Team Building activities: The best way to build a good working team

Achieving good team cohesion and a profitable teamwork can be a hard task, especially when the company has many employees. In certain occasions, employees either do not communicate well enough, or are not informed of their goals, or do not have a clear idea about their tasks to be performed, etc.  All these circumstances discourage them, causing low work efficiency and in many situations, goals are not met.

In order to solve this situation, many companies decide to implement team-building activities, an Anglo-Saxon technique that has become very popular.  It consists in performing activities with all team members (bosses included), and aims to work in cohesion, participating in common strategies (above all solving problems within the team) and also works to smooth interpersonal relationships.  The goal is to increase personal motivation and build an efficient working team.

A principal aspect to take into account is that these activities should be developed in a location far from everyday life, because being in a different environment helps to release tensions and to behave in a different way with your colleagues.

Lexington suggest you some of the team building activities that can be carried out in order to improve the team concept and to increase the motivation of the employees are:

• Word games:  These games help to break the ice and bring together colleagues. It encourages team members to participate, even the most introvert ones.  Some of these games could be:

- In one word: Each team member would choose a word describing his or her job in the company.  This facilitates an initial discussion where everyone’s opinion can be listened.

- Find 10 things in common: The goal of this game is for the employees to get to know each other better, beyond the relationship they might have at work.

- Express meeting: Employees are rotated to meet each other over a series of short conversations lasting 10 minutes. This way, employees can know each other more closely, which can be very convenient for helping the introvert ones to participate and become more integrated.

• Clue Games:

- Cluedo:  This is a role-play version of the popular investigation game.  It helps to work with strategies and to practice problem-solving tasks as a team.

- Treasure Hunting: This game also helps to encourage teamwork, pushing everybody to contribute with his or her ideas and to solve the problems with the participation of everyone.

• Gymkhana and physical activities:

- Champion’s Tournament: These types of competitive games incentive an efficient teamwork to attain the goals.

It is worth mentioning that it is proved that team-building activities improve company results; since employees feel more involved and learn how to work as a team in a proactive and efficient way, which helps in the design of new strategies that can be applied to the company’s activity.  So team building activities are highly recommended for unmotivated teams as well as to improve even more the level of employee’s satisfaction.

 “Teamwork is the secret that make common people achieve uncommon results” Ifeanyi Onuoha