Planning Effective Teambuilding Activities

Your staff will always be one of your greatest assets as a company. Even as you invest in adding to your staff by recruiting the best talents the market has to offer, you should invest as much in nurturing teamwork among your employees.

Team building activities, trainings, and workshops encourage this teamwork and improve your team’s collaboration skills. There are plenty of ideas to explore and here is a guide on how to ensure your efforts are a success.

1. Work with Employee Suggestions and Feedback

An online search will return hundreds of team building activities that you can choose from for your team. An even better idea would be to take suggestions from the team. Participation rate, and morale throughout every session is likely to be higher, if your employees are engaging in activities of their choosing. Also get feedback after the sessions, so you know if they the activities and trainings and what, if anything, you should change next time.

2. Focus on Areas of Development

In what specific areas is your team lagging? Is it a lack of proper communication? Neglecting and leaving out the new members of the team? Poor time management?

Identify problem areas and ensure that you create trainings and team building activities that solve these problems in your workplace. Some activities focus on improving communication, others collaboration, and others on strengthening decision-making.

3. Set out the Goals Clearly

Before starting any exercise, activity or training, ensure that you communicate clearly to the employees the goal of that particular session. Each member of the team should know exactly how it is the session is going to help.

Communicating the goals helps to create a sense of transparency, which does a lot to enhance the team spirit. It also helps every team member to know the end-goal, and they can better focus their efforts on coming up with a strategy to achieve this goal.

4. Stay Away From Competitive Activities

If you include activities that are so designed to be competitive, then it would certainly defeat the purpose of team building. Unfortunately, it is quite common to have members of the same team game things up so much that they turn what should have been a collaborative task into a competitive one.

It is, therefore, important that you design your team building activities to be collaborative and not competitive. If the tasks take a different direction in the course of the training or activity, whoever is in charge should reiterate the importance of working as a team and not trying to outshine each other.

5. Shuffle the Teams Often

At the start of your session, you will divide your team into small groups. For the best results, ensure that you keep these teams for only a few activities, and then shuffle them.

Shuffling teams helps to build better connections among everyone. Your employees will get to interact with others from a different department. This interaction will give them a chance to see and learn from the way others’ way of doing things.

6. Host During Office Hours

Hosting team building activities and trainings outside office hours will have a negative impact on participation and morale. No one will be too excited about spending their personal time doing anything that relates to work, however much fun it may be. As such, make these trainings and activities a part of your calendar, so you don’t impose on your employees’ time.

With these tips, and hosting the team building activities and trainings on a regular basis, you can achieve the collaboration and other values that your team needs to achieve your goals as an organization.