each person is encouraged to work on something he or she noticed is lacking from his or her performance or emotion control.

“Fantastic experience and will definitely do it again”

Our team developed strong bonds with each other after the session.  To this day, we still talk about the fun we had together and how impressed we were with each other’s hilarious moments and comfortable flowing improv conversations.  I’m sure that continual sessions would be great at helping more “withdrawn” people come out of their shells, and to help anyone in a management/communication role improve their abilities to work with others.

We all learned that the key to good communication skills is being yourself and not being afraid to show it. There’s no reason to hide!

Additionally:  PURE UNADULTERATED FUN!

- Taylor Battista, FreshBooks