Team building is a crucial but sometimes overlooked aspect of running a business. Employees who work well as part of a team are more efficient, more productive, and generally enjoy a greater level of job satisfaction. Team building sometimes has the reputation of being expensive or time-consuming, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
#1 Team sports
Team sports have long been considered the ultimate employee bonding experience and with good reason. Even something as simple as a game of soccer is enough to get employees on the same wavelength and break the ice. Sports like baseball, basketball, and even cricket force individuals to cooperate and work together towards a common goal. They also encourage open communication and team planning.
While any sport will inevitably have a competitive edge, it’s important to try and keep proceedings as casual as possible. Fierce competition can easily have the opposite effect, alienating employees who aren’t as fit or quick as other staff. If sports don’t sound ideal, alternatives like laser tag and even paintball involve the same tactical, team element and are heavily communication-based.
#2 First aid courses
First aid courses are more than just team-building exercises. Accidents can occur in the workplace with alarming frequency, and even mild injuries require prompt medical intervention. Having a trained first aider in the office means that if anything does go wrong, there’s somebody on hand to help. Of course, first aiders can also save lives. If somebody falls seriously ill or suffers a life-threatening injury, first aiders are the intermediaries that administer care before an ambulance arrives. That really can be the difference between life and death.
Moreover, first aid courses are excellent confidence and team-building exercises. The training takes place in a group, and there’s a lot of cooperation involved. Individuals work through various medical procedures like CPR together. It’s challenging and sometimes fast-paced, which fosters the perfect environment for employees to get to know each other and develop stronger bonds. Best of all, you’ll come away with a set of highly trained first aiders ready to respond to any incident.
#3 Ideas as Building Blocks
The simplest game on the list, this activity only needs to take around half an hour, but it’s quite intense and encourages people to work together. It’s used as a theatre warmup game, too, since it’s designed to get actors to think creatively. The essence of the game is simple. The group leader invents a fictional problem, and then everybody else tries to work out different ways to solve it. There can even be a competitive element as teams are judged on how successful the group leader deems their solution.
More than just a team-building exercise, this game encourages and rewards creative thinking. It also gets people working together to create – a process that is extremely important for any developing business. Some people take the game a step further by adding in new problems or layers of complication, forcing players to innovate and quickly develop solutions.
