Awesome Team Building Activities to Improve Employee Engagement

Vartika Kashyap November 20, 2020

“Individual commitment to a group effort–that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” —Vince Lombardi.

One of the most important job responsibilities of any good team manager is to combine your experience and managerial skills in a way so as to get the best out of each and every team member.

However, a team is composed of different people with varied backgrounds, working styles, personalities, and perspectives towards work and life. Keeping together a diverse bunch of individuals is a challenging task, but this is where you have an opportunity to prove your competency.

Before you can get your team to work together as a cohesive unit, you’d need to build a team and a strong one. Remember, a scattered team is not going to get you expected results and you are more likely to face frequent challenges in keeping the flock together.

As the Chief Marketing Officer at ProofHub, I firmly believe that the team that plays together also works together with great dedication. That’s why we prioritize organizing team building activities to improve employee engagement, improve internal communication and productivity, boost morale, and most importantly promote employees bonding with each other.

Mentioned below are some amazingly effective team-building exercises that have yielded excellent results for my team to take employee engagement and teamwork to a new level. I hope they can help you as well.

Ice-breakers

New employees usually find it tough to start conversations with others when they join. To make them feel like a part of the team, organizing “Ice-breakers” can prove to be of great help. Encourage new employees to participate actively in team meetings and training sessions.

Get new employees involved sharing even the small achievements (both work and personal) with the rest of the team to familiarize with the rest of the co-workers and know them better.

Problem Solving

Activities like these help employees to show how good (or mediocre) they are in reacting to certain challenging situations at work. It’s important to choose the right problem-solving activities because it will help to distinguish between highly skilled workers and the weak links of the pack.

Team managers can organize a half-day workshop where ‘worst-case scenarios’ are put in front of the employees. Your staff would need to work together to find a reliable solution to the problems to succeed.

Coaching

Team building exercises do not always mean playing games, singing songs, eating, and dancing together. Various studies have shown that engaged employees would rather have coaching sessions conducted by a manager or coworker than any other form of learning and development.

Even professional development can be a part of the team-building process, provided it is done in the right way. Learning together has been found to improve team bonding and know more about your team members.

Outdoor Activities

The fact is that employees want to move out of the regular offices to break the monotony. For instance, with my team in particular, we regularly move out to places with natural surroundings whenever possible as it has a calming effect as compared to polluted and congested urban areas.

There are so many outdoor activities to choose from; you can get ideas from your workforce about activities they’d like to participate in. Trekking, rafting, picnics, wall climbing, volleyball, and other outdoor activities encourage employees to perform as a unit.

Serve The Community

Team building is not restricted to doing something to reach organizational goals only. Giving back feels good! Both the employer and the employee can benefit from serving the community.

Companies can collaborate with local non-profit organizations and encourage employees to volunteer for a social cause. Taking an active part in charitable events can help enhance the image of the company as well as that of its employees.

In Summary

As an individual team manager, there’s only so much you can get done in a given day. The idea of team building is to get your team together to perform diverse activities that help to improve communication and promote team spirit within the organization.

For team building ideas to be effective, the management should identify issues that are being faced by their group. Activities can then be planned that help to resolve these issues directly.

Try to make team building a regular part of a routine corporate culture instead of an occasional, once-a-year event.

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