Team building exercises can produce countless benefits, and you can even tailor them to best suit your goals. Though these activities are excellent for any workplace, they are particularly useful when your team works remotely from all over the globe. Let's look at twenty of the most compelling reasons to include team-building activities at work to help your team and your company as a whole be as successful as possible.
Though remote work has many benefits for employees and employers alike, there are also an equal number of challenges to face. For managers, it can create problems with communication, productivity, team cohesiveness, morale, and more. For employees, it can lead to a sense of social isolation, a lack of community, and a lack of deeper relationships with their co-workers.
Luckily, there is an easy solution to all of those problems: utilizing team-building activities at work.
Team building exercises can produce countless benefits, and you can even tailor them to best suit your goals. Though these activities are excellent for any workplace, they are particularly useful when your team works remotely from all over the globe.
Let's look at twenty of the most compelling reasons to include team-building activities at work to help your team and your company as a whole be as successful as possible.
There are a number of ways that utilizing team building activities can help to increase productivity among your team.
These include:
As we'll find as the article goes on, many of the benefits of team-building activities are intimately interconnected. For example, this type of activity can help improve communication, which can make your team more productive. Being more productive can improve morale, which can, in turn, enhance innovation and creativity.
Employee morale is an essential element of a successful workplace, as it's directly related to important factors like job satisfaction, engagement, overall productivity, and employee retention. Companies that have a healthy amount of employee morale tend to have engaged employees, healthy cultures, and impressive (and enviable!) employer brands.
When you use team building activities in your workplace, it can help to improve cohesion among the team and boost morale. The more enthusiastic your employees are to participate in team tasks and accomplish team goals, the more you will see positive results in terms of productivity and success.
Team-building activities won't just help your team feel connected to their co-workers, but they will also help them build connections with their managers as well. Improving morale is particularly important when managing a remote team, as it's easy for individuals to start feeling isolated and lonely when working from home.
Team building activities are excellent for increasing communication on your team. They give everyone an opportunity to build their listening skills, speaking skills, and even sometimes their writing skills.
Beyond that, they also have the chance to get to know one another a bit better, meaning that they will gain a greater understanding of how their teammates process information and learn.
Getting people out of their normal drudgery of the daily grind can do wonders for their ability to be creative and innovative. They can receive a triangulated perspective on work situations that they would normally struggle to see from a different angle.
Team-building activities are an excellent way to do just this. You'll find that their enhanced creativity helps them approach situations with fresh eyes and boost their problem-solving capabilities.
When your team works remotely, it can be hard for everyone to get to know each other well enough to really build trust. Additionally, if your team is largely made up of departments or teams that are newly created, it can create a lot of communication issues and make it difficult to get into a productive flow.
One of the most important things for teams to develop is a sense of trust. Team-building activities can be specifically designed to help boost trust amongst groups, such as obstacle courses where employees have to help blindfolded teammates navigate obstacles.
Another major benefit of team-building activities is that they can shine a light on employees with leadership qualities. During the exercises, consider taking notes about the strengths and weaknesses you notice among the teams.
Team-building activities can bring out characteristics in people that otherwise don't have an opportunity to appear during the normal tasks of the day. This can be incredibly valuable to your team in the future and the organization overall.
Increased individual and team confidence is one of the pleasant side effects of team-building activities. You might find that individuals are much more comfortable sharing their ideas with their co-workers and managers, and the overall workflow of your team can improve.
Not only will people have more confidence in themselves, but they will also gain more confidence in one another. This can have an impressive effect over time, boosting the productivity and morale of the whole team.
How your team performs during team-building exercises can illuminate the team's strengths and weaknesses as a whole. This offers managers valuable information that will help them create the most effective team possible.
Beyond that, you can also identify employees who seem to excel when paired up. The same is true with cross-departmental team-building activities– you might find that there are new opportunities for inter-departmental project teams that you hadn't previously considered.
Motivation is a tricky thing– when it's lacking, it can be hard to know how to conjure it. Without a shared sense of motivation, you'll find that your team is much less productive, and the company as a whole suffers.
Team building activities can help create a healthy, positive culture that boosts everyone's sense of motivation to achieve goals and complete tasks promptly. This can also mean that your individual employees are much more motivated to seek success within the company and within their careers.
Team building activities can benefit just about any type of group, but it is particularly essential for remote teams. There are countless advantages to working from home, but one of the drawbacks is that it can be very difficult to create a cohesive sense of community.
There are lots of different team-building activities you can engage in with remote teams, such as a virtual escape room or a virtual trivia night. Team building doesn't always have to be about playing games or participating in dedicated activities, though– even holding a coffee chat or a group lunch can do wonders for the shared sense of community.
When you have a positive workplace culture, it means that morale will be higher, efficiency and productivity will be increased, and employee retention will be much more favorable. On the flip side, an unhealthy or unremarkable workplace culture can mean that productivity, efficiency, morale, and retention are causing problems for your team and for your company.
Holding regular team-building activities can help shift your team's regular work routine in a positive direction, which can help to keep everyone more engaged. Beyond that, your company's culture can be reinforced by team building, which can have an exponentially positive effect over time.
Team building activities can also help support teams in your office by offering them a welcome break from their routine tasks. These types of exercises can really be a lot of fun, all while promoting teamwork, communication, collaboration, and more.
Breaks are important for promoting healthy habits and ensuring that your employees feel valued by you and the rest of the company. Beyond that, it can help increase focus, boost creativity, improve productivity, and more.
Engaging in team-building activities like having a dance party with a live DJ or doing a team yoga session can help support employees' physical health in the workplace. They can engage in physical activity without even realizing they are breaking a sweat, which can benefit them personally and professionally.
Physical exercise as a part of team building sessions can provide a healthy break from sitting at desks all day long and can also reduce stress and anxiety. Beyond that, physical exercise is known to help boost self-esteem and confidence, which can benefit productivity, morale, creativity, and collaboration.
Your team's mental health can also be supported by utilizing team-building activities. One of the major advantages is the way that these exercises can help to reduce stress levels by creating an opportunity to take a break and participate in fun activities. Your employees will likely return to work feeling refreshed and recharged.
Beyond that, they can also positively affect the mental wellness of remote employees, who are prone to feeling isolated and lonely. Helping them build relationships and create connections can boost morale and improve the mood of the team.
Conflict is inevitable in the workplace, but team-building activities can go a long way to help prevent future disputes and problems.
Through improving communication, building trust, encouraging collaboration, and having the opportunity to identify potential issues, you can build a more collaborative and cohesive work environment.
Of course, no team or department is an island.
Engaging in team-building activities can help benefit the relations between teams and departments in a number of ways, including:
Positive reinforcement is a method that involves giving your team a rewarding experience or stimulus in order to boost a variety of positive behaviors, such as productivity, creativity, and morale.
Team building activities are an excellent way to recognize achievements, provide feedback to your team, encourage participation (particularly among the shyest of the group,) build morale, and foster a sense of achievement. All of these elements can help to cultivate a work environment that is supportive and positive, that encourages everyone to be more productive and perform at their best.
Collaboration isn't always something that comes easily– it requires practice.
By providing opportunities to improve communication skills, learn about one another's strengths and weaknesses, and develop a greater understanding of how to effectively work together, your team can gain valuable experience during fun activities that can then be translated into actual work situations.
Problems always pop up at work that need creative solutions, and collaboration is often required to solve issues in the most efficient and effective way. Team building activities can encourage innovative thinking, help develop analytical skills, boost collaboration skills, and offer opportunities for managers or team leaders to provide valuable feedback.
Lastly, one of the great things about team-building exercises is that they encourage experimentation. In an actual work setting, experimenting can be nerve-wracking and risky. Through these types of activities, teams can develop stronger abilities to determine when the right time is to try new, innovative approaches as well as opportunities to learn from their mistakes.
Finally, team building exercises can also help to generally shift the mood of your team, department, and company. By breaking up the regular routine of the workday, you can bust through the monotony and give everyone a welcome break from the norm. We've already talked about some of the positive mood-based benefits of team-building activities, including boosting motivation, creating a positive work environment, fostering a sense of community and camaraderie, and encouraging overall positivity.
All of these factors come together to produce a beautiful result: a remarkably more sunny mood amongst individuals and the team. Though this might be less tangible than some of the other advantages of team-building activities, the effect is perhaps even more profound. Not only will your team be more productive, communicative, and effective overall, but you'll find that employees stick with your company for longer and deeply value the opportunity to be a part of your team.
One of the great things about team-building activities is that you'll never run out of fun stuff to try with your team. Whether you treat your employees to a rousing game of remote trivia or you work together to break free from a virtual escape room, these types of exercises really never get old. If you're looking for an opportunity to get everyone chatting and socializing, you might host a virtual happy hour or a pizza party.
No matter what the flavor of the day is, PizzaTime is here to help. Organizing a virtual team-building event can be complicated and stressful, and that's where we'd like to help lighten your load. If you're ready to experience the countless benefits of team-building exercises and events, start your order today.
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