When your office team works together well, your chances of success increase dramatically. Effective communication, problem solving, and consideration for everyone’s needs helps create a supportive environment in which teammates can do their best work. Unfortunately, this environment may not come naturally to some groups. That’s where team building activities come in.
Reasons Why Team Building Is Important
Why is team building important? While it might seem like just another excuse to get out of the office for the day, it actually gives your group the opportunity to practice the same skills that make office teamwork even easier.
Building Trust
When everyone’s individual success depends on whether or not their teammates can hold their own, trust becomes a necessity. In many team building activities, individuals may have to rely on their teammates’ knowledge, skills, and ideas to make progress. This requires trust, which is often not easy to give. When employees learn to trust each other, however, they are able to confidently divide responsibilities to complete projects more quickly because they feel their teammates will continue to do their part to succeed. This can help projects move along more quickly and prevent employees from feeling stressed or unsupported at work.
Better Communication
Team building activities often ask participants to solve a difficult problem or complete a complex task. In some cases, they might have a limited amount of time in which to do that. That’s when communication skills become important. Your team will need to communicate clearly and quickly to succeed in these situations, much like they would at the office when faced with an important task or multi-step project. By learning how to communicate during a team building activity, your employees can become better communicators in the office as well. They will be able to explain what they need, discuss plans and priorities, and work together in a more efficient manner, helping improve their productivity and working relationships along the way.
Improved Productivity
It’s likely that your team will be more productive than ever after their team building event. In team building activities with a defined goal, like completing tasks or racking up points, participants must use their communication, creating thinking, and other skills to win the challenge. With that goal in mind, employees often have better focus and organization. This, in turn, helps them succeed. In an office setting, having specific goals and a little bit of motivation in the form of incentives and rewards can replicate that scenario and result in higher production levels. With better productivity, your office may be able to take on more projects and boost its yearly earnings over time.
Effective Conflict Resolution
As your team works to meet the challenge set out in your team building activity, there’s a good chance that people will have very different ideas about which course of action to take for the best results. In a stressful situation like this, it’s natural for things to get a little heated. To avoid a more serious problem and save time, teammates will have to use their conflict resolution skills to address the issue and move on. If they fail to do so, they will likely fail the challenge and leave feeling disappointed.In the office, these skills can help teams work together more smoothly and prevent working relationships from being damaged beyond repair or necessitating more formal mediation processes.
Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses
Team building activities can be the perfect way to evaluate members’ strengths and weaknesses in a non-confrontational way. You may realize that some people have natural leadership abilities as they organize the group and delegate tasks, or that others allow the stress of a situation — escaping a room, winning a scavenger hunt — to get the better of them. By understanding how your team operates and where they demonstrate strengths and weaknesses, you can place them in roles best suited to their skills and support them in areas where they might need it most. Using a team building activity as an opportunity to observe these behaviors can help you address strengths and weaknesses in a proactive but approachable manner.
Schedule Your Next Northern Virginia Team Building Activity
Speak to Bond’s Escape Room for more information and to schedule a team building activity for your group. Bond’s operates the largest escape room venue on the East Coast, with 13 themed rooms filled with theater-grade props and challenging puzzles for an immersive adventure. Escape rooms are not only fun, they’re the ideal team building activity. Teams will have just one hour to solve those puzzles and find the key to unlock the room, testing their communication, trust, and conflict resolution skills, among other important abilities. Booking a private group session at Bond’s allows teams to use the VIP Suite to discuss goals or what they’ve learned before or after their adventure.