There’s a reason why corporate group activities are called “team building events”. Besides having an absolute blast, team building events are specifically designed to make groups of people work together, learn from each other, and combine every member’s strengths in order to achieve something as one cohesive unit. In this post, we’re going to outline just how effective team building events are in strengthening your relationships with your office colleagues and how why the benefits of the events live on throughout your career.
LEARNING
One of the most exciting things about your office is the diversity of cultures, histories, and education present. It’s an absolute wealth of information available for you to learn about the people that you work with. Sometimes though, many people don’t make the most of the opportunity and rarely engage fully with their colleagues apart from water-cooler talk.
During a team building event, you’re put in a supportive environment where you’ll need to learn about the colleagues in your team quickly so that you can pool your strengths together to complete your challenges. It’s the positive kind of pressure that reduces any social barriers and encourages everyone to pitch in with information about themselves that’s useful to the task at hand.
Everyone’s experienced that great feeling of bonding with someone else, and team building events provide that without fail. The lasting benefit of learning about each other is that your personal and professional relationship is so much stronger. Personally this could mean making great new friends and growing your social network. Professionally, understanding each other builds trust, which in turn makes it easier to complete projects, presentations and any other professional endeavour that you need help on. Furthermore, you gain more respect for each other, allowing you to work together in more productive manner than you may have done before.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
For managers, team building events can give you a great deal of insight into how members of your team operate together. Watching and participating in the activities will show you personality traits in your team, like who thinks more logically and can solve puzzles with ease, and who is seen as a leadership figure by the others. We find that many of the people that participate in our great races portray their strengths much more candidly than in the office. This can give the people that are generally quieter in the office the opportunity to show their skills that you may not have been aware of before.
The longer term benefits is easy – you can find the next group of leaders by seeing who the others look towards for direction. Plus, the quieter people in the office get on your radar, which gives you not only a better understanding of your employees, but gives them the huge self esteem boost of knowing that you’re aware of their talents. This of course leads to better job satisfaction, higher retention, and a team that works like a well oiled machine.
TEACHING NEW SKILLS
While we’re all about fun and positivity, team building activities can also show character traits that are less desirable. We don’t see this as a negative though, we see it as an opportunity! For example, sometimes participants are reluctant to communicate effectively or work as part of the team, choosing to “lone wolf” instead. However, during the course of the day, they’re able to witness first hand the practical benefits of working as a unit as the other teams, and members of their own team, begin to achieve greater things together than they can alone.
The long term benefit of this is that learning in a practical environment is simply far more effective for many people. It may be this activity that gets the lone wolf’s in your office to start working better with the team.
GREAT RACE
If you weren’t already convinced, you should be by now – team building is a critical part of creating an office full of happy, understanding, brilliant people that work together cohesively to achieve your business goals, smarter, faster and better than ever before. Investing in your team is the smartest business decision you can make. Get in touch with Great Race today and let’s fun!
