In the past few decades, most businesses have transitioned from having a competitive work environment to one that focuses on teamwork. They have discovered that collaboration between employees helps their business succeed by delivering higher levels of productivity.
The best way to foster teamwork within the workplace is to use team building events and activities. Not only do team building activities help employees work together, they build employee confidence, increase motivation levels, and provide many other fantastic benefits. In this post, we’ll explain why team development matters and share the many benefits of holding regular team building events for your staff.
Why Team Development Matters
Team development is about turning a group of individual employees into a cohesive team that can work together efficiently. Encouraging employees to work as a team can turn the workplace into a much more productive and enjoyable work environment. Effective teams can also tolerate tight deadlines, work with less conflict, and solve problems more efficiently.
Successful team development depends on three primary factors:
- Team selection
As all employers and human resources professionals know — choosing the right employees to work together is a critical part of team development. - Team support
Steps must be taken to help a team accomplish their mission. This includes providing adequate resources, guidelines, and developmental material. - Team leadership
Having the right leadership in place is essential for keeping a team organised, productive and moving in the right direction. An effective team leader is one that the group respects and is willing to listen to. Having a poor leader can prevent positive team development.
Team building activities are an important form of team support, which helps the group become more cohesive. Some of the many amazing benefits that team building can provide for your team development strategy include:
Teams Become More Productive
Team building helps to improve productivity in a number of ways. Employees that participate in team building become more familiar with one another. They learn how their team mates communicate, what kind of personalities they have, what their key skills are and what their personal preferences are. This knowledge helps the team understand who is the best at certain kinds of tasks, leading to a productivity boost.
Employees also become more productive simply because team building makes them happier. A study from the University of Warwick found that happy workers were 12% more productive compared to unhappy ones. Fun team building exercises like the Bear Grylls (Survival Skills Academy) also make the team feel rewarded and appreciated by their employer — increasing both happiness levels and productivity even more.
Teams Find It Easier To Collaborate
Improving collaboration skills is critical to team development. Team building helps by putting employees into situations where success can only be achieved through collaboration. Participants in team building exercises will also learn who has certain kinds of knowledge and who they enjoy working with the most. The relationships between employees eventually become stronger, which makes collaboration easier.
Teams Develop Higher Motivation Levels
Successful team building helps teams develop momentum, build confidence, and feel good about themselves. This leads to much higher motivation levels within the workplace — a crucial part of team development.
Teams Learn To Work Under Pressure
One essential part of team development is getting the team to work well together while under pressure. If a team can develop this skill, they can handle anything thrown at them without having disagreements or personal melt downs. As an example — the Taken (Kidnap style event) is one of the best team building exercises for learning how to work under pressure as a team. Participants must work together to solves clues and analyse data within a set time limit to save a hostage.
Teams Become More Creative
Many team development activities require participants to come up with creative solutions to a problem. This encourages all participant to contribute their ideas to the discussion, which boosts creativity and employee participation.
Teams Make Better Decisions
In most cases, the best decisions are made when all team members make a contribution. This practice can be encouraged with team building exercises like Stocks in the City, which ask all participants to take ownership of the decision making process.
Teams learn to communicate better
Good teamwork cannot exist without good communication skills. Many team building events have a strong focus on activities that improve communication — helping with this fundamental aspect of team development.
