Team Building Activities

Tyler Hayden founder of our little store said, "Team Building is what you do with people, not to people."

Too often managers, leaders and facilitators get stuck in the rut of doing things that they think would be a great way to connect and build their team. But it doesn't quite work out as they intended. We've all been there at the office "golf tournament" (and we hate golf), or going out for "drinks after work" (and we have our kids after school stuff to tend to) ...

Solving this is simple, the trick is to profile your team and build programs around their learning domains. That's how we sort out our activities here at our Team Building Activity Store. There are 8 major learning domains. Once you know what your teams domains are you will have a better success rate in choosing team activities. To read more check out our article on, Multiple Intelligence Quotient (MIQ) in our Blog.

The essence of good team building is setting up a series of progressive events that will bring people closer together and help them to magnify their engagement. With that engagement comes a bunch of results that make team building a good investment of time and money. Here are just a few reasons to invest in your: team building bottom line.

• Disengaged employees cost the US economy $254 to $363 billion annually. Biggest sign of disengagement is absenteeism - costing $40 billion. Love to know what presenteeism costs!
• Gallup polls have reported an engaged workforce outperforms their competition with stats like: 86% higher customer service ratings, 70% higher productivity, 44% greater profitability, and 78% better safety ratings.
• Imagine what it would be like if you had 100 employees who gave 15% more effort on the job willingly - that’s like getting 15 free FTE’s.
• Motorola estimates it returns $30 for every dollar spent on professional development.

3 F's of Team Building

There are three major "styles" of team building. For many years in our industry people believed that "team building" could only realize the recreational or "fun" objectives. However, over the years more and more people have learned how to match specific learning outcomes with team events. This training and development approach creates a unique opportunity for team members to engage in "whole brain learning" to realize hard and soft skill development. The trick is to understand which of the three the express objectives in "doing" the team event you are investing in.

To increase your teams attitude and buy in of team building initiatives remember the 3 F’s - Fun, Fast forward, and Fix.

• Fun is probably the most traditional use of team building initiatives. And while fun is usually inherent in any team event you will do it sometimes can be the prime objective. Good reasons to make fun the educational objective include: group reward or recognition, morning energizer, orientation of new members. The biggest gap with “fun” that you should stick in the back of your mind is, not everyone has fun doing the same things (consider using MIQ)
• Fast forward is just like we used to do with our analog tapes back in the ’80’s. It’s all about getting to the good part as quick as possible. Team building can be an excellent vehicle to get your team to learn new skills, orient new processes/protocol, and build soft skill relationships. For your next training objective consider using an initiative task that builds the team as much as it builds the new skill.
• Fix is the heavy lifting of team building. This usually requires an expert hand with an outside facilitator (but not always). While the other two F’s are proactive, this is the reactive stage of team building or rather team fixing. This can come in various packages like: resolving relationship issues, communication problems, establishing accountability, and exploring ethics.

The morale of the story is: to get your team excited about “team building” don’t always call it what it is... rather integrate it into as many facets of the work that you currently do from morning meetings to performance appraisals and retreats to pot lucks.