Member Article

The cringe-free guide to team building

Your most valuable asset is right under your nose. It’s not your customers, it’s not your product or service - it’s your staff.

Head down, focussed on annual turnover and customer satisfaction, we often forget about the team delivering it all. They may get a pay cheque at the end of the month, but unless they’re being motivated day-by-day, their performance can start to dip. Enter the art of team building.

It’s got a bad image, has team building - conjuring groan-tastic visions of trust fall exercises or paintballing bruises. And that’s where businesses go wrong.

Powerful team building doesn’t come from competitive raft-building or getting absolutely legless with the boss: in fact, both competitions and alcohol can bring out the worst in people, making staff neither cooperate nor perform better.

If these are the ways you would usually go about team-building, it may be worth thinking about what kind of leader you are, and getting more insight into the type of business you’ve created.

The new Great British Business Quiz takes just minutes to complete and is intended to help business owners work out their ‘entrepreneur personality’ - helping them work more effectively. The cherry on top? You can win £5,000 worth of advertising for your business simply for having a go. Why not spend a few minutes and take part now?

What kind of team building actually builds teams?

A high-performing team is formed from a number of factors: a common purpose, mutual goals, shared accountability, strong individual roles and a commitment to each other.

Specific tasks can draw a team together, yet so many employers go for abstract activities that are, quite frankly, a waste of time. Not just for you, but for your team, too.

If you really want to develop staff productivity for business, you need to get them knuckling down on real, useful group tasks that actually boost your business. Successful team building should result in a few golden outcomes:

1. Deeper understanding between co-workers. Communication is the most important factor of a concrete team: once you’ve mastered it, it almost becomes telepathic.
2. Better relationships. There’s no denying it - personalities clash. Building healthy rapport among members through team events creates a happier environment, encouraging staff to work together amicably.
3. Boosted morale. Many psychologists have proven the profound effect a sense of community and belonging has on a person’s well-being. It’s innately rooted into our psyche; working as a team is good for us.
4. Raised motivation. The feeling of ‘being good at what you do’ is the strongest driving force to work even harder - and the experience of having performed well together brings with it an increased desire to cooperate in the future and help each other out.
5. Refined knowledge. If your staff come away from an exercise with new or improved learnings that can be applied at work, or a greater understanding of specific strategies - productivity will hit the roof.
6. Increased creativity. Doing the same thing everyday does nothing to engage the mind, so getting out of the office for half the day gives teams a fresh perspective, sparking new ideas.
7. Identified strengths and weaknesses. Diversity is a beautiful thing. Each member of your team has huge potential - your job is to bring out the best of their talent. Finding the talents of individuals motivates them to pool these talents and hone in on what they’re good at.

How do I arrange a powerful team building session?

You want to have fun, get these results and avoid causing staff to wince with embarrassment - but knowing exactly what to do can be a tricky decision. The most important factor is mutual goals; events where participants don’t compete, but work together to solve problems and fulfil objectives.

The activity must also reward those who get great results, but also those who help others achieve these results - making it an enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

• Taking staff out for lunch, hiring a function room for the day, or holding your creative sessions in a gallery or museum are all fun ways to inspire your team and build better relationships.
• Another wonderful idea is tackling a project in the community: volunteer at a care home for the day, paint a community centre, build a playground, or feed the homeless in a soup kitchen for the day.

Abstract activities are fun, but actually doing something worthwhile together can build remarkable morale among co-workers; especially in an activity where no one is an expert. Once back in the office, give your team plenty of time to reflect on how the learnings from the event can be applied to their work.

Developing regular exercises that emphasise that common vision, working on strategic plans and finding real opportunities to work as a team every day are the only ways to apply team building to your business; cringe-inducing trust falls not included.

A team isn’t a team simply because they work together - they’re a team because they respect, support, trust and care for each other.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Nina Marie Cresswell .