Hiring the best talent is one thing and encouraging them to work together towards a common goal is another. Employees who collaborate and corporate more improve the company’s overall bottom line and chart its path to success.
Being a manager is no duck soup!
Ensuring team deliverables – check
Hiring top talent – check
Training and development – check
Maintaining a safe environment – check
Building team efficiency and employee engagement … eh?
Employee engagement is the secret ingredient to any company’s success. Believe it or not, highly engaged employees consistently outperform the competition regarding profits, productivity, and turnover.
Such personnel are always excited about their work and committed to contributing to the company’s progress. And a distinctive way to achieve better employee engagement is through team-building activities.
In human resource management and organisational behaviour parlance, team building refers to high-interaction activities that enable work teams to achieve better results, meet team goals, and accomplish work tasks.
With firms implementing a hybrid working model, team-building activities have become a pressing necessity to help keep their workers connected no matter where they are. However, team-building activities like virtual town halls, dress-up parties, jigsaw puzzles, escape rooms, and trust falls have become dull and lame!
Here is a round-up of some super-interactive and unusual team-building activities that can reap a range of benefits to put your worries to rest.
It’s a drill – business simulation games
Simulation games are a wonderful blend of fun and learning aspects. It’s a team-building activity through which game-based thinking and tools are used strategically in a non-game context for increasing engagement and positive outcomes.
These days, instead of following the set pattern of employee engagement, many companies are choosing to tread off the beaten path. This is where Dare2Compete came up with the introduction of business simulation games that vividly depict the daily workings of any role in particular.
A perfect way to test your employees’ management and business strategy skills is by putting them through a virtual setup of a real-life business scenario. If you want, you can choose from the list of available Business Simulations or have the D2C Team curate one for you based on your need.
Boogie-woogie with a flash mob dance
Flash mob has made its way into the C-suite world! They are becoming increasingly popular to achieve a variety of business objectives. Flash mobs help foster a bond between co-workers, promote team spirit, and rejuvenate the workforce as a low-cost team-building activity.
And, if you have your office T-Shirts/pullovers, hop into them and use flash mobs for marketing purposes and social sharing. Encourage the teams to break out their dance and brighten everyone’s day around.
Plan a few rehearsals of simple dancing steps, and you’re good to go!
What about dancing together daily for 5 minutes before starting work? After all, having a lovely time dancing to the music while simultaneously reaping the health advantages is a great combination. Please give it a thought!
Let’s play shark tank; because ideas are glamorous
Encourage everyone on your team to open up their cabinet of creative ideas. Designed in line with the television series Shark Tank, this team-building activity is a great way to foster a culture of open communication and to show your employees that their ideas are valued.
Please give them the liberty to present their concept using diagrams, PowerPoint, live models, skits, etc., thus making them feel the room to do extraordinary things.
Because you never know when their outrageous ideas can quickly turn into high-performing products or the next significant innovation. Perfect for a hybrid working model, this one of the unusual team building activities should challenge their strategic and creative thinking and communication skills.
What about giphy wars?
The best and (most fun) remote team-building activity ever! A GIF war is simply what it sounds like: a challenge to discover the best GIF to fit a given theme. Make sure you first curate and share the prompt/template on a common platform based on a theme of your choice.
The voting lines will open once everyone has submitted their gifs! Play with the rounds, tiebreakers, rules, and prizes to spice things up.
Trust us; this is as exciting as it sounds!
Please tell me my name!
This is an activity that can surpass your expectations of employee engagement. In this game, the employees write the name of a well-known celebrity on a sticky note and place it on the forehead or back of another employee such that, except them, the rest of the group can see the tag. The creative part comes next!
The participants go around asking creative questions related to their names. The first person to guess the name written on their note wins.
All in all, this is a must-have ice breaker for people that don’t know each other!
The power of positivity
Staying together when the business is booming is easy, but binding in together through setbacks is something that every company looks forward to. This exercise is spot on!
Pair up the players. Ask one member to describe a negative experience (work-related or personal) with another member. Now, ask the former member to recount the same experience again, this time focusing on the positives. Repeat with another member.
This will inculcate a spirit of togetherness, positivity, and sticking together in bad times.
Dare not to laugh
An ultimate challenge to play along to build a personal bond between team members. The idea is simple: The team members have to prove how long they can be without laughing WHEN THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO LAUGH!
The person who lasts the longest wins!
Get ‘back’ to the drawing board
A team-building activity that will take everyone a trip down memory lane! Probably to the time when you celebrated your birthday in Grade 4. Just like that, divide the employers into teams of two, with each pair sitting with their backs touching each other.
One of them is given a shape, and the other is given a sheet of paper and a pen. The former must verbally give instructions to the partner without revealing the ‘name’ of the image/shape. The task for the latter is to draw it out on paper. The team with the best image replica wins.
What did you just say?
A fun team-building game for a large group of people where the players are arranged in a circle or a line. The first player whispers a message into the ears of the second person, which is passed on to the next in a similar manner.
The fun part is that when the message reaches the last person, they speak it aloud to the entire group, which is then compared to the original message spoken by the first person in the chain. The end message is usually full of errors and humorously has an altogether different meaning.
This activity has no winner and acts as a perfect ground for bonding between the teammates.
Memory memory everywhere
Memory Wall is an excellent way to appreciate your team, celebrate their accomplishments, and build camaraderie among team members. Ask your team to write or sketch their memories with other team members. Please give them the liberty to pair with other members and work on the details together.
Once the activity is over, ask them to put their sheets on a wall, thus creating a memory wall. Go to the wall, select memories randomly, and call out the person to share them with the rest of the team.
Club this activity with happy hours – give it a try!
Image: Unsplash
Team-building activities – do it the right way!
There is an overabundance of articles on why team-building activities matter, but here is how to incorporate them into your company effectively.
Here are the 5 best tips to go about team building.
Create a rewarding and great place to work
Rewards spur people to work harder and be more productive. According to Globoforce, 78 percent of employees feel more productive after being rewarded and recognised.
But merely telling your employees “Well done” might lose its charm within some hours or days. The not-so-magic formula shows them you appreciate their efforts more tangibly and uniquely.
Give a handwritten note, give thoughtful gifts like gift cards or flowers, or take them out for dinner. Get your creative juices flowing and make your employees happier!
(What about featuring them in your blog or newsletters?)
Work out career paths
Providing opportunities for growth can create an employee-centric culture and increase employee engagement in your workforce. Show them a blueprint of short-term and long-term roadmap to help them advance in their careers and reach their dream position.
Define the smaller steps they need to take. If required, outsource training programs to help them garner the skills to climb up the corporate ladder.
Setting yearly performance goals can give a positive push to your team to work cohesively and collaboratively.
Value them, or your competitors will!
Valuing your employees is not an annual activity but a daily habit. Employees who feel valued are enthusiastic about their work and are more likely to hold themselves accountable for their tasks.
One of the easiest ways to remind them how much you value the things they do is by giving them as many opportunities as you can. This will enable them to grow and succeed and inspire others to go above and beyond for the organisation.
It is equally important to show your team that their co-workers and management are appreciated. So, if any co-worker or customer compliments their efforts, do not keep it to yourself. Share the praise with the respective employee!
Cultivate an open environment…
…because no one wants to upset their boss!
Create an environment where your team feels comfortable opening up. This will build stronger bonds between employees and encourage them to have honest conversations with you.
For this, you don’t need to conduct team-building activities focused only at work. Forget work for a bit and let your team loosen up. Provide open-ended time for your team to talk about things other than the office. Help them de-stress and prioritise work-life balance.
Do you know the hidden benefits of getting your employees to speak up? It will speed up your organisation’s success. How? Try it for yourself!
What about practising this habit in general? Let them schedule their own work hours.
Motivate everyone to get involved
A team’s success is dependent on every team member working collaboratively towards a common goal. Design a team-building activity that requires every team member to participate—for instance, asking questions or making them share one bizarre fact about them.
Choosing unusual team-building activities so that no one is left behind is important to make them feel everyone is treated equally.
In Summary
Activities like these unusual team building activities are critical for a successful business since they help develop and strengthen the company culture. These are just a handful of the unusual team-building activities that have the potential to raise employee engagement levels to unprecedented levels.
But here, you need to take a step back and check in with yourself: Are you conducting team building activities in an effective way?
So understanding how to successfully integrate them into your organisation is equally crucial. Hopefully, these tips will help you bolster your team to leave behind personal differences and work together towards a common goal.
Here’s to a cohesive team that communicates and collaborates!
About the Author
Shivangi is a storyteller by nature. At Dare2Compete, she tells stories ripe with promise and inspiration, and in life, she voices out the stories of our four-legged furry friends. Providing a prospect of a good life filled with equal opportunities to students and our paw-some buddies helps her sleep better at night. And for those rainy evenings, she turns to her colours.
