Having a cohesive team is critical to the success of your department–and your entire company. Why is this? And how can you do this?
To answer these questions, I interviewed Strayboots CEO Ido Rabiner over at Cornerstone, Inc.’s ReWork blog.
For my sharp-minded readers, I interviewed Ido once before, for a sponsored post on this blog. The people at Cornerstone thought his idea was so fabulous, that they asked me to interview him again. Happy to do so!
Hop over to Cornerstone and read: Team Building Exercises Aren’t Just for Fun–They are Critical for Employee Engagement
Unfortunately a lot of team building “fun” activities do the opposite. Take the scavenger hunts…how would this make a wheelchair bound or other employee with limited mobility feel included? What about places where the boss gets to decide how to define “fun”. Mine wanted to do laser tag. I hated the idea of aiming anything that functioned like a gun at a co-worker. Then you’ll have the coworkers that turn a “fun” activity into some huge competition, making it feel, for others, like high school gym class all over again. There just aren’t a lot of companies that do “team activities” well.
Jill, please check the comments on this post – https://www.evilhrlady.org/2016/06/team-building-that-actually-work.html
Our scavenger hunts are not just about having fun. That’s an important part of it, but not the only one. You get to know your teammates better. You get to know the city around you better. And you get to do an actual team building activity. It’s a sophisticated adventure, where the goal isn’t to race to the finish line, but to get the most points. And to have fun… 🙂
We’ve done over 1,000 events, most of them for fortune 500 companies, so if you are still skeptical about it, send me your email and I’ll send you a free hunt for you and your team to test.
Engagement is like confidence: it comes with time and patience, by creating the conditions where it blossoms. You cannot decide it, you cannot command it. Even the employees who feel engaged or confident cannot tell what makes them feel this way, because it is a very PERSONAL and intrinsic energy.
Team buildings can create a disruption whereby people experience something different is possible. But I believe -and most research on motivation show- that engagement requires daily care, over and over. Not caring as much about the people themselves as about creating favorable conditions where they simply feel engaged.