The first and foremost benefit of team-building activities is to help employees to find common ground, work together, and develop a base for respect and collaboration in the workplace. Team-building events and activities allow your staff to see themselves as a community and allows them to connect with their peers. It allows management to build a positive and dynamic company culture that encourages collaborative efforts for the good of the company rather than individual achievement.
Make sure to choose a good location for hotels that are easy for everyone to reach and give them a break from being in the workplace. Being in a hotel also allows you to direct the flow of events and arrange seating to allow people from different departments to work together. The kind of activities you plan for the team-building event must reflect the values you wish to see in the workplace. Choose activities that promote teamwork if you want to see more collaboration. Choose activities that require imagination if you want your teams to display more creative problem-solving.
Start Simple
If you and your employees are new to team-building activities then start small with a manageable activity. Book clubs and walking clubs are a good way to bring people together and encourage discussion and community spirit.
Walking clubs are also a great way to encourage your employees to exercise and get healthy. A healthy employee is a productive employee. Book clubs will give employees a wider range of ideas and help keep their minds active and engaged.
Sports-Related Team-Building Activities
If your staff are familiar with team-building activities, then dial things up a notch by forming an interoffice sports league. You can choose to play simple athletic games such as baton races or something with more competitiveness such as a softball league.
These work best if your employees are already an active group. In the event they are not interested in sports then you could get them into obstacle courses. These are fun games that allow teams to give tasks to different members that suit their talents. An obstacle course is also easier to set up and manage than several sports teams and you can allow employees’ families to join in as spectators. Everyone will enjoy themselves and you will be able to build a stronger community spirit.
Volunteering and Charity Work
You can also combine your company’s need for team-building activities with your corporate social responsibility obligations. This will allow you and your employees to give back to the community in a way that will strengthen your company’s ties with them.
You could offer services free-of-charge, work at a soup kitchen, or volunteer with an NGO to provide resources to impoverished communities. The employees will benefit from and enjoy the charitable work and it will give a much-needed boost to an organization dedicated to the betterment of people’s lives.
Classes and Training Courses
Some companies prefer that their employees use team-building activities to improve their skills or learn a new activity that will be useful in the workplace. There are many team-building activities that polish soft skills which are very useful in the office. The importance of soft skills is being recognized more widely and companies are happy to support employees in improving them.
Training courses may not immediately seem like a team-building activity but it depends on the type of training. Courses in time management, communication skills, and leadership training allow employees to get to know each other on a personal level and develop trust. Employees will be better able to work together, rely on each other’s skills, and happy to collect new certifications that will eventually lead to raises and promotions.
If you want to try something completely different from anything you have done before, then try a hack day. Hack days are a team-building activity that is generally used by businesses that have a lot of engineers and technical staff. This is an activity where you expect your employees to put aside their regular assignments one day each month and do some work that benefits the company.
Put together teams that have people from different departments and give them a list of activities to choose from. This list should include tasks that will benefit the company. You can have the teams come up with solutions to common customer complaints, work on streamlining processes or design a revamp of the business social media accounts.
The only requirement is that they present real solutions to make existing tasks better and that their suggestions do not require big financial investments. This is to help the employees see that the human resources of the company are more than capable of helping the company to achieve sustainability and succeed in its business goals.
