Team building activities

Whether you own a small or big business, you must have a set of employees who understand each other and work together as a team for the venture to experience success. At times of challenges such as decreased productivity, conflict, lack of cooperation, and complaints about favoritism, business leaders can undertake regular team building activities. Fun and physical team building activities are more likely to build confidence and increase productivity. If done the right way, team building activities can also increase employee engagement and reduce the attrition rate.

Team Building – What is it?

Team building is defined as a process by which cooperation and teamwork are improved in a work unit in an organization. The conception behind the team building activity is that what a team can achieve is much more than what individuals can achieve. These activities can range from a short, problem-solving game to a retreat lasting a couple of days. Powerful team-building exercises help develop trust, support, and respect among the group, positively affecting the work environment and its productivity.

How Team Building Activities can Boost Productivity

Fixes Communication Issues

A significant roadblock of a perfect team is a lack of efficient communication. Communication challenges can cause team breakdowns and subsequently impact the company’s overall productivity. This is where the importance of leveraging team building activities comes into play. A team that communicates efficiently establishes a safe place for employees to think creatively. Also, with effective communication, information can be shared in a way that is clear and easy to understand. To improve communication in a team, activities such as back-to-back drawing, zen counting, truth and lies, barter puzzle, human knot, perfect square, and minefield can be leveraged.

Encourages Creativity

As the team leader, you can do certain things to make creativity a priority and encourage your team. Team building activities can help you to explore your employees’ creative sides. When team members engage in collaborative team-building activities, they learn to work together and get to know each other better. The activities can be something non-work-related like zip-lining or a scavenger hunt, or something relevant to the job, like a brainstorming session about a particular project or problem. These activities take employees out of their usual environment and give them an out-of-the-ordinary task to perform, which encourages creativity.

Boosts Confidence Level

As a team leader, one of your most important roles is to bring out the best in your team. Team building activities gives employees a chance to interact with one another in a different setting outside the work environment. This boosts their confidence levels and strengthens collaboration. Besides, team-building exercises encourage every employee to complete the task, boosting individual confidence and confidence in the other colleagues. Consequently, one gets to understand how important he/she is as an integral part of the team.

Positive Results

As all businesses will need to handle new challenges to head in the right direction, it is imperative to create a clear picture of a problem at hand and decide on the best course of action to win the challenge. The core notion behind team building is to empower individuals to contribute to common goals by understanding each other’s strengths as well as weaknesses. Besides, team building exercises also increase productivity, enhance motivation across teams, improve workplace collaboration, encourage creativity, enhance job satisfaction, and eventually bring positive results.

Develops New Skills

While many employees view team building activity with skepticism or distrust, a well-organized program can engage and grow your team. The benefits can range from a specific skill that you would like to develop team bonding. It can even help quieter team members to break out and improve their leadership skills and those with leadership potential to hone their communication skills.

Identifies Strengths and Weaknesses

Team building programs can help team leaders identify strengths and weaknesses within the team that may not have been noticeable. This allows team leaders to flatten out any weaknesses that may be causing an issue within the team and figure out how the team could function more efficiently. This can also help develop much-needed skills that will boost productivity and improve teams’ communication.

Wrapping Up

There are multiple team building activities that you can leverage to increase collaboration, identify employees’ creative skills, improve communication, and encourage adaptability and planning. However, without a real purpose, a clear objective, and proper planning, they won’t have the genuine impact that they should. Hence, while building a team activity, the main aim must be to let your team break the shell and bring out their extrovert self.