Team building is an essential ingredient to promote a productive work culture and create an environment where your people thrive and are actively engaged in what they’re doing for you.
Team building activities allow your people to connect with each other and form positive relationships.
The result?
Higher employee engagement and job performance.
To maximise the performance of your people, you, the leader, must do more than just create a team by hiring talented people.
That’s only half the job.
You need to implement deliberate team building strategies to unite your talented team to work in harmony to achieve the objectives of the business.
Your product is not your product. Your product is your people, so it’s critical your team is united, loyal and committed to each other and as engaged in the business as you are, to fuel and sustain a winning performance.
We’ve compiled a list of some of the best team bonding activities to bring your teams closer together and boost their engagement and performance for you.
5 Team Building Activities For Growing a High Performance Team
1. Personality Profiling
Understanding the people you work with for 8 to 9 hours a day is key to avoiding workplace conflicts and promoting positive relationships between members. Start the activity by having all your employees fill out a personality test or questionnaire. We use the test in Florence Littauers book, “Personality Plus”.
Have each team member share their results with the team. It’ll provide insights into individual strengths, weaknesses, and character traits, enabling coworkers to form better professional relationships as their understanding of each other deepens.
Our clients have seen amazing results from this process. It also assists in putting the right people in the right role, which further increases team unity and performance.
2. Brainstorming
Let your team get creative!
Instead of a formal/restrictive meeting to talk about a new project, for example, give your team the freedom to let their creativity “run wild” with a casual brainstorming session. Get the creativity and inventiveness flowing by encouraging members to participate without the fear of failure or meeting approvals.
We’ve seen brainstorming sessions uncover hidden talents and expose different perspectives that produce brilliant ideas and innovative concepts. Give it a try!
3. Team Appreciation/Edification Circle
Many recent studies have found that showing appreciation to your people/edifying them for what they do for you and each other has extremely positive results on employee engagement and performance, and it also reduces absenteeism and turnover. How could it not?! We’re wired from birth to need appreciation shown to us.
An effective team building activity to encourage your team to show appreciation/edify each other is by conducting a team appreciation circle.
Have each team member write down on a separate piece of paper for each team member what they appreciate about that person. Then each person is handed their “notes of appreciation” from each of their team members to read and keep.
It could be anything from a valuable contribution to a project, to bringing coffee and encouraging words they’ve spoken.
Edification – promoting anyone but yourself – has far-reaching effects for your business and team and if you haven’t tried something like this yet, I encourage you to give it a go.
4. Office Competitions
Introduce a friendly office competition where workers pair up to compete in activities that aren’t work-related – like entering an office team in a local sport competition, holding office scavenger hunts or doing an “Escape Room”, or even an office “sports tipping” competition.
Friendly office contests help break down barriers, create some common ground between team members other than work, form relationships and identify qualities like problem-solving skills or constructive thinking that can be applied to strengthen the performance of your team.
5. Remote Team Member Interaction
Team building activities are not only for in-house team members. With the rapid switch to remote and hybrid work environments, remote team members can often feel disconnected from their fellow workers.
While remote team building activities may seem more challenging, all it requires is a little creativity and inventiveness on your part as the leader.
You could initiate fun games involving coffee breaks during video conferencing to allow members to know each other – for example, you could have games like uploading pictures of your workspace and have coworkers guess who it belongs to.
It’ll allow team members to bond and interact with colleagues they’ve never met in real life and feel more connected to the team as a whole.
There are countless remote team activities on the internet, though here’s a great list we found.
Team building is just one element of creating effective and successful relationships between your people. If you’re interested in boosting your employee engagement and experience to improve their productivity and ultimately the performance of your business, we can help.
Leadership Dynamics specialises in employee engagement and leadership strategies to empower teams and leaders for sustainable and long-term business success.
Get in touch for more information about our services and training programs.
