Team Building Activities for the Workplace

Team building activities for the workplace are gaining more and more popularity in the corporate sphere. Corporate event managers and planners find themselves organizing team building events for teams, departments and whole companies. This isn’t surprising since successful teams are at the core of any successful organization. To organize a great team building event you first need to understand what team building is.

What are the components of a great team?

Team building activities for the workplace

• A great team is one where all involved parties share a common goal of achieving the organization’s objectives because they understand and value them.
• The team members respect and value each other and they are motivated to cooperate and collaborate when performing their work.
• Corporate culture is often responsible for preventing or creating great teams, by encouraging cooperation and rewarding team player activity. Click here to read more about team building.

Team building is fostering wanted behavior and enabling a group of people achieve their goal.

Things to Consider before you Start Your Team building Activity:
The Who – who are your participants? Their seniority, gender, age, type of work they do.
The How – how many people are you planning for? Are you planning for a whole department or company or one team.
The Where – what is your location? Are you at work, during lunch hour, at a conference?

Getting to Work…
The first step to organizing team building activities for the workplace is to define what you are trying to achieve. Do you want to simply create a sense of team work in your company? Then your best bet is to take everyone out for a round of drinks or a company lunch.
Or maybe you are trying to change a certain behavior and build an effective, motivated and wholesome team? This will require a little more work. No worries here’s where the fun begins. It’s the corporate event manager’s responsibility to make sure that the goal of the the team building activity is clearly defined and understood. Different team building activities have the ability to foster or correct different behavior. Some encourage collaboration and creativity while others help build trust, teach conflict resolution or problem solving techniques.

5 Tips to build Great Team Building Activities for the Workplace:

1. A common misconception about teambuilding is that if it’s fun then you’re team building. This isn’t true, fun team building activities require more than just a “fun atmosphere,” they require planning that includes: setting goals, developing a plan of action and desires outcomes. Then your activity is both fun and effective in building a team.
2. Doing is more effective than listening. People learn better when they are experiencing learning hands on. Although an in-class workshop on effective communication may take a lot less time, a creative outdoor broken telephone game will reinforce the message in a completely different manner. For more ideas for effective communication activities click here.
3. Make the families of your employees part of the deal, try to incorporate them in the event if possible. Families provide support and reinforcement, which makes them valuable in terms of business. If you’re holding an event outside of work hours include your employee partners and families as well. Employee Appreciation Day is a great time to conduct team building activities and include families as well.
4. Make the activity fun, and bring personal benefit to those participating. However you should always bring in an aspect of business into the activity. If you’re teaching brainstorming then you should use examples from an upcoming product launch or current campaign.
5. Avoid competition because it doesn’t encourage team building behavior and not all people actually learn through competition. Here’s some more information on how to avoid these types of team building events.

There are lots of great teambuilding activities that you can practice right at work. Check out this free resource for detailed teambuilding activities, explanations of what teambuilding aspects they work on and specific instructions on how to conduct each one.

Spotlight on Dialogue in the Dark

Dialogue in the Dark is a workshop/exhibit/dinner in total darkness, led by blind guides, it has been presented in more than 30 countries with more than 7 million visitors and has provided employment to more than 7,000 people who are blind.
From their website:

“One of the most amazing team building activities that I’ve come across is the Dialogue in the Dark Workshop. “In the course of the workshop participants become aware of the boundaries of communication and the need for active listening to achieve an objective. Almost one in four respondents reflecting on their relation to others came to think about the requirements for efficient communication and that filling information gaps with assumptions may result in suboptimal results.”

And that’s what team building activities for the workplace are all about.