It’s no secret that teams that trust each other work better. Here are 7 reasons that underline the importance of team building when building a high-performing – and happy – team.
Rather than your office or your equipment, it’s your people that are your greatest asset in business. Your employees are the lifeblood that keeps your company going and growing.
Keeping your team members engaged and happy through team building is an easy way to ensure your company goals are hit.
Let’s get into some specific reasons why team building is important for your organisation:
1. Save Time by Building Camaraderie
If you don’t take the initiative to organise events that help your team bond, it will take a long time for your team members to build up a high level of trust with one another. If you’re short on ideas, here are 49 team building activities to get you started.
Particularly with remote working becoming commonplace, it’s hard for team members to get to know each other when there are no longer communal physical spaces for them to bump into each other.
However, according to research conducted by Google, the highest performing teams have the highest amount of internal trust between them. Trust evolves from being vulnerable around your peers.
A team-building event is a great way of building that trust quickly as it often requires team members to be vulnerable with one another as they go through a range of different activities.
2. All Work And No Play Makes For Unproductive People
If your employees are constantly working without the chance to have some fun – well, then life will be pretty boring. On the other hand, having something to look forward to such as a team-building event will be motivating for everyone involved.
Work can get stressful, especially in a post-COVID world where people are more worried than ever about things such as job security.
Globally, we’re facing the biggest drop in GDP growth since the Great Depression. This is leading to higher levels of stress among employees across all companies. This increases the importance of team building as a way of decreasing stress, which will help to increase the productivity of employees.
HR managers now need to make sure they monitor the mental health and happiness of their teams. Even simple things like icebreaker games can help to alleviate stress in the workplace.
3. Team Building Exercises Create Better Communication Across Teams
A common goal for managers trying to build effective teams is for them to have a clearer two-way path of communication across the company. Breaking everyone into smaller groups during a team-building day can help foster better relationships between teams as they tackle different challenges.
Many team-building challenges involve solving puzzles or obstacles as a group, creating the perfect environment for teams to collaborate on solving these together.
This new improved relationship will carry back over into the office environment (and it applies for remote teams as well).
4. Foster Strong Company Culture
Every good CEO knows that maintaining a strong company culture creates an environment for company success.
Team building activities create an atmosphere of competition and pride that can quickly foster the team focused relationships that company culture is typically built on.
Building a strong company culture pays a lot of dividends to a company in the long term. It makes the company a more desirable place to work which can then attract better quality candidates in the hiring process.
5. Welcome New Employees
Onboarding new employees can be quite a challenge. A really fun and simple way to make them feel a part of the team is to create time for a team-building experience where they can get to know their co-workers quickly.
This can be planned for the end of their onboarding training – typically within two to four weeks of joining the company.
The relaxed social environment of a team-building event will make it easier for new employees to form connections with people from across the company in different departments.
6. Improve The Bottom Line
Team building has a direct impact on the profits of a company. If your people are unhappy, you’ll find yourself having to look for new ones more often as they quit and look for better roles.
Keeping retention high will keep your profits high, as recruiting and training new employees is a very expensive and time-consuming process.
It will also keep productivity high. Retained employees are more valuable to a company as they build up knowledge of how to best operate within their roles.
7. Build High Performing Teams
All of these team-building insights should help you now understand that team building can lead to creating a high performing team that will get your company where it needs to go sooner.
If you’re looking to build the best performing team within your organisation, then we encourage you to put together some team building activities.
Even if your team is working remotely, you can check out virtual team building services to bring teams closer together on a weekly basis.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, by this point, the importance of team building on a regular basis should be abundantly clear. Not only will it make for a happier, more productive team, but it will also be great for the bottom line of the business.
It’s one of the best ways to bring your team closer together and the most important investment when it comes to creating a culture of effective communication.
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