Teambuilding through telegram stickers — engaging millennials at work
Communication in the workplace has shifted from emails to Whatsapp and from Whatsapp to telegram (for those of us with no corporate funds for SLACK). With the convenience of adding bots and the range of stickers to express emotions, telegram has slowly taken over as the communication tool of choice for the younger folks at work. (There’s also the added advantage of not having your bosses in the chatgroup since most of them are still using Whatsapp)
The range of stickers found in the telegram is simply amazing, but I think nothing beats having stickers of you and your team mates because of the shared inside jokes and control over the expression of emotions. So far the stickers have proven to be a hit with requests to add more expressions and more team members from the larger team asking to participate. Creation of something as simple as stickers helps to bring folks together.
So how was this done? Let’s first look at the end results (http://bit.ly/telstickers)
The stickers help to capture the expressions and commonly used phrases we associated with the individuals. This helped to create a personal element to the conversations and insert a comical element to the quirks of the team. I felt that this helped in breaking down the walls further for a rather high performing team.
The tools that I used:
- Pick a random jpg to png converter on your phone (iOS defaults the pictures as jpg format). It should preferably have the option to crop into squares
- Downsize the png to 512 X 512
I found this site to be rather useful: https://www.garyshood.com/imageconvert/ - And then headover to stickerbot on telegram (https://telegram.me/stickers)
- Enter /newpack
- Most importantly, you need to upload the png as files (telegram default uploads as photos)
- Insert emoji of choice 💁🏻♂️
Voila! That’s it
For folks looking to find ways to engage your younger team members this could be a good start (albeit rather time consuming effort). I hope you will have as much fun as our team as we make fun of ourselves :)
