The word team building used to be met with raised eyebrows and groans from employees and employers alike. However, in the modern world we now live in, it has taken on a whole new meaning and is being much better received than it ever has before. Why? Because corporate event management has seen significant improvements and workplace culture has evolved accordingly.
Despite this, there are still many challenges faced by leaders across a wide variety of industries in workplaces. By utilising team building events to their advantage, leaders can improve their interactions with their teams and beyond.
Main Issues Faced
While it is easy to discuss the merits of team building, it is often difficult to envisage how this will work for you and your workplace. By looking at some of the issues that many leaders face, it is much easier to see the benefits.
- Effective Team Management – there is much more than simple people skills required to be a good manager and leader. The ability to juggle many roles at once is key to being a good manager and knowing where and what your team are up to allows them to lead all members in the right direction
- Inspirational Management – many leaders struggle to inspire members of the team and ensure they are happy and content within their roles. Motivation and morale is crucial
- Learning and development – to ensure all employees are motivated and to retain morale, it is beneficial to have a training and development plan in place for individuals as applicable to their own goals, as well as the for the workplace
- Cultivating Positive Change – big changes in the workplace can often lead to conflict and resistance that can be difficult to overcome
- Dealing with all aspects of office life alongside the work that needs to be done – ensuring the team works well across departments and productivity is maintained during meetings with peers and management
- Friend or Boss – balancing the difficult task of being friendly with your team alongside being their superior and ensuring a level of respect is achieved accordingly can be a tough ask for new and old leaders alike
- Delegation – knowing your team’s strengths and weaknesses allows a better use of task assignment and encourages a sense of pride in team members as their own areas of responsibilities often come to light
Not all of the above my directly be relevant to your team and/or work environment, but the chances are that at least a few will tackle issues that have or even still are effecting the workplace. The best teams should be a well-oiled machine that is capable of performing without too much hands-on management from leaders. Instead of watching over the shoulders of the team, leaders should be able to trust colleagues to perform to the best of their ability, allowing them to focus on their own day-to-day tasks.
Team Building Resolutions
There are many more issues that leaders face, of course, but these are core areas that many leaders resonate with professionally. Team building can help in all areas where leaders may be struggling. Not only do events specifically purposed with this in mind allow businesses to get to know their staff on a personal level, but they can utilise the time from a managerial perspective to improve the workplace culture, too.
Long gone are the days of trust falls and ground hand-holding sessions; team building events are now designed to highlight the strengths and weaknesses within a team subtly, with an emphasis on developing and nurturing a lasting framework of trust and connectivity.
Welcoming in New Team Members
When a new member of the team starts, those first few days as the new starter beds in have the potential to be unnecessarily awkward; not only for the new member of staff, but also the team as a whole as they feel out the new starter not only professionally, but also their personality. Personality traits, what makes them tick and their sense of humour (all of which helps to build relationships in the workplace).
Many companies ask new starters to stand up in front of the team and give a brief overview about themselves, such as their experience in the field, any hobbies or interests outside of work and anything else they feel would be of interest. Very few people like speaking about themselves, especially in front of a roomful of strangers they hope will like them to make their integration into a new environment a little bit easier. There are better ways of doing this.
Ice Breakers
Breaking the ice is always the hardest aspect of having a new starter, especially if the new member of the team is naturally introverted and quiet. The worst case scenario is that colleagues mistake quietness for rudeness, falsely jumping to the conclusion that the starter isn’t interested in getting to know their new team.
To help combat this, as a team leader, it could be worth holding some small ice breaker activities where the team can not only learn more about the new starter, but also about each other. This way, your potentially shy and retiring new starter doesn’t feel singled out and they soon learn more about their new colleagues in the space of an afternoon than they might in a month.
As a leader, it is your duty to ensure that all members of the team, regardless of whether they started yesterday or have a decade of service under their belt, are all singing from the same hymn sheet.
No matter what your industry, your location, or the size of your team – the issues described above are consistent across the board. Team building is versatile to the point where it can be tailored to suit your specific needs, as and when necessary allowing your senior management team to highlight and rectify issues as and when they arise. With the access to corporate event management expertise, workplace owners, managers and leaders are much better equipped to deal with the associated issues accordingly than ever before.
