This movie time was an opportunity for our iARATech team to build some great bonding experiences as a group, and it didn’t require a facilitator, worksheets, or icebreakers; it was simply a shared experience of sitting in a room, turning off your devices, and doing absolutely nothing productive. It is safe to say this was one of the top team-building events we’ve had this year.
Last week, we all sat down and watched Logged Out together!
We are sure many of you have heard of this movie, it tells a story of what happens when people are completely disconnected from technology and then challenged to find a new sense of purpose. It’s funny at times, it can be awkward at times, and it has a lot of quietly profound messages that will sneak up on you, especially since we are a digital team working in the digital space, and we often manage our client’s social media, generate leads, clean data, run campaigns, etc.
We could see that everyone recognised something in what we were seeing: a truth about screens and connections and what truly matters when you remove all the distractions and notifications. No one was discussing this during the movie, but you could see it.
At the end of the movie, we all went to lunch together. This is the moment when something special occurred, a moment that is difficult to put into a company update or a performance metric but ultimately has a huge impact on the culture of a team. Team members talked to each other, not about work, not about clients, not about deadlines or what is coming up in the week ahead, but rather about the movie, about what they found funny, about the parts of the movie that struck them in a different way than they anticipated, and about what they would do if they were really logged out for a week.
Our founders and co-founder were directly in the mix of everything going on, not in a separate area, not making a quick stop to check in, but right in the middle of the conversation, just like they are on the cricket field, or at birthday celebrations, or at any other time that leadership at iARATech is present. Lunch was longer than it ever has been and that slow pace and the feeling of being able to simply be together without having an agenda are extremely rare in today’s workplaces.
In today’s society, there is a silent idolisation of busyness, and taking a full lunch break can sometimes feel guilty, and stepping away from the screen for a whole afternoon can seem like you’re falling behind.
Logged Out, perhaps by design, perhaps simply perfect, helped counteract that for a couple of hours. It reminded the team of something important, the work is important, the clients are important, and the deadlines are important, but none of these aspects of work will sustain themselves without the people doing the work being replenished. They need to have laughter that isn’t based on a successful campaign, they need to have shared experiences that exist outside of deliverables, they need to be able to sit next to a fellow employee, watch something, and feel like they are more than just the person they were hired to be. That isn’t a distraction from the work, that is the fuel that makes the work possible. When teams play together, watch movies together, eat meals together, they begin to trust each other more, communicate with each other more honestly, and offer more kindness to each other on the tough days because they have seen each other on the good days. While the science may support this idea, you don’t need to rely on the science, just sit in a room with a group of people eating after a movie and notice how differently they look at each other, lighter, warmer, more human.
Logged Out was a movie about disengaging from the digital world so we could re-engage with the physical world, fittingly, for a team that spends every single day in the digital world, it ended up being the exact reminder we didn’t know we needed, we are already planning the next movie night.