11 Benefits of Team Building Activities
Your employees can be your number one asset, and you should do everything you can to make sure they remain happy and healthy throughout their time with your company. If you want to build stronger relationships between your employees and improve morale in the workplace, then you need to include team building activities in your corporate culture.
What Is Team Building?
Team building is the process of creating a team that cohesively works together towards a common goal. The importance and main purpose of team building is to create a strong team through forming bonds and connections. Creating these bonds through team building is very beneficial to businesses and organizations. The benefits of team building include increased communication, planning skills, employee motivation, and employee collaboration.
Fun activities that help people see each other in a different light allow them to connect with one another in a different setting, usually one that is more fun, more casual, and less stressful.
One of the most powerful reasons for team building is to get results. Through a series of planned building events that are fun and motivational, teams build skills like communication, planning, problem solving, and conflict resolution. These team building activity ideas help to facilitate long-term team building through fostering genuine connections, deeper discussions, and personal communication.
Why Is Team Building Important?
It’s essential for every organization to engage in some sort of team building activities, as the result can provide a multitude of benefits. Here are reasons why team building will help your organization.
1. Increase Employee Morale
Team building activities are a fun and interactive way to boost employee morale. Getting out of the monotony of work and engaging with one another for non-work-related events and tasks can do wonders for teams.
Taking part in fun games and activities that require team collaboration can increase efficiency in the workplace. Engaging in fun activities allows team members to develop relationships with their peers and upper management. These new communication channels can foster new creative ideas and perspectives.
Here at The Zone we have all the resources you’ll need to make it fun.
2. Teamwork and Boosting Team Performance
Team building activities also work to improve workplace projects that involve teamwork because it helps the teams understand each other better. After completing team building activities together, employees better understand each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and interests. This understanding helps them work even better together on future projects that are vital to the company.
When everyone is contributing their best, it sets the tone for a positive work culture. Each team is different, and every individual has something unique to contribute. Once you can identify and encourage everyone to reach their individual potential, your team will be able to reach its collective potential as well.
3. Competition and Bragging Rights
Competition has been known to increase productivity. By channeling that increased productivity into a fun inclusive team building activity, teams can bond in a more effective way than by other methods. Learning to work well together can take some time in a work environment, but you’d be surprised at how fast teams can come together when there is an incentive to win on the table.
At The Zone, we have many interactive games that are well suited for competition. Maybe a Mini Golf tournament? How about some Laser Tag?
4. Celebration, Team Spirit, Fun, and Motivation
After any sports team wins a major championship, they celebrate and have fun, which motivates them to want to win even more. The celebration, cheering, and fun that comes with a team building activity at The Zone can motivate employees to also bring their job performance to the next level.
5. Collaboration and the Fostering of Innovation and Creativity
People tend to have a larger imagination when they are around people they are comfortable with. Successful team building events not only bring people closer together, but they also contribute to a more successful and creative workplace. Everyday workplace collaboration is key to a successful business. Your employees will be more creative and better able to problem solve if they feel that they are working alongside individuals who value their strengths and work hard to achieve team success.
6. Communication and Working Better Together
To no surprise, communication and working better together is the top reason why people choose team building. Everybody wants a friendly work environment, where people are happy to talk and work with anyone.
One of the best outcomes for team building is that the activities actually work to improve communication.
Many hold these activities with the specific goal of working on communication and trust. While that is the general goal for every office, you may find certain areas of communication that could be focused on.
At The Zone, our Escape Rooms are a good way to build teamwork, communication, problem solving skills, and more. Team up with coworkers to crack codes, solve puzzles, and find hidden objects.
7. Enhance Company Culture
Company culture can be explained as the values, norms, goals, and attitudes that exist with your organization. Simply put, it defines the environment you work in and makes up the personality of the company. As a business owner or member of upper management, you’ll want to be the one to steer the ship when it comes to company culture.
Regularly scheduled team building events can improve your company culture and provide a space to understand your employees’ wants and needs. Sometimes the culture of management doesn’t match up with that of the employees, so finding a middle ground is an important step in creating a more positive environment. Team building activities help to cut out toxicity and get everyone on the same page while working together.
A half day or day of team building activities at The Zone will reap benefits that will be sure to follow you back to the office.
8. Create Something to Look Forward to
Whether it’s once a week, once a year, or every few months, scheduling team building activities will give your employees something to look forward to other than those project deadlines. No one wants to look at their calendar to see what seems like a neverending list of tasks. Have your employees get excited about non-work-related events during the workweek, not just on the weekend.
It’s also important to recognize that these events give employees a shared goal that doesn’t have to do with their work. The much needed break is good for employees’ mental health and ties into the idea of creating a more positive work environment for the people who make your company successful.
At The Zone, we have the atmosphere and activities that your employees will look forward to, whether they come up on the calendar often, or are looked forward to as an annual event.
9. Show Employee Appreciation
Along the same lines, team building events let employees feel appreciated for their hard work. Many times, great work can accidentally be swept under the rug due to a sea of other things going on. Prioritizing these events shows employees you care about them and appreciate their efforts by rewarding them with a fun activity the team can enjoy together.
10. Build Bridges Across Departments
The connections between employees within one department aren’t the only ones that matter when it comes to building a stronger team. “Team” doesn’t have to be confined to the sales team or the marketing team. It can be a unified collection of all the working teams that make up your organization. Ask yourself: how well do you know employees in departments other than your own? If the answer is: not well or not at all, then team building will surely bring departments closer together to encourage cross-functional collaboration that will benefit your organization as a whole.
11. Unlock Leadership Potential
In a more relaxed and creative environment, you may find employees have hidden skills that haven’t been discovered in the office. Leaders can arise in the simplest of activities and may surprise you. Regularly scheduled team building events can feed employees’ confidence in the workplace. You may find that the quiet new employee is incredible at inspiring peers, and with the right mentor, development opportunities, and encouragement, could be your company’s next rising leader.
Even though team building plays a critical role in an organization’s success, it is often overlooked. It’s about time that you take team building seriously and start deploying some team building activities into your organization’s schedule.
Team building activities make sure that employees get to know each other well, learn to trust and count on each other, and are motivated to get the job done together.
When you establish a positive work environment where everyone respects and understands each other, your organization becomes unstoppable. Strive to make these activities an ongoing affair and not a one time thing.
What team building activities do you plan to implement in your organization? With all the benefits, it is easy to see why team building has been the secret weapon of managers to help employees work effectively together. Call The Zone and let’s have a chat about the best team building activities in the Lowcountry.