Fika DNA: Building Team Trust and Understanding

This is a short activity focused on building trust and understanding within teams, both on a team level as well as the interpersonal level.

This is particularly useful for onboarding new team members, creating self-awareness and deepening connection within the team.

Time for Fika!

Every language contains a few untranslatable words. In Denmark and Norway, “hygge” is used as an example for a general state of lovely cosiness. In Sweden, the word that is hard to translate literally is ‘Fika’. To ‘Fika’ is a good old Swedish word that basically means to ‘meet up, have a coffee and a chit-chat’.

We Hyper Islanders love nothing more than to meet up for a Fika. This can be done at any time – and a Fika can take anything from 10 minutes to several hours, depending on how good you are at Fika-ing. If you’re in Norway or Denmark you don’t use the actual word Fika, but the rules of the game are the same.

We hope this exercise helps you communicate who you are to your team mates, highlight potential areas of growth within the team and foster greater trust and collaboration in your shared projects and goals.