Team Building Activities
Team building activities lead to building People and, people form a team, only the teams build your Business. This is indeed a fact we must acknowledge.
Fine, you all had fun by engaging your team with a lot of team building activities. Have you ever measured what happens once the team is back to the deck? Do you see them REALLY solving conflicts better than earlier? Do you witness “Emotional Intelligence” influencing the work scenario? Or it ends up opening up a Pandora’s box?
Why don’t most of the team building activities work effectively? Why is building a team building activity still a tough task? You can no more cook up activities like ‘lemon & spoon’, ‘sack race’ or ‘pizza eating contest’ types with your team. The current generation employees are smarter and have huge exposure to lot interesting events. Satisfying their need is never going to be easy.
Want to conduct ‘out of the box’ activities? Want to make your team laugh, learn, connect and feel ‘inclusive’? Experiential learning is the best way to achieve all these ‘wishes’ and ‘wants’.
“The trouble with not having a goal is that you spend your life running up and down the field and never Score”
Bill Copeland
Our team building activities are truly fun and extremely exciting, at the same time aid in achieving the goals. Here’s an example from our list of activities that can help addressing various organizational needs.
The Actuator — Bring in Harmony among Teams:
Ty Howard, the former professional American football champion beautifully defines the secrets behind forming successful teams.
“Successful teams struggle, fight and bicker too. The difference between a successful team and a failing team: when they face challenges, the successful teams acknowledge and resolve as well quickly. Because the successful teams work with shared vision, harmony, consistent production, and the success of the team are more important than any ‘he says — she says’ drama of counter-productive foolishness.”
Isn’t it extremely important to make your teams work towards a common goal and a shared vision? Is your team mastered the art of perseverance? Do you envision your team to be the dream team? The perfectly designed team building activity can induce all these traits and make your team stronger and better.
Why the ‘Actuator’ activity? Foremost among all, let us explain what exactly the Actuator does. The actuator is a motor, a key component of a machine that moves and controls the mechanical system. It works using a low energy, even a compression from a human power or pneumatic or hydraulic pressure can move or control the system.
How does it work as a team building activity?
When the team is involved in this activity, the team members are asked to perform very simple tasks, but through a series of complex transitions.
There are various tools, materials, properties given to the participants. Using these properties, the team members need to create a series of various energy conversion transitions. The ultimate goal is to create an automation project using various tools given to the team members.
What happens when the teams perform this game?
- Shared Vision: Unless they understand the vision, creating an end product is not possible. Here the team learns how to share the common vision or a goal so that there is a harmony built at once.
- Communication: Unless the communication is planned well, what each person designs individually will not make any sense. There is no other way rather the team members have to communicate to bring the end result. It requires one way as well two-way communication skill so that the series of energy conversation transition is processed without any interruption. Moreover, listening is one key skill that is necessary to complete the game.
- Collaboration: It is not only about communication, they need to collaborate with each other to monitor and control each other’s involvement to reach the end goal. There should be seamless monitoring, controlling and communication only can help the team to achieve the goal.
- Creativity & Innovation: This activity requires innovative thinking process where the creativity is used as the base skill. Since the tools given are very simple ones, the creativity and focusing skills are induced as they think through the processes to achieve the goal.
Trebound team has put in serious thought behind designing and developing this activity. It is important to plan for an activity which can bring in amazing impact and able to enhance multiple skills, at the same time aid in achieving the goal set by the organization.
What to learn from ‘The Actuator’ game while building team building activities?
The main attribute that leads to failed team building activity is ‘not setting the goal right’. Foremost among all, it is essential to understand that the team building activities need to be built around your goal. If you treat it as just a fun day out, you are wasting everyone’s precious time, your team’s energy, productivity and moreover the cost involved in organising the day.
Yep, you need to make a strategic planning before designing the team building activities.
Start with setting a goal. Decide why you require a team building activity now?
- Is it to strengthen the relationship among teams?
- Is it to improve communication, problem-solving capability, decision-making abilities of your team members?
- Is it to aid them to measure their strengths and weaknesses?
Based on one or combination of various needs, carefully design your activities. Remember, the activities should bring in lot fun and laughter. Don’t make it an another ‘think tank’ meet.
How can we measure the effectiveness of Team Building Activities?
Monitoring the team effectiveness is key to measure the impact the team building activities create. How can the measurement be done here? Start building a few KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that involves group activities of your team.
For example, if the communication was the issue before conducting the activity, you can set KPIs such as
- How do the teams communicate during project closure times?
- How do the teams react to each other during conflicts?
- How effectively do they listen to each other?
- How do they handle pressure building circumstances?
If the conflicts are better handled than earlier or if the communication between the teams looks positive during challenging times, you can take it as the positive result from the activity your team had during the recent event.
Remember that the KPIs being set to need to be meaningful and achievable to the team. You cannot expect a team that lacked basic English language skill to start writing like ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘JK Rowling’ just by making them undergo a few activities.
Likewise, creativity is one skill that requires serious and continuous working of the brain in some pattern. Creativity cannot be induced just by playing one single team building activity. The team building activity needs to be reminded in various forms while they do the actual job and perform their responsibilities. This can be achieved by giving a serious thought while building a team activity.
The productivity level can be used as the best key performance indicator to measure the effectiveness of team building exercises. At the same time, the quality also needs to be monitored. One of our clients measured based on the team’s ability to meet the deadlines but missed to monitor the increasing quality issues. The perfect blend of KPIs will indicate the real impact of team building activities.
How to achieve organizational growth through team building activities?
Measuring the effectiveness of team building activity will lay a path for the organization to grow. Once the measurements are analysed, based on the results,
- The processes can be redefined
- Specific skills of individual employees can be identified and responsibilities can be assigned based on such strengths rather worrying only about the weaknesses
- The team spirit can be used and to involve them in major corporate initiatives
- Making them working under a shared vision itself will lead the company to growth path
Set your goals, strategize your activities and spread positivity among teams. But, most importantly, DO NOT FORGET TO MEASURE THE AFTER EFFECTS. Instil the values learned by making team building activities a routine.
Originally published at www.trebound.com.
