On the way to make one organization a successful business, a cohesive team of employees could play imperative role. Many of us will agree that high-performing team might be critical in organizations due to the fact that employees must work closely within themselves and bring effectiveness to the organization in order to accomplish tasks successfully and to stay competitive.
The goal of team-building, as a psychological discipline, is to inspire employees to communicate through various events that are motivational and entertaining. Team-building programmes give realistic experiences that empower individuals to contribute to common goals and improve productivity. Gathering employees out of the office helps them break down political, personal and other barriers, eliminate existing and prevent potential distractions. The advantages and benefits of team-building programs are of great importance that many corporations have incorporated teambuilding strategies into their standard training schedule.
Understanding the power of team building, Bild Studio top management, especially Human Resource sector, diligently works on empowering individual and group communication skills, developing trust and productivity. We realize that job satisfaction is an important part of a person’s employment. Being useful, being part of a team and having a sense of achievement are essential elements of happiness. We are convinced that these feelings can ensure employees to be at their most productive form. Being led by premise that happy staff is a most productive staff, Bild Studio founds out that team building activities positively affects the productivity of individuals, teams and in the end, of the whole company.
A big success of Bild Studio came partly from having well organized groups of people, where they work and act like one body. To create this type of organization a lot of water should pass under the bridge along with patient and personal knowing of each and one employee. This is where team building activities step on bringing the following benefits:
Calming conflicts
Conflicts among employees could seriously damage proactivity and success of tasks. Making team building events once a month, or even once a quarter, significantly will decrease conflict between colleagues and give them an opportunity to bond through fun activities. This will result to get known each other on a personal level, instead of purely work level. To prevent and secure highly successful team building activity, we recommend the ones outside the office and daily job environment.
To decrease or prevent potential conflicts, we use energetic activities such as paint ball, adventure park, hiking or bicycling where our team members relieve stress on a healthy way.
Trust development
A team without trust isn’t really a team: it is just a group of individuals who work together, usually making mistakes and disappointing movements. It could be they’re not sharing informations, or they’re arguing over responsibilities and rights, or they don’t want to cooperate with one another. Even if you have talented and capable employees, they will never reach their full potential if trust is absent.
Otherwise, where trust is present, each individual in the group becomes stronger due to the feeling of being part of an effective, cohesive group. Trust is of huge importance for each organization because it provides a sense of safety and when your employees feel safe with each other, they would feel comfortable to open up, they accept and manage risks more easily, they share knowledge and they are not ashamed to expose vulnerabilities.
‘You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.’– Frank Crane
Each team leader in Bild studio trying to encourage team members to open up by giving example and explaining how trust is an essential element in team productivity. Team leaders on daily bases ask their teams about their hobbies, interests and in the same time sharing some personal information about themselves.
Communication improvement
The roof of many team problems could be a poor communication which can lead to mistakes, quality issues, conflicts, missed deadlines or lost opportunities. There is several ways our Bild team communicate: face-to-face, by Skype, by instant message or by email. But we started asking ourselves, does it do effectively? To make effective communication network, we’ve been implementing plenty activities in order to improve listening skills, giving and receiving feedbacks, understanding messages.
“Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.” – Earl Warren
One of the activities that we used to practice is ‘Just Listen’. We form team members in pairs. Each team gets few index cards. One partner will blindly choose a card and then speak for three minutes on how he feels about the topic. As he talks, the other person cannot speak – her goal is to listen. After finishing, the listener has one minute to summarize what her partner has said. Than, the roles switch.
Teamwork increment
We can all agree that teamwork can have enormously dramatic affect on organizational performances. Strong and effective team can bring to organization incredible results. On the other hand, a team that is not working will probably cause working flow disruption, missing deadlines and delivery and strategic failure. Knowing teamwork strengths and weaknesses does not have influence just on organization growth, but on personal and professional development of each person in the group.
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.“ – Michael Jordan
With team building activities we can easily develop strong teamwork, where all members understands they have common goals to achieve and they speak freely about individual goals they may have.
Successful decision making and problem solving is the heart of effective teams. The organization without team building will eventually come to the point to implement these activities. The ones who already have this system within organization, should ask themselves the following questions: did colleagues enjoy the experience, what happened when your team members returned to the office? Are they still arguing over small tasks, or they refuse to collaborate with each other? The fun that activities brought to you and your employees might be nice break from business, but have you learned something from them?
Very often, managers plan team building with no real meaning or goal. This means to be a waste of time and threatening situation where managers might lose the team’s respect if they plan the activities that will not result with constructive lessons and help those involved.
Team building can be a powerful tool to unite groups, develop strength and discover weaknesses, but only and if the exercises are planned and carried out strategically. Saying that, you have to have a real purpose behind your events – for example, improving the team’s problem-solving or creativity skills – rather than just giving your employees a nice day out of the office.
Preparation for tomorrow awaits. We would like to write further, but this activity, as well as all the others, request commitment, well planning and teams engagement. Tomorrow we continue not only to strengthen ourselves, but to cultivate tightly knitted network with our partners, business friends.
Stay tuned, we will communicate again. ;)
