Team building activities are something that many businesses have put on the backburner since the pandemic. However, they are an excellent way to celebrate your team’s successes and can be a great pick-me-up for staff, as we recently found out in London.
Some people find organising team building activities a daunting prospect. But in reality, this isn’t the case – they can be as big or small as you like. A team building activity can be as simple as taking your team out for lunch.
In this article, we explore the benefits of team building activities, how to plan team building events and ideas for activities.
Benefits of Team Building
With workplaces and working practices changing recently, team building activities are great, as they are highly flexible and can take place both in person or virtually. The main benefits are:
- Boost team morale – team building provides an opportunity to re-group and ensure your staff and colleagues feel valued. It gives you an opportunity to thank your team for their hard work, reward their successes and provides confidence within the team.
- Improve communication skills and productivity – it allows colleagues to get to know each other more personally, and develop stronger bonds and working habits. Collaborative team building activities will teach them how to work more efficiently together. All this combined will make teams more productive when working together. Team building activities can also be used to build employee’s communication skills by putting staff in teams with colleagues who they don’t interact with on a regular basis – improving interdepartmental working.
- Develop future leaders – Team building activities can be used to see who is a natural leader and who will step up and take charge. They also allow company leaders to identify any of their staffs’ hidden talents, which could be utilised within the business.
How to plan a team building event
- Define your goals – it’s important that you firstly set a clear goal of what you want to achieve from the event as it will determine the activities. For example, rewarding your company’s successes or building working relationships within your team.
- Set a budget – set up a budget at the start of the planning process. It can be as small or as large as you like, as long it is realistic to meet your main goal.
- Identify a planning team – it can be difficult to organise a team building event individually. Therefore, it could be worth delegating responsibilities. Gaining different perspectives on events, you are more likely to choose activities that everyone will enjoy.
- Decide who’s invited – this is an important factor and can be difficult to decide on if you work at a large company. To help, find out if the venue or the activities you have in mind have a maximum capacity and decide whether you would like the event to be compulsory. If it’s compulsory, try to find out people’s availability to determine a date and location.
- Choose activities – once you’ve decided your goals, you should have an idea of activities that will align with them. Try to choose activities that are interactive, engaging and collaborative.
- Invite people and market the team building event – the final thing to do is invite everyone. Create an agenda and send it around or just provide a date/ general location if you would like it to be a surprise.
Ideas for team building activities
Below are some of our favourite ideas for team building events or activities:
- Escape Room
- Mystery Dinner
- Office Trivia
- Exploring A New Place
- Memory Wall – get the team to draw or print photos of memories and put a wall to create discussion and camaraderie
- Go Karting
- Cooking Class or Bake Off
- Visiting A Museum
- Magazine Cover – get the team to make a magazine cover about a recent success or project
- Back Of A Napkin – draw the solution to an open-ended problem on a back of a napkin
- Charitable Activity – for example, walking or an obstacle course to raise money for charity
About the Eventus Recruitment Group
At the Eventus Recruitment Group we are award-winning specialists for Legal, HR, Finance and Accountancy sectors. Established in 2009, we have a wealth of experience in recruiting the right candidates with the skills and efficiency to help businesses thrive across the UK. If you would like support with recruiting, please click here to contact us. To view our latest jobs or if you are looking for your next role, please click here.
We are currently recruiting for a Recruitment Resourcer to join us here at The Eventus Recruitment Group in Lancaster. All employees benefit from fantastic team building events and incentives. Click here for more details.
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