Why team building in the workplace matters

Teams that are highly effective at collaborating produce high-quality results for your business. Team-building exercises promote teamwork, communication and positive attitudes. When your teams are comfortable in the workplace, they’ll get better at cooperating on complex tasks and employing creative problem-solving skills.

Team building is one of the most valuable investments you can make in your organisation. Here’s why:

Boost team performance

The more that team members get to know each other, the better they become at collaborating. I’ve found that team-building activities work best when they give participants a chance to learn about everybody’s strengths and weaknesses. This informal knowledge helps everyone to understand one another at a more fundamental level.

When you can identify each team member’s strengths, you can assign tasks more efficiently. Higher performance will follow.

Create a fun and engaging environment

Very few people go to work every day because it’s fun. They go into the office because that’s where they can earn an income. But what if your team could earn a living and have fun at the same time?

I’m not saying that work needs to be like an amusement park, but it doesn’t have to be boring either. Team-building events can infuse the workplace with positivity. This makes your team members more likely to feel happy and focused when it’s time to get down to business.

Practise collaboration and creative problem-solving

Collaboration is a skill that needs to be practised like any other. There can be a feeling among managers that employees should come to work fully prepared to do their best. But simply hoping for the best won’t always lead to great results.

Think about what type of team you want to lead. Is it creative and cooperative? If so, you need to practise tasks that foster those traits. The more practise your team gets, the more likely those traits are to become ingrained.

Build trust between team members and management

Trust is essential to any team-based project. But you can’t give a seminar on trust. You can’t convince your team members to trust you and one another with a command. Trust is built over time, through hard work.

Team-building activities give your employees the opportunity to build trust in a low-stakes environment. This trust will then translate into better collaboration when it really counts.

Develop new skills

In corporate settings, training often takes the form of videos and presentations – i.e., passive activities. Usually, team members are expected to take notes, absorb the information and then put it to use in their work.

While there’s a time and a place for passive learning, at ICML we use the scientific insights that tell us that active participation leads to faster results. Let’s say you’re trying to implement a new workflow in which team members must complete their responsibilities before passing the project on to someone else. You can use games to simulate similar tasks and patterns of collaboration to hone these skills in a fun way.

Create a sense of friendly competition

Competition pushes team members to work harder and take more pride in their work. However, competitiveness can also turn unfriendly very quickly. Team-building activities foster friendly competition so employees can motivate one another while staying positive.

Interested in learning more? Contact ICML for more information about our tailored in-house team-building workshops.