Team Building
Team building is an important part of business and there are many different ways to help your team work together more productively. You can either take them away for a weekend or just for a day to a hotel, resort or specific team building centre.
There are many beautiful hotels and castles in the British countryside which accommodate corporate groups and functions. You can even hire a chauffeured car to take your group to the function centre. This allows for initial bonding and for everyone to relax.
One exercise you can try while you are at your team building camp can be simply carried out with a few tennis balls. This exercise promotes teamwork as well as problem solving skills while teaching your team to adapt to a changing environment. These may be skills that all of your team already have, but putting them together with their workmates may be a challenge.
This exercise works best with groups of eight to ten people. Each group gets one tennis ball. The rules are;
- The groups are all in competition with each other and the group which completes the most amount of circuits is the winner.
- A circuit is completed each time every person in the group has touched the ball.
- Only one person can touch the ball at a time which means the ball must be thrown and not passed.
- If the ball touches the ground the group must stop for one minute.
After several rounds of the initial exercise, you can then introduce other challenges to se how your team reacts, for example;
- Remove one member of a team to represent a team member who has called in sick. The team with a missing member will have to work harder to compensate for their missing team member.
- Give one team an extra ball to simulate increased production and tell them each person can only have one ball at any time.
- Tell the team that they must create a sequence of passing which alternates male-female-male-female to represent inclusion in the workplace.
Team building should strain your team to think outside of the office but it should also be fun, so make sure you include a trip to a nice restaurant or a drinks tab after the day's exercises.
