Corporate team building events aren’t just field trips for your employees. When planned well, team building activities can provide a lot of benefits to company culture, team spirit and collaboration. It gives team members an opportunity to notice commonalities as well as celebrate and be grateful for one another’s differences. A good team building event will require a broad range of skills, insights and abilities, to give employees a chance to see different areas where their teammates shine.
Additionally, it’s a great place for employees to be able to collaborate and experiment without the pressure of KPIs, deadlines, sales targets, and the like. They feel more comfortable taking risks and experimenting because it is a low-pressure, less formal environment. If someone makes a mistake, it is a simple matter of learning and moving on – there will be no repercussions beyond that single exercise.
Here are a few ideas for activities you can include in a corporate team building event.
#1: The Great Outdoors
There are plenty of outdoor activities that can offer excellent team building opportunities as well as giving your team a chance to get some fresh air and spend time outside the four walls of an office. An outdoor team obstacle course might work, and plenty of places that offer ziplining or hiking will also offer team building activities and workshops.
#2: Escape Rooms
Escape rooms are cropping up everywhere, and it’s a great way to encourage teamwork because you must work together to escape the locked room. There are many different scenarios to be found in these popular attractions – choose one that will be challenging enough to require teamwork and collaboration.
#3: Corporate Volunteering
Offer your team as a volunteer crew for a non-profit company like Habitat for Humanity, which will partner with you to create affordable homes for low-income families. That’s not the only option, though – even a local community centre, homeless shelter, or animal shelter might have corporate volunteering opportunities – just make sure you get in touch well in advance of when you would like your team building day to occur.
Tips for organizing a team building event:
It’s a good idea to put together multiple activities – whether lead by another group or company, like corporate volunteering, or created by your own team and taking place at a venue or your office. This helps to create a well-rounded team building day that requires many different skill sets. There are also companies that will design a corporate team building event or even a multi-day team building retreat for you based on the team size, budget, etc. You can use a planner like this if you are having difficulty coordinating all the activities or choosing ones that suit your team.
To ensure your event runs smoothly, post a notice about the days you will be participating in this event on social media. For good measure, you can have each team member set up an email auto-response that explains they are out of office or unavailable for a corporate team building event.
Finally, make sure your activities are suitable for every employee. For example, someone with claustrophobia might not do well in an escape room. Don’t plan activities that will exclude any of your employees from participating. If you are providing food, you will also want to find out about any dietary needs ahead of time. Plan your team building event to be inclusive of everyone.
Corporate team building events can provide numerous benefits for your team, not to mention providing a break from the daily grind. It’s okay to start small with a half-day event if it’s your first time. If your office space allows for it, you can even have the event take place in your office building – no external venue required. The most important thing is to get started.
