Building a successful team and maintaining staff morale has become more important over recent times as the Covid pandemic has forced employees to work from home rather than in corporate offices.
The challenges of remote working
Although large numbers of people have been double vaccinated, there is still a significant number of employees who are mainly home-based and only make occasional visits to their corporate offices. This can engender a feeling of isolation and separation from the business which can reduce the effectiveness of teamwork and have a negative impact on productivity.
It is particularly difficult for new members of staff to join a business as they are likely to have add online interviews to win their new job and have never met their new managers or colleagues before actually starting their new job. Leaving one employer on a Friday and then joining another on the following Monday without leaving their study at home, must be confusing and difficult to transition from one corporate culture to another.
A more distributed workplace is now a reality that is likely to be adopted by many employers in the future, so building and motivating teams with a remote workforce will become a central role for managers. Team leaders and managers are likely to look for team building events to bring staff together so that they can interact and build relationships, which allows them to communicate better with each other within a distributed workplace.
Team building events should be fun
Corporate team building events are often held at venues well away from the normal workplace so that staff can be free from the normal stresses and strains of their work, are free to relax and thereby be in a better frame of mind to interact with their colleagues and develop teamwork and collaboration.
Above all, team building events should be fun, although many are also challenging as a group of people working under difficult circumstances come together in a common purpose to complete the task, and without realising it, start to work together as a team.
Team building events can also be based around unusual activities which present new opportunities to the delegates that they are unlikely to have encountered before. If every delegate is out of their comfort zone, then they are more likely to seek support from their colleagues, thereby fostering a strong team spirit.
Many team building events create scenarios in which the delegates have to perform task such as bridging a small river, or navigating through dense woodland, however a way of making the challenge more unusual and fun is with an event such as axe throwing with Celticaxethrowers.com, which is learnt in teams in a very safe environment. Not many people have had the opportunity to throw axes, so it offers a new experience that can bring people together as a team.
Team building events must be well organised
Keeping delegates focussed and challenged is a core requirement in running a successful team building event. Although allowing for downtime and periods of relaxation is important, particularly if it involves free drinks and a cosy bar, it is vital that delegates don’t start to feel bored.
This is where effective planning of the team building event comes into play. There must be a clearly defined purpose for the event that is communicated to the delegates so that they know what to expect. It must also be planned sufficiently far ahead to allow the delegates to allocate free time in their diaries to attend.
Planning events successfully is easier when you use dedicated software systems such as Bizzabo, which offers comprehensive event management capabilities for all aspects of event organisation and effective delegate participation.
To round this up, it is clearly important for businesses large and small to foster strong teamworking and collaborative skills within their employees. In this new age of distributed and remote working, becoming a valued member of a team is more critical to prevent employees feeling isolated and under valued.