Team building. These very words can strike fear into the heart of an employee. Spending time with unfamiliar people, being asked to open up and share personal details or even worse, being forced to go orienteering in the middle of winter.
Relax, team building can actually be a fun and rewarding experience with benefits for both employer and employee.
Here are five major benefits of great team-building activities
Trust
This is a tough one to achieve but is often considered the most important benefit of team building. A good team-building exercise is designed to encourage members of a group to build trust in each other by lowering barriers, allowing them to relax and start to work as a team. This trust is then taken back into the workplace, making working relationships easier, more open and collaborative. Find out some great examples of trust building activities.
Leadership
Team building is a great way of identifying the natural leaders among a group of co-workers. When a group of people are put together in an unfamiliar environment, different personalities start to emerge. One or more people will naturally start to take the lead and step up to run or coordinate the activity. Bosses can then make decisions on who they would like to cultivate as a potential leader within the company.
Communication
Another major benefit of team building is to encourage and sometimes force people to talk and discuss the problem in hand or open up on a subject they would not normally talk about at work. This allows the team to find out more about their colleague’s lives, skills, talents and possibly even their family and culture. This communication will hopefully then continue in the workplace.
Morale building
Most team-building exercises are designed to be engaging and fun for all involved, encouraging creativity and a competitive spirit. Giving people this type of connection boosts their morale and confidence in themselves. And we all know that the higher the morale, the greater the productivity at work.
Identifying employees’ strengths and weaknesses
Strengths and weaknesses are not always apparent when carrying out day to day tasks and don’t always give an employer the full picture of an employee’s range of competencies. Watching closely while a group carries out a team-building task helps to identify the traits they may be looking for in an employee, such as problem-solving, integrity, competitiveness or influence.
Team building can be beneficial for both the employer and employee and is often an overlooked area of employee development. Why not visit the Team Tactics website to find out more about how your company can invest in your employees and let us help you organise a great team-building event.
Photos courtesy of gettyimages.com
