What Makes a Team Building Activity Effective?

Holding a team building activity is nice and all, but if it’s not effective, then it’s futile. Not to mention that it’s a waste of people’s time and your company’s resources.

So what makes a team-building activity effective in the first place? Below are some factors that indicate that a team-building event will be effective and efficient for your employees.

Clear objective

For a team-building activity to be effective, you should make sure that you have clear and measurable goals for it. Otherwise, your employees will not know what it is they’re trying to reach for with these activities. They may feel like it’s just a waste of time.

Aside from that, it will help them to know whether the activity is worth their time. This is especially if you’re taking them away from their free time (if you hold it during the weekends) or if you’re taking them away from the work (if you hold the activity on a weekday).

Ground rules

When your employees are out of the office and on a cool location with no specific rules in place, things can get unruly.

Sure, you want everyone to have fun, but you don’t want to get things out of hand. This is why you should make sure that you set some ground rules beforehand.

For one, you should make sure that you communicate the goals of the activity so that they know what they’re aiming for. Aside from that, you should encourage everyone to be punctual, so everything is on schedule.

Relationship with employees

An effective team building getaway will be a success if you take the time to get to know most of the members of your team during this time. Leaders in the workplace should use this chance to get over the barrier of social hierarchies during this time and learn to function as a team first.

During the activities itself, try not to be the leader and learn to let other members of the team make the decisions for you.

Team performance

Of course, an effective team building activity involves excellent team performances from each different group. Thus, creating events that help develop these team skills is essential so that you’re sure that your team-building getaway is successful.

There are plenty of activities that test skills that are relevant when it comes to working with a group of people. For example, task delegation, trust, and coordination are three crucial life skills relevant when you’re socializing, especially in a professional sense.

Thus, you should make sure that activities tackle these particular skills.

Open communication

Communication is vital in strengthening every type of relationship that you have in your life. From your personal life to your professional relationships, learning how to communicate with people openly is key to building trust and coordination between one another.

If you feel like after the team building that everyone has become more open to communicating with people, then it’s an indication that the activity was a success. Thus, make sure that you involve activities that test the communication skills of your team members.

Organization

Learning how to organize right is a skill that’s important both in one’s career, as well as in other aspects of a person’s life.

With the help of a team-building activity and assigning tasks for your team members, it will be easier to learn how to be more organized. Your employees will learn how to organize not only assignments but also people.

Managing one’s professional workload is crucial to one’s day-to-day in the workplace, and it relies on organizational sense.

Will to take risks

Risk-taking is something that people should learn to take sometimes. However, there’s hardly a safe place to learn how to make some risks in their lives.

With a team-building activity, it’s a safe place to know how to take risks. It will teach people to have more confidence in the decisions they’re making.

Try to encourage more introverted members of the team to make these decisions, so they learn self-confidence in their choices.

Mutually accountable

The great thing about being in a team is that it teaches you to be responsible over losses together. No throwing blame and no lowering of morale. Everybody is responsible for the actions of the entire team.

Instead of sulking over the losses that the team has ended up taking, everybody should learn to celebrate their wins. It helps make everyone mutually accountable for the actions of one person, and it doesn’t develop grudges between people.

 

Holding events willy-nilly without considering certain things beforehand will be unproductive in the end. They won’t give you the results that you’re looking for. This applies to even a team-building event.

Make sure that you check on the factors listed above. That way, your team-building activity is going to be effective and productive and won’t be a waste of resources. You want to be able to drive home the point of the event. That is to make everyone closer to one another after all.