Whether you’re leading an in-person project or an entirely remote company, fostering collaboration between your team members can feel like an impossible task. Maybe you’re reading this article because your team feels super disconnected right now? Maybe a synergy that once existed has been lost somewhere between deliverables, deadlines, and varied opinions? Perhaps that alignment was never fully there to begin with? 😭
The truth is, each member of your team brings something unique and essential to your THING’s success, or else they wouldn’t be there, right?! It might sound a bit unexpected, but frameworks like Astrology and Human Design can be used as workplace tools that offer insights into how individuals communicate, process information, and thrive in their work environment.
Too often, team building initiatives are a group effort, lacking a focus on each individual’s inherent skills and what they uniquely bring to that group, in favor of human knot-tying! Human Design provides illuminating insights into our unique characteristics. Remote team building activities like Human Design group workshops give team members the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of themselves while also learning how to work more effectively with their colleagues, ultimately empowering them to be part of a solution.
The Power of Understanding Human Design
So, what is Human Design? Human Design is a birthdate-based system of self-exploration that combines Astrology, the Chinese I Ching, the Jewish Kabbalah, and the Hindu Chakra system. By calculating information pulled from a person’s birth day, time, and location, a unique chart is cast that reveals insight into how the person shows up in the world—including at work! When teams are guided to explore their human design charts together, they are able to unlock vital information regarding their communication styles, strengths, challenges, and core values.
Uncovering all of this knowledge is extremely useful for self-reflection, guiding each person to be able to better understand how they operate in specific situations. Later, we’ll explore a case study from a Human Design Group Workshop that we facilitated for a vintage store in Woodstock, IL.
Deep Dive into Individual Charts: A Tailored Experience
If you’re looking for team building activities that aren’t generic, Human Design workshops are the perfect solution because they are inherently personalized. Even if two people share the same element within their birth chart, its placement in the context of the rest of their chart acts as a filter giving it unique meaning. Adding further context through the lens of your THING, industry, team size, and more factors can unlock even more meaning into each participant’s chart. At the same time, the knowledge gleaned from the participant’s birth chart is not limited to their professional role, as the information within is relevant to their personal relationships, career goals, personal mission, and life purpose—knowledge that contributes to overall employee development.
Learning about each team member’s key characteristics and how they interplay within a collective provides further knowledge for that team member, and the team as a whole.
Group workshops encourage conversations that focus on team members better understanding how they work together. For example, one team member might feel more empowered when they’re invited into tasks because they feel recognized for the value that they bring to that task, while another team member might feel more empowered if they let others know what they’re up to with daily updates, allowing the other members to respond in their own supportive way. This approach doesn’t focus on weaknesses; it highlights important strengths and inherent traits that, once named and processed through active listening, can support people in showing up more authentically, and thus with less friction.
Pinpointing Areas of Focus for Collaboration
Every team faces different challenges depending on factors like the skills of each team member, the company’s industry, and company goals. Just as it’s important to consider Human Design charts from a personalized lens for each team member, it’s also important to consider the reason why the workshop is needed in the first place.
A global, remote team might face team challenges due to physical distance. A generational brewery might face team challenges due to the team also being family members. By focusing on the current challenges each team faces, the group workshop can be more successful because each team member is considering their personal role in the potential solution. These understandings can help to foster a team rooted in empathy and compassion.
There is a seemingly endless amount of information inside of a Human Design birth chart. It’s important for a group facilitator to use their knowledge of Human Design to find the perfect combination of key elements to focus on for a group workshop. For example, certain planetary placements are more beneficial in readings about romantic relationships than they are in work relationships.
By combining an understanding of your team’s unique challenges, with an analysis of the information collected in the data gathering portion of the workshop, your facilitator can guide a group in a way that best suits your needs.
Learning More About Each Other: Stories and Connections as Remote Team Building Activities
One of the most important parts of these workshops is that they are collaborative. Each team member has the opportunity to share their own perspective, experience, and learning. The workshops provide a space for conversations to take place that might get deprioritized in a regular work day. Learning about why one colleague might see something as a challenge while another sees it as benefit, can help deepen understanding between how team members operate both in their personal and professional lives. This gives the entire team insight into better understanding each other as more than just someone they work with.
Of course, the workshops in no way encourage the breaking of boundaries between colleagues, in fact, they can strengthen them. It’s much easier for someone to know how to do something when they know why they need to do it. By understanding why a team member might make a decision a certain way, or why the company has a certain goal in place, people have more information to work with in order to respond appropriately.
Case Study: Transforming Team Dynamics Through Human Design
Our Human Design Workshop with fulfilled.—a Woodstock, IL vintage store—proved exactly how understanding team members on a deeper level can empower the team as a whole. Our initial goal was to help the fulfilled. team learn more about the ways each of their energies worked within the scope of their projects, tasks, and goals, as well as with their personal goals and interests.
Here are the steps we took to empower team fulfilled. via our Human Design Group Workshop:
- Inform Team – We sent out a one-pager about the experience to fulfilled.’s team members, outlining expectations and requirements. We also asked the team to submit their birth information into our Birth Chart Generator.
- Gather Data – We polled fulfilled.’s employees anonymously to gauge their level of knowledge around Human Design, their happiness level at work, their understanding of their personal skills and role at fulfilled., and their general feelings about their contribution to the company. We reviewed the teams birth charts and created an outline for the workshop based on the information in their charts and the anonymous poll.
- The Workshop – We brought our workshop to the team over a 2.5-hour virtual video session where we dove deep into each of their Human Design charts, taught them the basics of their design, and applied their design to the context of their personal passions outside of work as well as their regular contributions at fulfilled.
- Actionable Insights — We held a follow up call with fulfilled.’s founder, Mollie, to review the information that was gathered during the call and to determine action items she could experiment with, and assign to her team members to put their learning into practice.
- Deliver Resources – We provided Mollie with a PDF of notes, ideas, and a summary of the experience. We also personalized our Teams Notion Template for fulfilled. to help them keep track of their experiment.
The outcome? We prefer Mollie’s words over ours on this one:
“This was a great opportunity to set ego aside and learn to acknowledge each other as humans before workers. We all have different energy cycles and gifts. I think the most powerful part was learning what things my team could take on and fully own. It’s been so cool to see the freedom and peace that has brought them.” — Mollie Dunn | Founder | fulfilled.
Empowering Growth and Connection
Human Design group workshops offer visionary leaders a way to reignite their teams. Giving people the opportunity to see themselves from a new perspective and showing them ways they can work better with their teammates, empowers them to figure out how they can be part of a solution to team challenges in their own authentic way.
If solving your THING’s current problems, empowering your team, and contributing to each member’s personal development sounds like something you’re into (duh), let us help you personalize a workshop based on your current needs!
Let’s talk!
