The term ‘Team-building’ is a highly popular keyword among corporate organisations. Over the years, businesses have strategically steered away from competitive work environments to workplaces where collaboration and cooperation between fellow co-workers are seen as key to success. Working well together is one of the most essential elements for maintaining a successful and efficient company, but more often than not, this isn’t something that happens naturally. As with all working relationships, you need to get to know your colleagues and learn how to work well together.
This is where corporate team building activities flourish. These are activities that have been specifically designed to engage and involve everyone in ways that requires participants to cooperate and work together. Below are 7 benefits that you will gain thru team building activities:
1. Increased productivity
The collaborative objectives of a team building program teaches participants how to work together more effectively. It allows co-workers to see and understand that everyone has different skills and approaches to a problem. This knowledge is then transferable to the office environment, as individuals begin to understand the importance of synchronising and synergising each other’s gifts and abilities.
Improving productivity is one of the most common goals of team building activities where it encourages employees to learn to collaborate in a team and to reduce duplication of effort, enabling your employees can work more efficiently.
2. Confidence
Team building increases confidence, not just only in yourself, but in others as well.
Stepping outside of our comfort zone can be scary. Many times we put a “cap” to what we can do, but by pushing our limits and successfully completing the seemingly impossible task at hand can be a huge boost to your confidence. Similarly, witnessing a co-worker step outside their comfort zone can have the same effect!
Some of the reasons why employees are reluctant to work together is because they are unsure of the abilities of others (and worry that they may have to carry the load of the colleagues) or they worry about their own abilities (and about being seen as a weak link).
Team building activities erase these fears. When you see your co-workers overcoming the obstacles placed in front of them, when you overcome these obstacles yourself, or when you and your co-workers work together to overcome, your trust in yourself and your teammates increases. All this confidence and trust translates to more cooperation back at the office which leads to a higher level of productivity.
3. Teamwork
Here’s the big one: all of this leads up to your employees working together like a finely tuned machine. All of the previous benefits add up to teamwork.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”
When your employees care for one another, they are able to trust themselves and each other. When they believe in the company and have a clearer understanding of their roles, then employees will work together towards a common goal.
Employees will look forward to coming to work each day. In addition, they will turn up for work early and would not mind staying late to complete their tasks. Employees will take the time out to help one another, working not as a collection of individuals, but as a team. They will start to see the company as a collection of friends, working together towards a common objective.
Doing a good job is no longer just about the paycheck, or just clocking hours: it’s about helping one another accomplish a common goal. Team building can turn a job into a career, and an office into a home.
Employees will begin to see themselves as a part of something bigger. Working for more than themselves, they understand that when one of them succeeds, they all succeed.
4. Communication
One of the key benefit of a well organised and planned team building activity is improved communication between employees. Enjoyable and fun-filled activities enable employees to get to know each other better, creating a better understanding of each other and breaking down barriers of mistrust by encouraging people to focus on what they have in common rather than their differences.
Team building activities can be a really dynamic and powerful way to develop collaboration and trust between fellow co-workers, improve motivation, nurturing one’s strengths, and addressing their weaknesses.
5. Company-Wide Integration
During team building activities, people who typically wouldn’t interact in the office are paired up in these team building programs. While you may not see this as a work benefit, increased integration can help lead to innovative and “out of the box” thinking and problem solving in ways that previously wouldn’t have happened which aids in improving work relationships company-wide.
Thru these interactions, you might find some fellow co-workers that you might have formed negative pre-conceived views about, might not really be such a bad character that was portrayed to you and you might actually end up working well with.
6. Encourage Creativity
Team building activities take employees out of their usual, sometimes mundane, environment and gives them an out-of-the-ordinary task to perform. This environment often allows employees to be more creative and to use their imagination to accomplish the tasks set before them. It also sends the message to employees that their creativity is welcome in the workplace. These creative problem-solving skills translate back to the workplace once the activities are complete.
7. Increased Collaboration
One of the most important benefits of a properly planned team building activity is greater collaboration between employees. Collaboration is about knowing who has what knowledge and abilities, trusting them, their experience and expertise and being able to get access to that person when you need it. By creating activities that people enjoy and can experience as a group, employees can build relationships and develop networks of contacts outside their day-to-day role that will help them in the future cooperatives.