The core of every functional and successful company is not the cutting-edge products or services it offers. It is the team.
Your team handles every touchpoint of the workflow, from developing, rolling out, and maintaining a product to communicating with your customers and ensuring they stay on board.
Now, imagine what happens when your team members are disengaged and disconnected due to a lack of proper communication and relationships. That’s chaos in the guise of reduced productivity, work conflict, and a broken return on investment (ROI) curve.
To help you avoid this, we’ve compiled six proven innovative activities that will keep your team strong and help build a connected communication line.
Logan Mallory, Vice President of Marketing at Motivosity, “Tons of factors like just moving into a new workplace, getting a new boss or team buddy, undergoing a transitional phase at work, or being an introvert all affect team building and communication.”
The newcomer is reserved and feels too timid to spark conversation with the old guys. The introvert is socially exhausted and prefers to focus on assigned tasks while ignoring other things within the company. A multilingual team composed of people from different regions makes setting off a social wave difficult.
“These factors indirectly lead to social isolation since every member would rather go ‘Oh well, let me just keep to myself and do my job’”, Tim adds.
Too bad; social isolation results in 21% decreased workplace productivity.
Roman Zrazhevsky, Founder & CEO of MIRA Safety, also believes remote team members have it worse regarding social isolation at work. “Thanks to the rapid technological advancements and no thanks to the advent of COVID-19, more companies are going remote. That’s a structural shake-up putting team members thousands of miles apart. So there’s no more hi-five or the ten-minute discussion during lunch breaks.”
This makes it quite easy to feel detached from the rest of the team. And if nothing is done about it, you’ll only be leading a team of silo workers as a team manager. For a silo team, the best you can get is barely completed tasks, missed deadlines, burnouts, and a sloppy productivity rate.
On the other hand, if you do something, team building and communication can help you hit the roof. For instance, 63% of women with work friends feel more engaged. More engagement signifies a happy team.
And a happy team with a bond as strong as Hercules’ arm will lead to the following:
6 Innovative Activities And Steps To Foster Team Building And Communication
For Sturgeon Christie, CEO at Second Skin Audio, investing in team building and communication is synonymous with investing in your company’s overall growth. “You need employees who see their work as a part of themselves, your company as a place to be, and fellow members as a family. It is this inclusive perspective that fuels team productivity. And productivity fuels quantifiable results.”
Let’s explore a few innovative activities HR managers and business owners can implement to achieve this goal.
1. Launch Team Workshops And Facilitate Group Discussions
Team workshops sound like the ill-reputed traditional biweekly team meetings, right? They’re way different.
Traditional team meetings usually favor the dominators with the loudest voices or the most senior members. This means newbies with creative ideas or people who cannot present their perspectives in a dominant pattern are neglected.
“If your team members feel like a third-wheel at every meeting held, they’ll eventually disconnect, after all, ‘who cares to listen in the first place’. This limits team communication even outside meeting walls and results in friction instead of cohesiveness. Friction leads to workplace mistakes and errors that could have been otherwise avoided”, says Tony Mariotti, CEO at RubyHome.
On the flip side, team workshops are highly structured learning and collaborative gatherings that provide an avenue for everyone, introverts or extroverts, to:
communicate their ideas and be heard,
share perspectives without getting a dozen dark criticisms back,
and figure out their hidden strengths at no extra expense.
Beyond that, managers can use workshops to assess each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, educate teams on the importance of healthy communication, and train members to work together.
When running a workshop, do the following:
First, evaluate your team’s SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Knowing where your employees and their team stand ensures proper planning.
Set a smart, achievable, and time-bound goal for your team workshop. The goal could be to enhance the team’s problem-solving skills through joint brainstorming and communication, resolve existing conflicts, or prepare the team for new projects requiring teamwork.
Develop intelligent resources in different formats, such as videos, PDFs, slides, and so on, to improve learning during workshops. A physical coach must be in place to make everything effective.
Devise tasks and assignments for each cohort to handle together. This could include active problems in the company that require solutions. You can use a sprint template to make your team come up with solutions in a few hours or days.
Remember, the goal of a workshop is to facilitate inclusivity and enhance discussion between members via brainstorming ideas, solving problems, and learning about each other’s SWOT.
2. Introduce Team Building Retreats
Quick fact: Organizations with a fully engaged workforce often record twice the previous revenue.
That’s a lot. But you can pull such results off by treating your team to a retreat. No buggy deadline, impending submissions, and desk full of to-dos. Just you and your team in a cool campground.
According to Pierce Hogan, Owner of Varied Lands, “Team retreats are a more extensive version of team workshops. But here, no one is coaching anyone. No bossy HR manager or CEO. No learning materials or resources. Only previous work experiences and everyone sharing what they’ve been through at work so far. This approach helps team members voice out their fears or worries – a perfect moment of truth.”
During the retreat, you want team members to reflect on previous jobs done, each goal accomplished, the milestones toppled, and the records set. Talk through the times, laugh off the hard projects, and meditate on the difficulties encountered as a team.
Most importantly, aim to offload the work tension your employees have accumulated over the past few months. This ensures employees resume their desks with a light heart, happy to kick things off and set new records.
3. Go On Team Vacations And Tours
Unlike the basic team retreat, vacations escape the confines of location. So whether you’re managing a remote team or handling a set of hybrid workers, you can still pull everyone together and take a break to an entirely unexplored city or country.
Why this is a good idea is that you’re exploring a new place, trying out new cultures and cuisines, playing games you’ve never heard of, and taking a night stroll along the streets of another man’s land. Those are all beautiful memories and improves employee experience.
And memories build relationships.
Before taking a team vacation, ask your team members for ideas on where they would like to go or the activities they would like to engage in. Tours to reputable cities like Vegas, Barcelona in Spain, and Lisbon in Germany are all awesome, but you shouldn’t overlook other less-popular locations.
“By the way, most employees expect you to take care of team vacation expenses, which could be as high as tens of thousands of dollars depending on your plans. Take these expenses into decision-making while letting your team know how much the company is able to cover for the vacation”, comments Bert Hofhuis, Founder of Every Investor.
4. Volunteer Team For Community Service Day
When HR managers mention team-building activities, what usually comes to mind is tea breaks and virtual coffee meets. But there are other unconventional activities such as volunteering for community service day.
This includes cleaning up parks, organizing food drives, volunteering at shelters, or helping promote sustainability moves in the community. Letting your team participate in these non-corporate activities fosters a sense of camaraderie – where dopamine goes high, everyone feels accomplished, and each member becomes a hero.
Also, community service participation encourages teamwork, builds stronger team connections and communication, trains micro leaders who can adapt to situations, and helps grow trust.
5. Introduce Team Building Games
Games trigger our brain’s reward centre and make us feel good, empowered, and accomplished to do more. For a team struggling with reduced work motivation, poor collaboration and lacking problem-solving skills, this is a goal-getter.
HR managers can embrace games like Two Truths and A Lie, in which a member says three things about himself or herself, and the other members must identify which is true or false. This helps team members get to know each other better.
Others, like Escape Room, involve putting a team in a room, locking the door, and prompting participants to look for clues or solve a puzzle to escape within a short period. Since it is time-bound, this pushes everyone to work together and trains their problem-solving skills.
You can also explore:
Tower building: Provide different materials and ask the team to build a tower within a limited time. Grows creativity.
Scavenger hunt: Randomly scatter some resources in a designated area and ask the team to find them within a period. This fosters teamwork and strategizing.
Charades: Each member acts a phrase or words and other members guess what they mean. Enhances team understanding and communication.
Remote workers will benefit from “Online trivia”, “Virtual scavenger hunt”, “Charades” and “Two Truths and A Lie”.
6. Prioritize Cross-Departmental Collaboration
Prioritizing cross-departmental collaboration is essential for larger organizations to achieve increased efficiency and improved customer satisfaction. This is especially true because larger organizations have more sub-teams and departments with specialized functions.
For example, the sales team of a hundred-man freight factoring company should be able to communicate easily with the marketing branch to develop targeted campaigns. Likewise, these two departments should hold regular brainstorming sessions with the customer support team to gain insights into common customer challenges and develop solutions.
If neither of these is possible, it’s a clear indicator of a workplace disconnection, which can negatively impact an organization’s work chain at all levels.
To avoid such outcomes and foster cross-departmental collaboration, use any of the activities we’ve listed before, but this time tailored for multi-teams and more employees. Team-building retreats can become organizational retreats. Although that’s bulky and will cost more, it’s worth the investment whenever possible.
Companies on the scale of Amazon and Tesla might not be able to pull that off. But you can still run an annual company meetup where every employee travels down to an agreed location to hit off, network, and connect.
There’s no one-size-fits-all activity to build your team and encourage active communication. Depending on your circumstances and goals set, combine two or more activities and roll them out. You can also take suggestions from your employees – they have the best idea of what works for them.
For the context of this article, launch team workshops and introduce team-building retreats. Let employees share their ideas and thoughts with equal voices. Go on team vacations or tours to interesting places, participate in community services, and play team-building games.
Finally, prioritize cross-departmental collaboration. Neither individuals nor teams should go silo.
