7 Practical Tips For Creating Team Building Activities in 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of today's workplaces, fostering collaboration and camaraderie among team members is the foundation of success. Organizations invest tons of money in acquiring resources and recruiting the best talents. Still, they often miss out on one key point.

That pivotal point is teamwork and taking measures to improve it by creating team building activities.

What are Team Building Activities?

Team Building Activities are exercises that aim to improve the bonding between the participants and make them work together to complete the task at hand. Such activities also teach the participants to focus on mutual goals by leaving aside personal differences and improving their collaboration skills.

Encouraging teamwork has become crucial in today’s fast-paced work culture, where everyone competes against each other instead of working together towards a common goal.

Before we help to make your team building activities effective and enjoyable, let’s learn about the importance.

Importance of Team Building Activities

Great things in business are never done by one person. They are done by a team of people.
– Steve Jobs

In today's globalized world, working as a team is the only way to succeed amidst competition. In this race to grab the top spot, achieving good results is next to impossible with individual efforts.

HR leaders are now trying their best to bring their employees together by introducing various measures. However, they usually keep aside team building exercises because it involves a lot of effort, like picking up suitable activities, scheduling them properly, and more.

A survey by Team Building Hub revealed that -

• Creating team building activities is crucial for building teams that can deliver positive results by building trust, bringing employees together, and fostering creativity and learning.

• Team building activities has gained much more prominence in recent years. As more companies adopt remote work arrangements, creating a company culture with unity and collaboration among dispersed teams becomes essential.

• Organizations are delving into virtual team building activities to tackle issues related to teams working in isolation in a remote working environment. We have prepared a list of the 10 best virtual team building activities for remote employees to help you in this regard.

• Engaging in team building activities allows teams to forge connections and delve into one another's working styles, strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, thought processes, and problem-solving methodologies. These vital components contribute to the team's overall effectiveness, leading to higher employee engagement.

So how do you create successful team building activities? Before answering that question, let’s glimpse some challenges that may arise during implementing team building activities.

Recommended Resource: 10 Reasons Highlighting The Importance Of Team Building

Challenges In Implementing Team Building Activities

Creating team building activities can be fun and benefit the employees. But, they often present certain challenges during the implementation stage.

Here are some common challenges you may encounter while implementing team building activities.

1. Time Constraints: Finding time to conduct team building activities can be difficult. Due to busy work schedules, organizations may find it difficult to allocate dedicated time for these activities without affecting work deadlines.

2. Resistance to participation: Employees may resist participating in team building activities. They might perceive these activities as unrelated or a distraction from their work.

3. Finding the right activities: Identifying activities that resonate with the team and addressing their challenges at work is essential. You must be patient while finding the right set of activities for your team.

4. Lack of follow-through: To yield long-term results, you must follow through with your employees after the team building activities are conducted. Integrating the lessons learned during the activities into daily work practices is essential for receiving positive outcomes.

Now that we know about the challenges, let’s discuss some tips to resolve those challenges and create a successful team building activity.

7 Key Tips To Create Successful Team Building Activities

1. Introduce Rewards and Recognition

Employees are often hesitant to participate in team building activities. Introducing rewards and recognition into team building activities can significantly enhance their effectiveness. For example, incentivizing participation can encourage team members to participate actively and do their best.

Moreover, the impact of rewards and recognition extends beyond the activities themselves. It influences employees' performance and job satisfaction in their regular tasks.

Many organizations today use Rewards and Recognition platforms to their advantage for conducting team building activities successfully. These platforms are innovative, efficient, and customizable thus meeting all requirements.

Vantage Circle is one such player in the field of R&R. The platform can be white-labeled as per the company's branding. With features like customizable badges, a manager’s gifting wallet, and an engaging social feed, employees can be encouraged to participate in team building activities.

To learn more about how Vantage Circle can help you with rewards and recognition, explore here or contact us for a free demo.

With diversity and inclusiveness as a primary focus, Vantage Circle supports you in creating team building activities successfully. It enables you to include employees from different languages and backgrounds.

2. Take Suggestions and Feedback

Taking suggestions and feedback from your employees is another important thing you must consider when creating team building activities. It'll make you understand where your initiative is heading and whether there's anything that you can do to make it better.

As an HR manager, you're responsible for keeping morale high. It would be more effective if the suggestions for the team exercises came from the employees. Based on recommendations, you should create activities for every employee. It’ll improve participation rates and uplift team morale.

Also, once the exercise is over, gather employee feedback about it and what they learned from it.

Companies worldwide are utilizing survey tools to measure the effectiveness of their team building activities. Vantage Pulse is one such tool that allows you to conduct employee surveys and measure its effectiveness.

Vantage Pulse offers a wide range of predefined and customizable templates.

Using the customizable template, you can create your custom survey questions like -

• How would you rate the overall impact of the team building activities on team cohesion and collaboration?
• Did the team building activities help you better understand your colleagues' working styles and strengths?
• Did the team building activities address specific challenges or goals relevant to your team?

Moreover, Vantage Pulse also enables you to gather anonymous feedback. The platform allows you to reach out to employees to follow up on their feedback on the survey questions.

Employees then receive an email with their response, to which they can reply and have an anonymous conversation.

3. Host Activities During Working Hours

A lot of employees value their off-hours and find it difficult to lose their "personal time." As such, if you plan to host any team building activity in your workplace, schedule it during work hours. You can put aside one or two hours for hosting team building exercises.

The most successful, memorable team building events are ones that don’t feel like a day at the office.
– Forbes

Another great way to bolster the effectiveness of such activities is to plan them over lunch or snacks. This would be a great way to increase the number of employees participating in the activities. Also, when anything involves "FOOD," it becomes delightful.

4. Focus on Key Areas of Development

One of your key objectives behind creating team building activities should be addressing the areas where your workforce might lag. These can be anything like -

• Lack of workplace communication
• Improper task allocation within themselves
• Neglecting new joiners and their ideas
• Irregular time management, etc.

Such problems restrain your teams from delivering their best performance. Usually, issues like these are overlooked when there’s a large workforce.

However, with time, these issues become major roadblocks. Organizing team activities frequently is a great opportunity to address such issues before they become problematic.

Team building activities act as an ice breaker between employees, improve internal communication, and strengthen decision-making capabilities. It helps your workforce's overall development if you focus on solving workplace issues through it.

Related Article: List Of Best Icebreaker Questions For Work

5. Set Out the Goals Clearly

Communicating the goals of each activity to your employees before they start with their task at hand is crucial. All the participating employees must know how the challenge they are given will help them.

Begin with the end in mind.
- Stephen Covey

Once your employees know the end goal, they can collectively formulate a strategy. Further, it instills a sense of transparency amongst all the members enhancing their team spirit.

6. Design it To Be Collaborative, Not Competitive

Creating team building activities aims to strengthen team collaboration and not give rise to internal competition. But to jinx up, the team building experience employers often involve too much gamification turning the collaborative task into a competition.

When employees are divided into teams, they do everything to beat their peers. This should be avoided at all costs. And the HR managers should also take measures to prevent this while creating any team building activity.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.
- Henry Ford

Team building isn't about making individuals work within their team and win it all. It is about fostering the ability of already divided teams to build a rapport within themselves and compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses to create a productive work culture.

Ultimately, the only thing that matters is how strong the cross-functional teamwork within the organization is.

Hence, whenever creating team building activities, always allow inter-team communication and design your task with the same motive.

7. Shuffle Team Members Often

Initially, when creating team building activities, you can let your employees decide on their teammates and divide them into small groups. You can keep the same arrangement for a few events, but eventually, you must shuffle team members.

Shuffling teams will help your employees get to know their peers from different departments and learn their way of work. This is also a great way to help your employees evolve from their present status and build better connections with everyone in the workplace.

Finally

These are some ways to help HR professionals in creating team building activities that resonate with their organizational values. As a leader, you must unite people and set them in sync.

Frequently conducting team exercises allows the employees to maintain that sync and reminds them of their goals. You can also consider a spirit week celebration to help your teams bond and connect.

However, if you can add some points on creating team exercises at the workplace, we would love to hear them from you!

Recommended Read: 6 Proven Types of Team-Building Every Company Must Explore

FAQs

1. What is the main purpose of team building activities?

The main purpose of team building activities is to improve the bonding between the employees and make them work together by leaving aside personal differences and improving their collaboration skills.

2. How do you bring a team together?

You can bring a team together by creating a team building experience where employees can build rapport within themselves and compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses.

3. How will you keep your team motivated?

You can keep your team motivated by setting clear goals from the beginning, designing collaborative team activities, rewarding employees for their performance, and taking suggestions and feedback from your team members.

4. What are 5 team building activities?

5 best team building activities are - Blind drawing, Flip it over, Winner/loser, Mystery dinner, and Minefield. Check out the list we created to know more about these activities.

This article was co-authored by Nilotpal M Saharia and Angshuman, who work as digital marketers at Vantage Circle. For any queries reach out to editor@vantagecircle.com.