In business, team building can often seem like a pleasant addition rather than an absolute necessity. The truth is, team building can have a big impact on employee satisfaction, wellbeing and in turn, productivity. The key to achieving these positive results is intelligent design and informed decision making, which is why the process of planning your team building day shouldn’t be taken lightly.
This short guide is designed to highlight three of the most important points to keep in mind when you are looking organise a team building day for your business. By the end, you should be able to shape a team building event that truly benefits your team, boosting efficiency and business growth.
Focus on Results
As with all things in business, the key to success is results-driven planning. Team building isn’t just about having fun, it’s a training tool that utilises the medium of games and activities to develop soft skills that translate into the workplace environment. Before you begin organising your team building day, it’s essential that you have a learning outcome in mind; a skill that you want your staff to practise and grow.
Most simple team building activities have a handful of learning objectives that they focus on, whether they be problem-solving, collaboration, negotiation or something more. When you are searching for your activities, select those that train the skills which you want to see developed in your staff. This is the best way of ensuring that the result of your team building day is positive and has a truly beneficial impact on your business.
Tailor to Your Audience
In this case, the audience of your team building day is your staff. Every individual is unique, with different working and learning styles that they prefer, which can make it difficult to select team building activities that work for everyone. However, the key is to appeal to the masses and group your audience into wide categories like introvert and extrovert.
Working with introverts and extroverts demands a wildly different approach to management and cooperation. In turn, team building days which focus on extroverts are rarely suitable for introverts. It’s recommended that you study your staff before beginning the organisation process, discovering where most members fall within your spectrum and selecting activities accordingly. If there is a distinct split between the two types, then pick out a mix of events to ensure that everyone in attendance comes away with something valuable and enjoys themselves.
Avoid Clichés
Finally, it’s important to avoid clichés as much as possible. In the workplace, team building can often be viewed with scepticism. Negative employees are difficult to manage and often see team building as a waste of time, convincing other members of the team that this is the truth. This can damage the effectiveness of your team building day before it has started but it can be combatted.
In particular, the selection of new, unique and interesting activities is guaranteed to pique the interest of all employees, regardless of their opinion on team building as a whole. If you fall into the trap of using the same old games and techniques, your staff will be disengaged and uninterested from the outset. Avoid clichés as much as possible and select quirky, unusual activities instead of those you have seen countless times.
These aren’t the only points to keep in mind if you want to create the perfect team building day; however, they are easily some of the most important. Whatever your industry or sector, keep these points in mind and you should have a much more successful and impactful team building day which leads to a noticeable improvement in satisfaction and soft skills.
