TIPS FROM YOUR CORPORATE TRAINING COMPANY
Effectively managing a team means more than just ensuring that day to day activities run smoothly. A large part of maintaining a healthy and productive team and employee base requires quality employee and team development.
As a Learning Leader, you already know that team building is important to the organization but how can you explain the importance to other team leaders or senior management who may feel that a team retreat is not effective use of budget or time?
One place to start is by talking through these ten benefits, which can all be tied back to achieving key metrics of the organization.
- Increase collaboration
- Handle conflict
- Improves morale and leadership skills
- Finds the barriers that block creativity
- Improves organizational productivity
- Identifies a team’s strengths and weaknesses
- Improves the ability to problem solve
- Increase engagement
- Clearly defines objectives and goals
- Improves processes and procedures
Once you have buy in for a team building event, you may still find resistance ahead.
One of the key reasons for both leaders and employees to drag their feet and groan at the first email they receive about an upcoming team development event is because past events simply have not resonated well. And so, begins the cycle. Poorly run events mean disengaged employees, which means lower productivity overall, which all contribute to lower results.
When planning out your next team development event consider these pitfalls and steer clear!
Mismatching Activity to Team
If you’re dealing with a younger team, perhaps Millennials, taking them to a golf retreat that requires them to mix and mingle (face to face) for the duration of the day, may not be the best use of budget. Consider creating content using gamification and have them working together while on their devices. On the flip side, if your team is made up of older workers, setting up a day of Laser Tag is likely not going to help build positive team work either.
Unengaging Content
As with any training material that you present to employees, the content that you create for any team building exercise must also be engaging. Consider what you’re aiming to do with the sessions and create the content in an interesting and fun way that is easy to share. For example, using an app that allows you to build a customized interactive quiz that teams can answer from their mobile devices may be a great way to share information, get a pulse on your team and also help them to understand one another by seeing real time polled answers.
Communicate in Advance
Springing up a team building event can meet resistance if employees feel that they don’t have enough time to plan for it. If you’re looking at a day event, they may have deliverables, meetings or calls that need to be rescheduled and reworked. If you’re planning something offsite and maybe even over a duration of a few days, they may need time to make arrangements at home as well.
You also want as close to 100% participation as you can get so ensuring that there is ample notice as well as clear communication to the teams involved you will reduce the chances of employees being on vacation or working remotely. It also gives those employees that may not always be physically in the office to arrange to be where they need to be for the event.
If you’re looking for some fun ideas to consider for your next event here are 10 ways to boost team cohesion.
- Cooking Class
- Board Game Tournament
- Office Trivia
- Improv Workshop
- Karaoke Night
- Go-Kart Racing
- Jigsaw Puzzle Race
- Room Escape Games
- Laser Tag
- Catch Phrase
- Volunteer
- Mystery Dinner
- Painting Class
- Sports Game
- Professional Development Workshop
A highly successful professional development workshop is the DiSC Everything Workplace program. Not only can it be customized to your unique team building requirements and team but can also be delivered over a half day or full day course. The session is highly engaging as it speaks specifically to the participants and their own personal workplace personalities.
How does this help deliver the benefits identified earlier? Well for one, it provides a clear explanation to why certain team members behave, communicate and work in the ways that they do. It also provides actual usable tactics for team members to implement when working with specific coworkers. Third, it gives insight into personal strengths and weaknesses to help employees to develop further as a professional and an individual.
Check out more about DiSC Everything Workplace here.
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