Team Radio

What it is

Each team devises and records its own radio programme: running order, presenting, music, adverts, guests. The content is the company’s own, from internal news to products. Who presents, who picks the music and who keeps time is for the teams to decide, and at the end a panel can choose the best show.

On air

Creative team building formats now touch every corner of culture. Music, art, cinema, dance, television quizzes: we’ve done practically all of it. So where do you find something new? Team Radio, a company radio station used to exercise a team and improve the way it communicates, effectively and informally at once.

Team Radio: how does it run?

The activity starts from the premise, obviously a fiction, that you want to launch your own radio station. With shows of every kind: current affairs, music, features, news bulletins. Each team has to devise and produce its own programme. The thread running through it is always the company: the shows carry the latest company news, adverts for products, updates on the new ‘characters’ who have joined, and so on. There’s room for comedy and variety too. Guests, star turns, anecdotes and sketches follow one another. We can also produce a video to go with it, exactly as in Movie Making.

Everyone contributes to their team using everything they’ve got, and above all the parts that don’t get an airing in an ordinary working day. Somebody turns out to be a remarkable DJ who can find the track that lands; somebody else becomes the narrating voice that holds the audience’s attention on every word; somebody else runs the running order, keeping an eye on the clock and organising the work. Team Radio makes it possible for each person to contribute to the shared result according to what they’re actually good at. And then there’s the competition between teams: each one pitches its own show for the schedule, and a panel can be brought in to choose the best.

What a radio team building gives you

Do you know what’s particular about working in radio? It demands serious concentration and serious respect for timings.

Radio always works at speed, organising the talking, the music and the shows second by second. There’s room for improvisation, true, but only on top of a plan made beforehand. However much it seems that presenters are improvising their lines and their reactions all the way through, everything they do is planned.

For a show to come off, then, it matters enormously to keep control of everything that happens and leave nothing to chance. Time management, resource management, working under a clock, dividing up the jobs: they all get used in the same two hours. The day after, the recording is on the company intranet and the team can hear exactly how well it organised itself.

So which qualities does the team get to exercise during a radio team building?

An occasion for radio: Family Day

A Family Day is a good occasion to launch the company radio. The radio team introduces the events of the day, keeps everyone updated on how they’re going, interviews the guests and accompanies people all the way through. And the audio recording, and the video if there is one, stays as a very good memory, to be played back at the moments that matter during the year.