7 Vital Tips For Creating Team Building Activities

Organizations around the world are constantly innovating to meet the evolving performance standards. They invest tons of money in acquiring resources and recruiting the best talents, but they often miss out on one key point. That pivotal point is teamwork and taking measures to improve it by creating team-building activities.

In today's globalized world, working as a team is the only way to attain success amidst the crowd. Almost everyone is now in a rat race to grab the top spot, but achieving this is next to impossible with individual efforts.

HR leaders are now trying their best to bring their employees together by introducing various measures. However, most of the time, they keep aside team-building exercises because it involves a lot of effort like picking up the suitable activities, scheduling them properly, and more.

But if a few points are kept in mind while creating team activities, believe me, it will yield fruitful results in the long run. And here in my article, I tried to bring forth a few key points that can help you plan better workplace team exercises.

But first, let’s understand a bit about team-building activities.

What are Team Building Activities?

These are the various exercises that aim to improve the bonding between the participants and make them work together to complete the task at hand. Such activities also teach the participants how to focus on mutual goals by leaving aside personal differences and improving their collaboration skills.

Encouraging teamwork has become utterly crucial in today’s fast-paced work culture where everyone is competing against each other instead of working together towards a common goal.

This will not only hamper the employees on an individual level, but it'll also create a hindrance to the organization's overall growth process.

Hence, to help you make your team-building activities effective and enjoyable, here are a few tips that'll elevate your efforts.

7 Key Tips To Create Successful Team Building Activities

1. Host Such Activities During Working Hours

A lot of employees value their off-hours and find it difficult to lose their "personal time." As such, if you're planning to host any team-building activity in your workplace, then schedule it during work hours. You can put aside one or two hours for hosting team-building exercises.

Another great way to bolster the effectiveness of such activities is to plan them over lunch or snacks. This would be a great way to increase the number of employees participating in the activities. Also, when anything involves "FOOD," it becomes delightful.

Similar Articles: List Of Best Icebreaker Questions For Work

2. Focus on Key Areas of Development

One of your key objectives behind creating team enhancing activities should be to address the areas where your workforce might be lagging. These can be anything like -

• Lack of workplace communication
• Improper task allocation within themselves
• Neglecting new joiners and their ideas
• Irregular time management, etc.

Such problems restrain your teams from delivering their best performance. Usually, issues like these are overlooked when there’s a large workforce. However, with time these things turn into major roadblocks that are not desired in a healthy workplace. Organizing team activities frequently is a great opportunity to address such issues even before they become a problem.

Team building activities act as an ice breaker between employees, improves internal communication, strengthens decision-making capabilities. Overall, it helps in the overall development of your workforce if you focus on solving workplace issues through it.

Learn more: 10 Best Virtual Team Building Activities for Remote Employees

3. Take Suggestions and Feedbacks

Taking suggestions and feedback from your employees is another important thing you must pay attention to when hosting team activities. It'llIt'll make you understand where your initiative is heading and whether there's anything that you can do to make it better.

As an HR manager, you're responsible for keeping the morale high. It would be much more effective if the suggestions for the team exercises came from the employees themselves. Based on their recommendations, you should then create activities feasible for every employee. It’ll not only improve the participation rates but will also uplift the team morale for giving the best performance.

Also, once the exercise is over, gather feedback from employees about it and what they learned from it.

4. Set Out the Goals Clearly

It will help if you communicate each activity's goals to your employees before they start with their task at hand. All the participating employees must know how the challenge they are given is going to help them.

Doing this is very important. Once your employees know the end goal, they can collectively formulate a strategy to achieve it. Further, it instills a sense of transparency amongst all the members enhancing their team spirit.

5. Design it To Be Collaborative, Not Competitive

Creating team-building activities aims to strengthen the collaboration and not give rise to internal competitions. But to jinx up, the team-building experience employers often involve too much gamification turning the collaborative task into a competition.

Employees who are already divided into teams tend to do everything to beat their peers. This should be avoided at all costs. And the HR managers should also take measures to prevent this while creating any team-building activity.

Team building isn't about making individuals work within their own team and win it all. It is about fostering the ability of already divided teams to build a rapport within themselves and compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses to create a productive work culture.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how strong is the cross-functional teamwork within the organization.

Hence, whenever you're hosting any team-building games, always allow inter-team communication and design your task with the same motive.

6. Include Volunteer Activities

Another thing that you can do to create a great team-building activity is to make volunteering a part of it. People like it when they have a chance to do something that benefits society. Even your employees can engage in voluntary activities that involve working as a team.

This could be like visiting local animal shelters or nursing homes and taking up the chores there as a part of the activity. Doing so will make them feel good, and also, it'll help them learn a few things about teamwork while they solve real-life problems.

7. Shuffle Team Members Often

Initially, when you create any team activity, you can let your employees decide their teammates and divide them into small groups. You can keep the same arrangement for a few events, but eventually, you must shuffle team members. It will help your employees get to know their peers from different departments and learn their way of work. This is also a great way to help your employees evolve from their present status and build better connections with everyone in the workplace.

Conclusion

These were some of the ways that I think can help an HR leader create better team-building activities that resonate with their organizational values. As a leader, it is your job to bring people together and set them in sync. Conducting team exercises frequently allows the employees to maintain that sync and reminds them of their goals.

However, if you think you can add some points on creating team exercises at the workplace, we would love to hear them from you in the comments below.

Recommended Read: 6 Proven Types of Team-Building Every Company Must Explore

Working as a SEO Analyst and Content Marketer at Vantage Circle, Angshuman always stays curious and is passionate about learning new things. Got any question? Drop a mail at editor@vantagecircle.com