Tell your spouse or significant other that you are venturing out for a team building day with colleagues, and you’ll inevitably be met with a pair of rolling eyes. For many, team building is simply a day off – it’s effectively like taking annual leave.
Of course, for those people who have actively participated in it, the reality is completely different. Team building in the corporate sense is absolutely essential to a productive team – and you’ll struggle to find many big organizations who opt against using such a strategy.
Additionally, team building activities have come on leaps and bounds over the years. You won’t be participating in some sort of pre-school physical education routine – many of the activities are thrilling to say the least and offer plenty of excitement, amongst the obvious team-building factor.
However, for those sceptics out there, it’s worth investigating team building from a more granular perspective. We’ll now take a look at some of the benefits associated with it and why more and more companies are going down this route.
It can integrate the whole company
This is one of those not-so-obvious benefits that will tend to affect larger companies. For anyone who works in such an organization, it goes without saying that there will be some people who you just don’t deal with on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes, these will be in the same department, on other occasions they might be based at the opposite end of your office.
Well, team building activities address this. It brings together everyone in a company and the knock-on effect is that it can lead to more innovative thinking. Additionally, it just makes the whole office sing from the same hymn sheet, rather than the disjointed approach we’re used to.
An office culture starts to be created
We’ve all seen the job ads; “join a vibrant and exciting office culture”. Well, if your company is to fall into this group, team building days can assist with this.
It breaks up the formal days we’re all used to and in general, just makes it a much nicer place to work. As we all know, the “nice” places to work are those which retain their employees and the ones which also attract the very best people.
Your office efficiency will increase substantially
Something you may have noticed so far is that we’ve just concentrated on some of the less obvious benefits and suffice to say, this is another one. Sure, we could focus on the happy-factor and all sorts of the other positive side effects that arrive with these days, but this benefit will really appeal to company bosses.
A lot of emphasis might be placed on the team building day itself, but it’s worth taking a look at just how your office’s efficiency improves in the aftermath. You’ll suddenly see the whole office becoming more productive, with individuals knowing how others work and how they communicate. Ultimately, relationships have developed substantially courtesy of the day, and this can be a huge benefit to the way in which your business operates.