Team Building Or Team Boring

Organising a team building activity for your group? When there’s so many different activities to choose from, how do you know you’re choosing the right one that won’t leave members of your group out in the cold?

“Having worked in corporate team building for many years now, I have come to realise and accept that ‘Team Building’ is a very broad term these days and encapsulates everything fromhaving a BBQ round at the boss’s house, to fun activities, to personality profiling and understanding team dynamics,” said Adrian Risely of ifindteambuilding.com.au, a website that assists corporate planning in finding the most suitable activity for their group.

Risely, founder of ifind Team Building refers to the site as “The Yellow-Pages of team building.” He created the website after years of working in corporate team building and realising how difficult it was for people needing to organise team building activities to efficiently explore all the options.

In the last 12 months ifind Team Building has received over 12,000 visitors and is neatly arranged into activity categories and the categories that are viewed the most, offer a good indication of what’s hot in team building right now.

“At the basis of any solid team is trust. Trust is essential to creating a high performing team, and in the presence of a lack of trust, team members will not share knowledge and will waste time and energy worrying about what other team members are ‘up to’.A lack of trust, which is often a result of lack of understanding of other team members, creates an environment of individualism, with team members working on their own agendas and not towards common goals,” he adds.

“A balanced approach to team building is essential, incorporating a mix of fun & theory based team activities. Team building is not something you can do in one hit or with one type of experience, but must be an ongoing and diverse series of team building events and workshops.”

We asked if there were any activities that are getting a bit stale and are there any activities that are completely under-rated or new?

“Organising ‘fun’ team building activities is definitely the trend and I think some focus has been lost as to what can be achieved by gaining a better understanding of ourselves and others and our roles within the team and team dynamics. I like to refer to this as ‘team development’ and there are a number of tools that can be used to assist in creating a better understanding and acceptance of others, such as Myers-Briggs, DiSC, TMS, Belbins etc.”

The most visited category is Team Challenges. These activities range from building billy-carts to 4-wheel-driving over obstacles to physical demanding ‘boot-camps’. “It goes to prove that managers are really looking to ‘challenge’ their people, and through this challenge bring the team together” said Risely.

Without doubt, Cooking remains a popular team building activity.

“With TV series’ like MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules it’s easy to understand what is driving this popularity,” he said.“A cooking activity is great for mixed groups as it doesn’t require the physical input needed for many other activities. It also offers the added benefit of eating what you create. ifind Team Building lists cooking team building all over Australia. 

It seems that TV has a great influence on team building activities, with the ‘Amazing Race’ category being the second most visited. “These treasure hunt style activities create a fun environment that require input from every member of the team to solve tasks and challenges while navigating to the next check point” said Risely.

Also making the top 5 are Artist Team Building and Adventure. These are both great team building activities as they can be tailored to suit different groups and different objectives. Artistic team building is attractive to employers wanting their people to be creative, think differently and overcome mental blocks in their thinking, such as ‘I’m not artistic, I can’t do that’.  Risely says there are definitely some ‘do’s and on’ts’ for organising the right activity for your group.

See his top 10 tips. 

Also for more ideas on activities for your group visit www.ifindteambuilding.com.au

Businesses in central London are being offered free bee hives to see if they will enhance office morale.

InMidtown, a group representing firms in Holborn, Bloomsbury and St Giles, said it has offered hives to 560 businesses in a pilot scheme.

The scheme hopes hosting apiaries will aid team building in firms and add to the urban food production.

Five businesses who have signed up are hosting 40,000 bees in eight hives on their roofs and terraces.

Employees of the host businesses will be trained to assist professional beekeepers to care for the hives and harvest honey.

Dr Susan Parham, head of urbanism at the University of Hertfordshire, will monitor the impact of hosting hives in a working environment.

Bee-friendly flowers

Law firm Olswang has signed up to the project and has a bee hive on its roof and another on a terrace in Holborn. It said the bees were a "very docile" variety.

"It just seemed like a great project and staff absolutely love it," said Sam Hudson, corporate responsibility executive at the firm.

Once a week 20 staff members don bee suits to check on the hives with a professional, and the firm hopes to harvest its first batch of honey this autumn.

"We are going to sell it off to our staff and raise money for our charity partner Coram. Hopefully give some to our clients as well," Ms Hudson said.

Tass Mavrogordato, chief executive of InMidtown, said the pilot scheme aimed to tap into the business benefits of hosting apiaries.

She said: "To ensure there is enough food from the off we've been filling five bike-lock planters with bee-friendly flowers since last autumn, with a further 20 planters installed along with the new hives."

Visualfunk’s belief is that everyone is creative yet this wonderful creativity is something that we generally repress. Visualfunk believe that creativity is a behaviour. It’s something that you do, rather than something you just talk about.

Their experience has shown them that people develop their creativity and their ability to innovate through activities that engage and exercise the RHS of the brain.

Doing creativity rather than talking about creativity drives the innovation that every team and company needs.

Rather than throwing everyone in the deep end and say ‘go for it’, they create a fun environment where people feel really comfortable and learn some how-to-create skills in the process. In the process, they get rid of the usual things that naturally inhibit creativity and ensure that what people achieve isn’t a pile of rubbish! 

Visualfunk believe that creative and dynamic facilitators are at the heart of a great program. All Visualfunk facilitators have a background is in both the corporate learning and development sector and the creative sector: visual arts/acting/photography/film/sculpture/design and theatre.

Each Visualfunk facilitator brings something unique that is outside of the norm and without the cheese factor! 

If you are looking for high energy creative team building, conferences, facilitation or a program that’s fresh and new, call the Visualfunk team who would love to have a chat. 

How and where can Visualfunk be used?

• Creativity and innovation programs
• Creative team building programs from 4 – 2,000+ people
• Corporate communication programs 
• Train the trainer with visual facilitation
• Graduate induction programsKeynotes
• Off site, strategy and planning session facilitation
• Injecting energy, fun and creativity to engage your conference delegates!

Contact Simon Banks to discuss your next team building event:

Tantalising Tuscany   Team Masterpiece   The Director in Me

Visualfunk:   Email Address   Visit website

This Ted Talk comes courtesy of Tom Wujec and outlines the benefits of a design exercise he runs.  Teams are instructed to build — in 18 minutes –  the highest tower possible out of dry spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and a marshmallow (which must sit atop the structure).

Team building exercises are a great way of boosting staff motivation and retention and should not be underestimated.

This is the view of Phil McCabe, spokesman for the Forum of Private Business, who insisted that conferences are vital for small firms, as they are an effective means of enhancing communications within a company.

However, he also noted that less renowned businesses may find such activities expensive, although there are cost-effective solutions out there if bosses are willing to shop around for a conference provider.

Mr McCabe added that team bonding is perhaps more important for smaller enterprises, as each worker is likely to hold a more vital role within the firm.

"There are businesses out there that hold regular corporate conferences for their staff, certainly quarterly ones," he remarked.

According to European Leaders, it is vital that firms make their staff feel part of a cause and good employee engagement levels can make workers believe that their best interests are at the heart of the management.

http://www.youatwork.com

The team goals should be easy.

Each team member should be able to identify a direct correlation to at least one -- if not many -- team goals. Make sure you identify key targets for the team member to achieve along with regular check ins and reporting requirements.

Professional growth goals may not be so easy.

For younger team members who are just charting their path through their career, identifying career and professional development goals can be pretty simple. Their goals can focus on getting to that next career step or at least to an "in between" place that gets them closer to their chosen place on the career ladder.

You'll want to identify goals like training opportunities, stretch project assignments, and acquiring new skill sets. Don't allow them to set too many goals. That could be way to overwhelming and become an obstacle to achieving success.

One to two professional development goals at a time will work just about right.

For seasoned team members, who are in the sunset of their career, creating professional development goals that get them to the next career step doesn't quite work.

Many of them just want to come to work and contribute their best one hundred percent to the team. For these team members, it will work best for you to tap into their knowledge and skills.

Professional development goals should be focused on how to get their knowledge and skills  transferred to other team members. This could be in the form of mentoring relationships, brown bag lunches to share knowledge, or creating standard operating procedures to document knowledge.