How to Engage Remote Teams: Virtual Activities and Practical Ideas with Lilia Joseph

How do you keep a distributed team connected when colleagues work across countries, offices and time zones? Global HR professional Lilia Joseph shares activities she used with her team, ways to include people who can be overlooked, and practical advice for planning engagement sessions that people want to join.

Guest: Lilia Joseph · Global HR professional and Program Chair, HR Executive Network of Greater St. Louis

Host: Ksenia Izotova · Co-Founder and Director of Studies at UnifyHub

Lilia Joseph is a global HR professional and Program Chair for the HR Executive Network of Greater St. Louis. She has worked with teams across several countries, focusing on employee engagement, people operations and cross-cultural communication. For nearly five years, she designed and ran a remote engagement programme for a distributed team spanning the United States, Latin America and Europe.

Lilia’s approach to remote team engagement is to include every location, ask employees what they actually want to join and create a consistent rhythm rather than relying on occasional events. In this episode, she shares formats she used with distributed teams across the US, Latin America and Europe, including scavenger hunts, company trivia and impromptu presentations.

Lilia describes isolation as a problem of access: people can be outside the flow of information, invitations and opportunities even when they belong to the same company. She recalls how a small office with one or two colleagues could be overlooked beside larger locations with 20, 30 or 40 employees. Team members whose roles involve fewer meetings may also have fewer natural chances to connect.

For HR, the practical question is whether company-wide activity reaches every location and role, not only the largest office or the people already visible in meetings.

Lilia’s view is that preferences differ from person to person. Some employees value an office, while others prefer to remain remote. Caring responsibilities and the flexibility people need can shape that choice. Ask employees what works for them rather than inferring a preference from nationality or culture.

Time zones make shared social events harder to schedule. Lilia recommends keeping locations and working hours in view, looking for a workable midpoint, and considering repeat or split sessions. Recordings can help people who cannot attend live, while clear boundaries protect colleagues from being asked to join outside their working hours.

Lilia recalls in-house scavenger hunts, company trivia, photo-guessing games and an impromptu PowerPoint challenge. She also describes facilitator-led DISC workshops as a way to start conversations about working preferences. These are examples from her programme; the episode does not establish that one format suits every team.

In Lilia’s programme, attendance could be optional while participants were expected to have cameras on. Treat those as her programme’s choices, not a general recommendation.

Lilia suggests learning what different colleagues enjoy, using short check-ins or game formats, and making an activity feel relevant to the people invited. She gives examples of small rewards and online puzzles that do not require everyone to speak. She also describes directly inviting quieter colleagues into conversation. Present these as her experience, and avoid implying that introverted colleagues should be pressured to participate.

Start by learning about the audience. Lilia describes using questionnaires to ask which topics interested employees, then building a pool of speakers, coaches and vendors she could draw on when time was short. She also recommends planning around dates that matter to the team, collecting feedback and learning from events that did not go as expected.

In-house activities still take preparation and may need technical support or a facilitator. Lilia describes both self-run and vendor-led formats; the choice depends on the activity, team and available capacity.

Lilia says she ran sessions twice a month over nearly five years. The schedule took effort, but colleagues came to expect and appreciate the regularity. Her example suggests choosing a rhythm the team can sustain and using feedback to decide whether it is helping people connect.

Ksenia notes that regular classes can be easier to attend when they are part of the working week, while optional speaking clubs may be harder to sustain. There is no universal format: plan around workload, motivation and the communication employees need to do in their roles.

Ksenia Izotova: Welcome to HR Unwritten by Unifyhub, a podcast about what really happens at work when the handbook stops being useful. We talk with HR leaders, founders and people professionals about leadership, careers, AI, workplace culture and the decisions that really make it into official policies. Today, I am joined by Lilia Joseph, a global HR professional and program chair for the HR Executive Network of Greater St. Louis. We are talking about keeping remote teams connected. Lilia, welcome. How has remote work changed the way you personally work? When did you start remote work?

Lilia Joseph: I started remote work like the majority of people I think in the world during COVID pandemic. I was working as HR for a local nonprofit, but also was managing a migration project here in St. Louis. And basically it allowed a lot of flexibility. So that was a big plus. I had young children at that time and it was much easier to do remote work. And then I never went back to the office. I did have a job with a hybrid kind of schedule. But then my latest role was completely remote. And I really enjoyed the flexibility, the freedom. And I also find myself actually more productive working remotely.

Ksenia Izotova: So if we evaluate your effectiveness, what do you do better? And what may be worse when working from home comparing to the office work?

Lilia Joseph: I definitely feel more productive. Why? Because I do not have them around me to distract me. So I'm a people person. I love working with people. I choose this career because I enjoy working with people. And one of the downsides in the office is that it could be upside. You get to connect with people that downside your tasks or obligations may not get done because you end up spending all your time socializing. So one of the things that remote work allowed me to completing all the assigned tasks on time, having some accountability, more accountability to myself, more structure, less distractions. And that's upside.

In my previous role, I was able to travel the world and work from different offices across the globe. So that was really exciting for me. And I was looking forward to these trips. I do love working remotely, but I also love to have the opportunity to connect with my colleagues across the globe in person. Definitely if you work completely remotely and never get to see anyone in person, I think that could get pretty lonely. I would say.

Ksenia Izotova: Do you see a pattern that there is a difference in various cultures when they work remotely? For example, does it depend on a person or it may depend on the culture?

Lilia Joseph: It's sort of doesn't depend on the culture. I think it truly depends on the person during my years interviewing and hiring people. I always ask a person, are they comfortable with hybrid, remote or in person? And some people just straight up will tell you, I don't want to work from home. I don't really like it. I feel lonely. I need to go to the office. And some people say, I absolutely take my home office. And it really just depends on a person, number one. And number two, it depends on their personal circumstances also because they may have some obligations that they need to take care of. Some office jobs could be less flexible and the schedule may not work out and remote work allows you to kind of step away from the desk and take care of your business, whatever it is. And so I truly don't see, despite that there are a lot of cultural differences between communal cultures and more individualistic like United States or communal like Mexico or some Asian cultures. I do see that it really, it really depends on a particular person.

Ksenia Izotova: What are the tips to work effectively within several time zones?

Lilia Joseph: I would say that when you work remotely, you should be able to have some sort of system structure without this system or structure that you create for yourself. It would be pretty difficult to operate. You have to be somewhat organized. Second of all, there is a lot of resources and apps and things available that allow you to have widgets on your home screen with time zones. You need to know where your coworkers are. You need to keep it in front of you and you need to be mindful of how you schedule the meetings and what kind of meetings you are scheduling.

And there's definitely a lot of challenges in my previous role. We were distributed across different time zones and a lot of times, some happy hours that we wanted to schedule, you know, they would fall on the morning in one office and the evening in another. So you have to kind of balance and kind of find a midpoint or some trainings or things like that. And sometimes you have to do a series of meetings like part one, part two or, you know, copy things and or record them and share recording. So there's a lot of different ways that you can stay in touch, but I don't think it's impossible. I think it just takes some adjustment on both sides.

And I think if you work with a distributed team, you have to always remember to be flexible and that may mean that you have to adjust your hours. I think that if you are not willing to wake up a little bit earlier, stay a little bit later, just for important meeting, perhaps this job is not for you. I have met people that said, well, I'm not willing to flex my schedule to wake up an hour early. But I think that the companies with distributed teams appreciate the flexibility of their employees that are willing to kind of bend their schedules a little bit.

But I also understand that for the sake of the boundaries, some people may say, these are my work hours and I'm not going outside of them.

Ksenia Izotova: Yeah, I can totally relate to that. What else tends to kill motivation in a remote team? Yeah.

Lilia Joseph: Sometimes company opens an office in, say, a country and they only have like one or two people there and where in other places they may have 30, 20, 40 people. And sometimes these folks, smaller hubs, they tend to feel a little bit in between. I don't want to say abandoned, but they may not be engaged because they don't fall under the time zone of one part and they don't fall under the time zone on another part. And then we feel like, well, no one's inviting me to events or I don't know, you know, who to talk to this time zone of this time zone.

So this happens and it happens a lot. And I've seen that in some Latin countries when I was hiring and people are reporting, well, they opened an office in Latin, but you know, nobody is taking care of us. You know, nobody's engaging us. So it comes to conversation to engagement. It's important to make sure that everyone is invited. Everyone has shared information. Everyone has access to all the different opportunities that exist in the company, including engagement opportunities or information that information is flowing freely and is available because one of the things is definitely that I've seen that people can feel isolated in those smaller hubs or while working remotely.

And if their job doesn't involve a lot of meetings, if they're more maybe introverted or they do intellectual work, which requires a lot of independent research or work or data, believe it or not, they still crave human connection. So creating these opportunities for human connection, whether it's a small engagement and formal, I don't know, quick chats or more group engagements or some sort of games or those little things, they're like little bricks, right, in the motivation. So what kills motivation is isolation and neglect of engaging everyone, wherever they are.

Ksenia Izotova: Let's dive in a little deeper and discuss what kind of activities in your practice are really effective. Maybe some not really standard ones, but very helpful to engage a remote team.

Lilia Joseph: Yes, absolutely. So when I started my role as a global HR manager, I had people that were located in different parts of the world including US, Latin America, Europe, and my job was to keep them motivated, keep them engaged. And that involved hosting some sort of workshops or opportunities to share or, I don't know, we call them Friday HR meetings. So every two weeks, that involved a lot of creative ideas, brainstorming, right? So since I've never really done remote engagement before this job, I dove right into research.

I found a variety of different vendors that do team buildings. But I also looked at it from the team's perspective. I definitely ask them for their opinion, what kind of topics are interesting to them, whether it's educational workshops on financial literacy, or they want to do something fun, like solving murder mysteries, or, you know, I definitely did a lot of soul searching and questionnaires. And every workshop and engagement is not going to be perfect. But over the years, I've done a variety of different things from Lego building workshops to cocktail classes, tarot card readers, costume contests.

I don't know, we traveled cities and played a variety of games. I mean, virtual traveling. We did tours of Milano online. We did a photography workshop, cell phone photography workshops. You name it. We did for mental health months of May. Every year, I invited a professional psychotherapist to answer any questions or prevent burnout. For Halloween we did obviously virtual costume contests, for Christmas we had to do a virtual Christmas party. Yeah. In the beginning, it sounds kind of lame, like, OK, a virtual Christmas party doesn't sound like fun.

But for that one person that is somewhere remotely, this is their chance to connect to their team. Actually, that is very important, right? So I think in my case, I just genuinely wanted everyone to feel important. The policy was the camera is always on. So there was no off camera type of workshops where a person could be doing something else, no, absolutely required complete engagement, complete participation. They were not mandatory. So if you didn't want to come, you didn't have to. But typically people always came, we played, of course, we provided rewards for people like if you won the game, you get a prize, like a gift card or something like that.

Ksenia Izotova: Which ones were the most successful? I'm sure that the community would like to listen to some ideas because the festive season is coming up. And people are searching, circulating for ideas what to do with the team, how to celebrate end of year and so on. So what were the really the most successful events that you can remember and why they were successful?

Lilia Joseph: I've used a variety of vendors that cost money. Obviously, the company had a budget for this type of engagement and a lot of them were really, really fun. But the most fun that I remember having were simple events like scavenger hunt, bring something that's made of metal or show your mug or like when you give a team a list of tasks, show something red and you have to run and find something red in your kitchen or show some sort of diploma, you know, like simple stuff like that. That's a very basic example.

The second one that I remember was really funny. It's the impromptu PowerPoint challenge. So the idea is presenting a team with a PowerPoint presentation that consists of random slides. And the trick is, and you split them in teams if you have a bigger group. And the trick is that they have to do a proper PowerPoint presentation with the slides that they haven't seen before. So how it works is one person is shown a slide, say that's a car. They have to kind of begin the story of the presentation. What about this car? Are we selling this car? Are we telling a story about this car? And then they say a few sentences and another person and their team goes, but they have a different slide and they could be an apple or a mug.

And the trick is that they get the opportunity to be creative, think on the spot, like getting a little bit outside of their comfort zone, right? And also work as a team. So it kind of exercises a lot of different skills and they learn something new about themselves. And the audience learned something new about them as well.

What else we've done? Any company can do a company trivia, so you can come up with questions about your company and do a trivia that also shows a simple question like what are the company values? Sometimes people don't remember the company values and you get to see also who remembers what or we took our corporate events pictures, for example, and we took a random photo from 2019. And there's some sort of game that we did a corporate event or a picture of a place. And we're asking people, what do you think we were doing? And that's an opportunity for people to guess, but also tell the newer people, oh, we've done this before. Look how many cool events we've done and tell them about the company a little bit and finding out a little bit more about each other as well.

We’ve done a DISC workshop for those in coaching space and HR space. DISC system is when you determine you send a test prior to the workshop to your employees. And we invited a professional coach, DISC certified facilitator, who could collect the results of this test and identify everyone's personality based on DISC, put it together in a visual and visualize the team. And after describing different types of DISC personalities, also put the coworkers on the map, which is usually very, very transformation of the team because they get to know each other's style of managing or leading or what things work for them, what things don't work for them.

And typically that workshop produces very, very interesting conversations. It can also be split into different parts. If there's not enough time for one, typically my workshops are like one hour long. You can always make it longer and discuss different ways in part two how to work together. If somebody is a high personality and the person is a C.

So I like to spice it up and throw different kinds of activities. My team never knew what is next. They never knew whether it was in person because I organized in person, get together and offline. It was always, it was always full of secrets and unexpected twists and turns.

Ksenia Izotova: So it was always a surprise.

Lilia Joseph: I tried to keep as many details unless it involved a test like if you had to take a test in advance. But typically, typically I did not like to open all my cards.

Ksenia Izotova: A quick note from Unifyhub. A language isn't the whole story when it comes to remote engagement. But it can make it harder to speak up at work. Unifyhub is a corporate language learning platform for tech teams. We combine assessment, role-specific programs, platform access, live practice with international educators and progress reporting for HR and L&D. The learning is built around real work, from meetings and written updates to feedback and client conversations. You'll find more in the show notes.

Have you ever met resistance and how did you navigate it during the event?

Lilia Joseph: The only time resistance I remember would be connected with a person's personal situation. So I'm saying they were having a bad day. I had a very trusting relationship with my team and I knew that if they don't have to come, if they don't feel like it. So it was never like you have to, you must come, come. If you have free time, they're usually in the Friday afternoon, Friday afternoon, tends to wind down a little bit and just come hang out. Some sessions would literally be like, just come hang out. Let's chat.

And yeah, so I don't remember any resistance. I do remember of course, like everyone, you invite a speaker and then you are kind of disappointed. I remember I had a couple of those when the speaker would have this wonderful profile and they present themselves. They sell themselves really well and then anybody who deals with vendors probably went through it and then they show up and their presentation is off or they're very monotonous. They don't catch the audience. They're not very engaging and you're thinking, oh my God, I'm just gonna get pinned to your chair.

I just wanna take over now. I could do it. I'm not an expert on this topic, but I will take over now. I will do this better.

Ksenia Izotova: So you've had these situations.

Lilia Joseph: I've had a couple of them because yeah, I've been doing this for a while. So almost five years and I've had a couple of speakers where I'm like, hmm, I'm questioning. Yeah, I'm questioning the qualifications a little bit. Sometimes it's not even qualification. It's the delivery. They may know that they just not delivering it where people like, okay, I learned something new. I never had a situation I had to interrupt or anything like that.

So they would complete the workshop and I would ask for feedback. So one of the things when you do online events, you always wanna have open conversation with your team. How was it? So you know how to do it again or not. And with all my successful speakers, I invited the speakers, again, the ones that received really high ratings and I'm really happy I did. They were always welcome back. And the ones that didn't do so well, of course the team also was quick to comment that I felt like it was a waste of time. I mean, some team members were pretty direct with me and I always appreciate the feedback, whatever it is. And I can just improve every time.

Ksenia Izotova: Do you always rehearse or listen to a sneak peek of the event before you organize it or it's not necessary? What would you recommend?

Lilia Joseph: There is a certain amount of risk always involved. When you deal with a professional team building company, they get it. They, you know, it's their business. They come on time, their technology works. They always have a backup somebody on the tech side. They are very professional in terms of setting up Zoom links that making sure everything works and they have professional actors in a lot of their games. So that helps also. I'm never worried about those type of workshops. The ones that I have done myself, of course, I had, you know, bloopers like technology failed me or I couldn't share the screen or something wasn't working. So that happened before.

So those big companies, they typically have sneak peeks on their web. They have some mini recordings and to advertise to market their activities, like if it's a murder mystery game or a traveling game or some sort of adventures, they actually make stories out of it and they have them on the website and you can go and you can click.

For the ones that were complete experiments from my side, the ones that I just found interesting and it was a complete risk. So if I was running them myself, I would have no sneak peek. I would just do it and hope for the best, do my best.

Ksenia Izotova: So there's always a part of the team that never shows up for these types of things. So how do you keep them engaged?

Lilia Joseph: Each company, as far as I know, implements their own reward system. And as we know, people are motivated by different things. Some people are motivated by praise. Some people are more materially motivated. So if you're materially motivated and if you know that if you show up, I mean, it sounds a little bit cynical, but if you show up and you participate in a game or some sort of easy discussion and you can get a prize, even if it's a gift card to Amazon or something like that, that might be enough for them to go and be like, okay, I get a gift card, now I have a lunch.

I can buy lunch or I can buy something from Amazon. So it just really comes down to really, really knowing your audience. Even the people that are typically not engaged tend to be introverted. There's a way to, if you know them, there's a way to motivate them by, again, material reward, perhaps mixing it up a bit and if they're not into, I don't know, dressing up for Halloween or tarot card reading or anything, they like video games. A lot of people that work in IT, they like video games. So we create or I find a vendor that does some sort of a game, an online game for a team that is replicating, I don't know, one of the video games that everyone knows and then you come in and you don't even have to talk.

You just, you join by the link and you play, whether it's solving a puzzle or, I don't know, some sort of riddle or anything. I tried to create, of course, opportunities for people to talk. I did not, I do not remember having workshops where people didn't have to talk. But I think it comes to the trust and it comes to just having very open, and trusting relationship with your team where they know that, okay, I'm gonna come see Lili on this workshop, I know she wants to connect with me. She's really interested in me.

So it's not just throwing something down your way, the team here, just come and do this. It's more like, hey, I've got something special for you. You have to drum up some interest. You have to sell it a little bit and you have to keep the intrigue. At least that work worked for me. So people would just come out of curiosity. Even if they're like, okay, well, this wasn't worth attending, but they were curious about it.

Ksenia Izotova: I really like it.

Lilia Joseph: Yeah, the same works for in-person events, right? They never knew, for corporate events, they never knew what's coming. But because I kept it very secretive, but also give a little bit of information here and there but not complete information, they would just come because they're like, oh, what's next? What's next? So I think down the years, they just learned to expect that there's gonna be something unexpected. So I don't remember anyone who would be like ignoring this type of workshop.

You have to be the right person for it. I realized that this is not an easy task and it actually takes a team, especially if you have huge teams. It's really something that takes effort, creativity, and time, and a special kind of person. You have to have facilitators. You have to have tech backup. It's not easy.

Ksenia Izotova: But what I really liked is leveraging curiosity. That's for sure something that works, allowing people to talk about themselves, right? I really liked your DISC example. It's again about curiosity, curiosity learning something new about yourself and about your colleagues. And these are the secret keys, the secret takeaways for sure.

Lilia Joseph: Okay, even the most introverted person, there's a way to get them out talking about themselves. And the way I did it, it's a little bit like a teacher in the classroom. Yes, maybe it's cringy for some people, but we would come to some of these workshops and I would have days, trust me, where I have no idea what to do. I'm just gonna show up and we're just gonna talk about, I don't know, not current events, but Olympic games or something. And I would just come up with certain questions, right? Or I would just say, let's give each other a compliment. And everyone has to go around and pick a person on Zoom who they wanna give a compliment to. Obviously it has to be a work-related compliment, it has to be appropriate.

So simple stuff like this will get even the person that doesn't like to talk, they would be kind of forced to talk, to be honest. Because you're there, your camera is on, someone called you out, they give you a compliment, you give somebody a compliment, or I would be like, okay guys, how's your week going? Or Tom, hypothetically, how's your week going? If there is a quiet space, I would fill it. Yes, it takes a lot of energy, but I felt like it was my job and genuinely cared about the team.

So combining the point that everyone likes to talk about themselves and they feel that genuine interest that creates that magic that you need during these online sessions. One of the coworkers that no longer worked at the company, and we're still in touch, he warmly remembers and texts me sometimes, he says, I remember these sessions, he worked exclusively remotely, he remembers them very warmly, it still feels like it was a lot of value for him. And he's the person on the backseat in the corner who doesn't like to talk. He felt like it was actually, it allowed him to learn about everyone else and talk about himself. So I was doing something, right?

Ksenia Izotova: Yes, it's a field of experiments. You have to experiment, you have to do something all the time, right?

Lilia Joseph: It's a skill, it's a skill. And you know this, Ksenia, you do this all the time. I mean, you engage people, right? You fill in the pauses and the gaps.

Ksenia Izotova: You've mentioned a list of activities that you've already done, it's a super long list. And some of them are very intriguing. And what would you like to try next?

Lilia Joseph: I think food activities are always trending. That's the one thing that I haven't done. I'll tell you why, because some of the folks that were joining from the office, so there was no setup. And I ran into some difficulties, shipping things, you know, because everyone has to have the same kind of kit, for instance, where they open it together, and they do it and they have to have access to certain supplies and certain tools. So that is the one we didn't do online. Now, we've done a lot of those offline.

We've cooked together a team, and there are corporate events, so we made a ton of stuff. I know that if you go to any of the websites for team-building companies, the food events are always good, especially like ethnic food. People trying something they've never tried before. Let's make, I don't know, get a global team, get a little cooking hummus together, or, I don't know, chicken tikka masala or something like that. Or boba tea, I know boba tea is popular.

I also really enjoyed this type of travel experience together. I know what's trendy is always like visiting, I don't know, Antarctica with a guide. It's a virtual guide, but you hire them, and you connect at a certain time, everyone, and the guide is walking around, say, Antarctica, South Africa, and the Savannah with animals, or some exotic destination that nobody has been yet. And they talk about the place, and people can get a feel and ask questions, and I know it's virtual, but it's still kinda cool, I think.

And then, of course, the number three trending experience, I think it's, again, comes down to learning, probably learning skills, vocal coach, like, I don't know, teaching people how to sing together, I mean, not just talking karaoke, but actually like professional vocal coach.

We have done something in person, we've all learned how to play violin, and that was really cool experience. But in remote setting, I think that would be more difficult because you would have to ship a violin or a musical instrument to everyone, but something like singing could work, or people learning together some sort of craft, I don't know, from drawing together to knitting or anything that people can do with their hands.

Yeah, so I see three things. First, trend is food. It hasn't gone away. It's been trendy since COVID.
Second is learning together. And third, what did I say? Music or some sort of a creative type of thing where you create something together. And third is kind of more crafty type of stuff.

Ksenia Izotova: That's a bunch of ideas, and something that I would personally like to try is definitely singing together. I think it's a great connection between the team. We don't have a big team, but singing together would definitely connect because music is always about mood. It's about bringing people together, connecting.

Lilia Joseph: Now, for that to learn together, obviously people have to have the same level of language and motivation to learn. And that's hard, you have to have the context, right? But having a group at your job where you learn together a language, I think that's amazing just to get a book club. What also makes it really strong case is consistency, right? So I was doing meetings twice a month. That's a lot of pressure, right? You have to constantly have ideas, constantly, constantly have ideas. And people learn to kind of expect it and appreciate it and look forward to it.

So if somebody feels a little bit lonely and isolated and they know that at least twice a month, I get to see my coworkers if I don't see them before or my HR person or my people. So that's also very important when you do team engagement. I think it's consistency because if you throw something once in six months and then nothing happens after that and you don't collect feedback, nothing, it doesn't feel like you commit to it, right? So you have to be committed.

Ksenia Izotova: I agree about regularity that it needs to be very stable. Twice a month, it's wonderful. There are regular language learning sessions when there is a group and regular classes and they are kind of mandatory. And there is a speaking club in the company. It's very optional. You can come when you have time and so on. And the problem with the optional activities is always not only engagement, but it is attendance. So I can rather work instead.

So there needs to be a balance and we're still working on that. If there is an HR watching us right now willing to organize an in-house event by themselves without a vendor, what are the most important factors they need to consider?

Lilia Joseph: Number one, the most important, knowing your audience. What works for one audience will not work for every single audience. Obviously common sense, but perhaps some people find it surprising. Not everybody's into sports. If you pick an activity that only caters to one particular group, you may not be successful, right? Or if you pick trivia questions that are also like sport or like moving to a particular period or video game related, no, if you have especially a very diverse team, you have to find some sort of common ground.

And then number two is doing research. Once you know your audience, you can also do some questionnaires. I've done some Slack questionnaires on like what topics are interested. I put a list of topics. They put pluses and say, okay, I'm interested in finance investment. Okay, I now have to invite a financial coach, right? Things like that, time management, conflict resolution. I mean, there's so many topics. What I did is having a pool of resources. So that involves a network of coaches, speakers, which of course you don't get overnight, but you have to do your research and you have a list of proven vendors, maybe some comments after, you know, whether they were good, not good, whether you would use them again, team building companies.

So you have sort of a wallet, I don't know, a purse of different resources to pull from. So that always helps because guess what? Life gets busy, you'll get busy. And then you're like, okay, I can't dedicate this week. So much time to this, but I have this list of people that might be available. So number three, what I did is I kept it seasonal. Don't forget about certain holidays and parties and put some things that are non-negotiable on the calendar. So say you're in, I don't know, New Year's Christmas season. Not everybody celebrates Christmas, but you can call it a holiday party and you know you're gonna have it. This month you're gonna have some sort of online holiday party.

I know May is Mental Health Month. I know I'm gonna have a speaker there. I know there's an Olympic Games going on. Oh, cool, it would be cool to make an Olympic Games themed event, right? So being prepared and having those resources is important. Watch, observe, monitor and ask for feedback. Exercise a high level of emotional intelligence to not put something on people that clearly, you know, didn't work, ask and receive feedback with grace and learn from your own mistakes. And I think four is, you know, maintaining a sense of humor that everybody fails at this.

This is a tough job. Like I said, it's not easy. And admit when things didn't go well and just move on and keep that light and trusting relationship with your team so they keep coming back to you events. Even if this event was not the best, when you say it's a, I prepared something very special for you so they can come next time. So those would be my tips, I think.

Ksenia Izotova: It's more like the last one because a failed event can also be something uniting.

Lilia Joseph: Yes, we all just laugh at it. You know?

Ksenia Izotova: Yeah, a difficult event to go through. Yeah, we all had it. We had this experience. I think it was 10 years ago. We had a horrible cooking corporate event. It was in person. And the cook was very grumpy and he was in a bad mood and it was just horrible. But yeah, we laughed at it and had a very good time, had a lot of prosecco, cooked something. And in the end of the day, it was one of the best corporate parties.

Lilia Joseph: Be ready, keep your mind open and be ready to experiment.

Ksenia Izotova: But in the moment, I wanted it to be absolutely perfect and it was absolutely the worst-case scenario.

Lilia Joseph: But people ate the food, right? The food was good.

Ksenia Izotova: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for being the guest. It's been an amazing experience.

Lilia Joseph: I'm trying to be authentic, right? This is not rehearsed. Just sharing basically what I've gone through and have a lot of empathy for other HR folks that are in the same boat or were or will be. And yeah, good luck to everyone.

Ksenia Izotova: Thanks for listening to HR Unwritten by Unifyhub. You will find the full transcript, key takeaways and related resources at unifyhub.eu/podcast.

UnifyHub is a Corporate Language Learning Platform for Tech Teams.

We help international IT and technology teams develop the English they use at work through employee assessment, role-specific programmes, platform-based learning, live training with international educators and progress reporting for HR and L&D.

Programmes are built around real workplace communication, including meetings, technical discussions, client conversations, written updates, presentations and feedback.

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