Reinventing Social During the Pandemic

No company can truly claim to have a culture without investing in its social infrastructure. To drive employees to success, we believe that maintaining a friendly atmosphere is best. Employees that enjoy working with their coworkers are more likely to be focused and productive during their work hours. To learn more about how our London Office reinvented their social culture during the pandemic, we spoke with Sarah Townsend, Delta Capita’s Senior EA and Office Manager.

The social side to our culture is something I am heavily involved in. I take pride in ensuring there is always an element of fun available for my colleagues.

For example, one of the regular social activities, prior to March 2020, was the congregation of employees in our London kitchen area. To keep things relaxed, I kept the time for 4 PM on Friday. It was a great way to end the week by catching up with some colleagues and getting to know others you do not work so closely with. Some weeks we would feature music and even dancing.

Delta Capita has always been dedicated to creating a cohesive social environment so when we went into lockdown, we wanted to keep the social side alive. The social committee jumped on a Zoom to discuss the best way to reinvent our social gatherings and came up with the idea of ‘Close the Week’.

The idea was to bring the team together via Zoom to enjoy a selection of music by screen sharing Spotify. To test our new teambuilding activity, we decided to just try it for one week. When it was a great success, we decided to do it on a weekly basis, and drive it globally, with several employees taking the role of host / DJ.

Each week we would have a new theme of music, ask our colleagues to request their favourite tracks, and tell us about the story behind their chosen track. Some weeks we would have a quiz on the chosen theme which created some friendly competition. Colleagues would regularly send jokes and other fun icebreakers using the chat functionality.

We successfully hosted ‘Close the Week’ for 18-months and it really was a great opportunity to get to know our colleagues based in other office locations but also our new colleagues as they joined Delta Capita. We soon found ourselves with an internal theme song, Buena Sera by Louis Prima, which then became our closing song each week.

Now, we have returned to our London office, so our virtual ‘Close the Week’ has come to an end. But we look forward to continuing the socialising in person. As everyone still has access to the playlists. I am sure they will be played in the office over the coming months. See a small selection of some of our favourites below.

Ready to join our dynamic team and help us reinvent the workplace? We’re always looking for fresh talent. Check out our vacancies to apply.