If you want more out of your leaders and teams, then consider investing in them to participate actively in corporate team building. Team building games are effective because they help your employees and management teams become more comfortable with working together. Team building activities also teach important leadership skills, such as planning, patience and perseverance. Here are several effective corporate team building games that your employees will enjoy.
CHOCOLATE MAKING AND STORYTELLING
This is a team building game that allows your employees to show off their creative side. Anyone can participate in chocolate making, and it can be performed indoors making it the perfect team building activity year-round. All you need is cocoa powder, icing, chocolate melting pans, piping bags and hard and soft centers.
HOW DOES THE ACTIVITY WORK?
Organize employees into teams. Let the participating employees choose the topic from a pre-determined list or allow them to choose their own to guide their chocolate making experience. Set the timer. Give each team similar time to complete their task or set specific times for each of the topics. The chocolate could be judged based on taste, presentation and style. The winning teams could receive awards to motivate active participation.
WHAT WILL EMPLOYEES LEARN?
Staff members will learn the importance of staying of one accord when they are working together creating their chocolate story.
SHOW AND TELL
You may be thinking, “This is a children’s activity.” However, show and tell is a great corporate team building game because it’s low pressure, fun and allows staff members to learn more about each other.
HOW DOES THE ACTIVITY WORK?
Ask your team members to bring in an item that reflects themselves. This can be something like a family photo, recipe or an article – anything. Remember to ask your leader to join too – this helps them get to know their colleagues better.
Show and tell is an activity that can be done at the beginning of a meeting. If you want to include this activity in your meeting, then you should set aside 10 minutes so that everyone can show and explain what they brought and how its important to them.
WHAT WILL EMPLOYEES LEARN?
This simple and fun corporate team building game creates more strong connections in your team. This improves performance as belongingness is a major driver of mental fitness.
BACK-TO-BACK DRAWING AKA THE BAD ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE
This is a team building activity done in pairs and illustrates the importance of great communication skills.
HOW DOES THE ACTIVITY WORK?
Each pair sits on the floor back to back. You give one person in the team a picture of the shape, and the other person a piece of paper and a pencil. The person who has the shape will need to give the person who has the pencil and paper verbal instructions on how to draw the shape. The person instructing is not allowed to tell the drawer what the shape is.
After the person has finished drawing the shape, you should consider asking some questions.
- How well did the person with the shape give instruction?
- How well did the drawer interpret the instructions?
- What problems did both people encounter when they were sending and receiving the messages? Those are just a few of the questions that you should consider asking.
WHAT WILL EMPLOYEES LEARN?
Often this communications skill building experience can be paired powerfully with actual feedback and quotes from customers or team members. Setting the stage for the whole team’s engagement in transforming the onboarding experience of customers, partners, and users.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING GAMES
Corporate team building games are a great way to help employees learn to effectively work with their co-workers.
SOME OF THE BENEFITS OF CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES INCLUDE:
- Increased employee performance
- Elevated team morale
- Increased employee cooperation
- Improved employee attitudes towards work
HOW TO APPROACH EFFECTIVE CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING
The most powerful corporate team building games allow the participants to take control, make choices and actively participate in the experience. This participant-driven approach yields better results because the feelings of ownership and responsibility flourish. Overly-prescriptive team building damages the ownership of the team because people were just doing what they were told.
AVOID PRESCRIPTIVE TEAM BUILDING PRACTICES
The approach of your team building matters. Remember this experience reinforces your company culture so you want choice, control and participation. Assuming you want a team and leaders who take ownership, avoid telling them what to do in prescriptive team building. Otherwise you could create more dependence on being told what to do. Its your moment in time to reinforce the behaviors you want more of – not the ones you want to replace. Often leaders ignore that the medium is the message, to their peril.
IMPROVE PERFORMANCE WITH IMPACTFUL TEAM BUILDING PROGRAMS
Finally, games and team building must be connected to achieving feelings of:
- Belongingness (I am part of the team)
- Development (I am becoming more capable)
- Mental fitness (I can handle more with ease)
You want to find projects that smaller teams complete to apply the team’s learning and meaningful insights back at work.
Learn2 solves the corporate team building challenge differently. Dare you to ask us how.
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