Career advice, insights & tips for HR professionals
Team building activities can build morale and encourage communication between colleagues 07/06/2010
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What's the benefit of team building days and how should employers go about choosing these? James Coakes discusses how team building events provide the chance to improve communication and team morale in a creative setting.
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- Why choose team building events?
- Choose your event as a team
- Encouraging communication between employees
- Encourage feedback after the event
- A creative solution to boost team morale
- Further information
Why choose team building events?
The effect of team building is hard to measure tangibly; much of the benefit is anecdotal. After a difficult time for many in business, team building events can be used to build morale, not least because organising an event sends out a message that a company is prepared to invest in its employees which may be exactly the message that is needed at that moment.
The choice of activity and the general sense of trust in the team are crucial. If the manager consults with the team and chooses something in an open forum that pleases everyone then the chances of a motivating experience increase significantly.
Choose your event as a team
If the feelings of the team are ignored, you can have a situation where people dread the event, do not enjoy it on the day even if they might have and resent it afterwards. It's always better to choose the event as a team and experience the whole process openly.
Encouraging communication between employees
Taking people away from their usual environment, changing the scenery, replacing concrete with trees and doing something different is a great way to open up communication channels between them.
It’s very difficult to avoid conflict in the working environment. Conflicting goals and competition for scarce resources make for unavoidable stress. It can be extremely beneficial to take people out of that situation and put them into a positive, enjoyable environment to remind them that it’s the work and not always the individuals that cause the friction.
Encourage feedback after the event
Following a team building day for Skandia, comments included:
“I know the people in my team a little better and we talk more now.”
“I think the key thing was identifying that the Finance department is one team and, although we have individual teams within it, we are all working under the same umbrella.”
Bringing whole departments together can be a very effective way of opening up communication between individuals and between work teams in a lasting way.
A creative solution to boost team morale
A change of scenery is also very good for creativity; coming up with new ideas and solutions and generally seeing issues from a different angle. The events used for team building are versatile and flexible and can be used to focus on specific desired outcomes. Communication is one such outcome, along with planning, creative problem solving and team work.
Team building events are not a stand alone solution in their own right and it’s often difficult to prove in hard statistics how effective they are. However, they are an important part of a mix of strategies and can be very effective in building morale and improving communication in business.
Further information
The Team Building Company, Progressive Resources, is based in Hampshire and provides team building activities to corporate clients around the UK.
James Coakes, facilitator, The Team Building Company
James Coakes is a facilitator with Progressive Resources, The Team Building Company, based in Lymington in Hampshire. Progressive Resources run more than 500 events a year across the UK for a wide range of companies including HSBC, Shell and Zurich.