by Redwan Hamzah  •   July 24, 2022

It has been a tumultuous two years, and as with most other businesses, we were affected in ways that both tested us and served as inspiration to discover new ways of delivering our vision as a company to the masses at large. In this article we take time to reflect on the past two years, as we start looking towards the future.

At the start of the pandemic, we were struck with the reality that many of our in-person programmes could no longer be held – from our JamLah activities, our Insyncsg Podcast, to our music lessons… not to mention our team-building programmes.

We did what seemed to be the only solution and pivoted: we created an e-Songwriter programme where participants would be going through a sliver of what our SongCreator programme had to offer, all from the convenience (or depending on how you look at it, restriction) of their living rooms. In that time period, we ran many of such programmes at different phases of the lockdown: in the beginning it was for people who were looking for a way to feel connected still with society while having to stay at home, and later on it became a way for companies to foster team spirit in spite of not being able to see each other face to face. We taught our music lessons online, with our team of instructors hastening their understanding of e-conferencing software and maximizing the aural and lesson teaching possibilities of such platforms.

It is now 2022, and the world is starting to rove around the wheels of existence again as she starts looking back at COVID-19 being endemic, with hybrid modes of working and service delivery finding its place in a renewed state of understanding around how society can function.

Insyncsg started the year off strong, being able to resume in-person music lessons and also holding a team-building event at our new venue partner, Hard Rock Cafe Singapore.

We played host to an upper-management team that flew in specifically to Singapore to have a week-long event of meetings and bonding sessions to kickstart the return of normalcy, to reignite spirits fatigued by a longer-than-expected pandemic.

It was such a memorable day that, as I look back upon it, was filled with many moments of magic:

Participants shared how at first they were perhaps not looking forward to yet another team building activity, and were reluctant to take part. But from the get-go, as introductions played out, rhythm warm-ups conducted and the flow of time executed that involved them learning how to play instruments for the first time – they were hooked.

I remember how one participant mentioned that when he realized that everyone had a part to play in the success of the band playing through the song they were learning – he took it a lot more seriously. This action had the complex net result of making him both play his role as best as he could as well as have exponentially more fun as he started to choose to believe in the process that would result in the entire group playing as a band for the first time.

The debrief was also such a point of joy in the day, as the participants were split up into groups to reflect on the day’s activities through the lens of three focus questions. In what seemed like an outpouring of both pandemic frustration and visionary thinking, the groups shared with each other both points of learning and their hopes for the future as they were led through this activity in a concise, deliberate and also free-flowing manner.

In a vision of the future, we believe that the need for team building is as high a need as ever. A recent Gallup study found that close work relationships boost employee satisfaction by 50%, while people with a self-described best friend at work are seven times more likely to be fully engaged at work.

Another Gallup study reported that engaged companies consistently outperform their competition when it comes to things like profit, productivity and turnover. It does make sense – the closer you are to your co-workers, the happier you’ll be and the more likely you are to want to sacrifice discretionary time in order to help a collective succeed. Team building activities for adults in the workplace of today is a surefire way to achieve such outcomes.

In conclusion, we at Insyncsg believe in the power of team building activities in Singapore to foster and refresh interpersonal relationships within companies, and in the use of music to create such moments of kinship and heighten levels of communication amongst employees. We conduct indoor team building activities  developed from the ground up to achieve targeted outcomes that are decided collaboratively with you, so get in touch with us to arrange your next corporate team building.