Strong teams lead to stronger companies, but knowing how to develop strong teams is a real challenge for many business leaders. It’s hard enough to run a business and manage people, let alone find ways to improve interpersonal relationships among employees. That’s why it’s a good idea to consider partnering with outside entities that can help with fun and effective team building ideas. Get your business all the benefits of better teams without the stress and hassle of attempting to plan activities completely on your own.
Join the Cause
It’s very likely that a good number of your employees are passionate about local causes in your community. It could be a charitable endeavor, something to raise awareness about a goal or issue, volunteering, or any other type of locally impactful mission. Speak with your people and find out about these passions, because they’re a great way to engage your employees and bring them together.
Let your staff choose the cause that you’re going to support and contact local organizations or nonprofits in your area that are working toward that goal. These groups will provide the structure for the event and you’ll provide the enthusiastic support – ultimately taking a lot of the planning off your hands.
For example, let’s say there’s a 5K run in your community to raise money for cancer research. If cancer research is something your employees have chosen to support, you could coordinate with the 5K’s organizers to determine the best ways your people can participate and help raise funds.
Perhaps consider a team meal before or after the race, or even running it together in matching company apparel. Promoting your participation across web and social media channels is a good idea too. That’ll have the added benefit of showcasing your business’s support for community causes.
Learn Together
Learning something new together is a great way to build camaraderie among employees. There’s something special about the shared experience of acquiring new skills. And in terms of planning, convenience, and cleanup, shared learning opportunities are fantastic for company leaders looking to do a little team building. Finding the right experts can take a ton of work off your hands and make engagement a breeze.
Think of this kind of activity as being separate from employee training types of events. Those are important and can help with team building too, but for the specific purpose of building better employee relationships one should look into other interests outside of work training.
A great example of a shared learning activity would be taking a cooking class together, perhaps with employees in pairs or groups of three. Divide your people up across multiple levels of your company to help bridge gaps between departments and leadership levels. Cooking lessons provide skills that everyone can take home with them and tasting the end product gives your teams a sense of accomplishment. This is a great engaging activity that won’t leave a mess to clean up at your office.
Challenge Contemporaries
When looking into team-building types of activities, it’s common to come across various competitions that pit employees against one another. Like weight loss challenges, for example, where employees compete to see who can lose the most weight. But there’s always a chance for inter-company competitions to backfire and breed animosity. Instead of having your people compete against each other, why not have them compete against one of your neighboring companies?
There are two reasons why this can be awesome. First off, your employees will be unified in this competition instead of against one another. And second, this type of activity could be a great way to get in a little bit of networking and positive optics alongside some of your contemporary companies.
As an example, you could develop a clothing drive during the winter holidays wherein your company challenges your three top business vendors to see who can donate the most clothing to a local shelter. Or maybe see which company’s employees can volunteer the most hours or collect the most food items for a local food bank. As long as it gives your employees a common cause to rally behind and outside competitors to defeat, there lots of different ways to organize this effort.
Additionally, an activity like this would also make for great promotional material in the media for all the companies that participate. It’ll make your firms look fun and active in the community.
Better Together
However you go about it, the process of developing teams that work better together can be made a lot easier with outside partners. Rather than planning an entire team-building event yourself, which can be a real pain, you can leverage activities already taking place around your company to bring your people together and find opportunities to connect with one another in meaningful, fun ways. All it takes is a little creativity and a willingness to explore what’s available, and before long your company will start experiencing all the benefits of better working relationships.
