How To Hold Successful Team Building Activities For Your Small Business 

Team-building exercises and events are essential for business development, productivity, and internal networking. Team-building encourages employees to communicate, thereby providing opportunities to identify areas where each member can improve for the greater good of the business.

Furthermore, team-building activities, such as fun virtual escape rooms, help employees get to know each other, strengthening team collaboration and camaraderie. 

These outcomes can only be successful if you efficiently plan and host the team building in such a way that facilitates positivity. Here are some ways you can hold successful team-building activities for your small business:  

1. Make It Fun

One of the purposes of team building is to break out from the monotony and routine of daily mandates. If a team-building session includes work illustrations that your team members attend to outside of team building, they may get bored and not participate to the extent required for productive results. Thus, you must keep it fun by thinking outside the box and providing activities they don’t usually get to do.

For example, you can include virtual corporate experiences where you outsource activity planners. With this, you can be assured that the activities will be well thought out and have tangible end goals. You also save time as they can execute the entire team building by guiding your team throughout the sessions while you also take part in the fun activities without worrying about driving the ship.

2. Encourage Team Work

Team-building activities root for teamwork, hoping the learned values continue into working dynamics. Some team-building activities require your team members to separate into different groups. This is when you can encourage the importance of working together as a team by identifying the common goal and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each member while strategizing execution based on these.

The other spectrum to encouraging teamwork is placing importance on winning an activity from a competitive standpoint that only facilitates win-at-all-cost attitudes that may go against teamwork. This attitude results in individualism, lack of empathy for the opposing team and, in some cases, cheating—all counterproductive to real work situations within your business.

Another method of encouraging teamwork includes discussing activities after the teams complete the activities. The team members can each discuss the parts of the activities that they found most interesting and the dynamics that may have been difficult for them. Such introspection helps each person realize aspects of themselves in teamwork within the workplace.

3. Go Offsite

If team-building activities happen where your teammates work five times a week, their minds may continue to be in work mode. As the activities roll by each day, they may not be paying full attention as they mentally write reports, remember a task they hadn’t completed, or even execute an idea.

Going offsite helps the team members to shift their focus entirely on the team-building activities rather than work dynamics. Ideas of spaces to hold team-building activities include nature parks, activity parks, or conference rooms.

Moving away from the workplace also helps team members understand each other without workplace dynamic lenses. For example, subordinates might not approach management from a removed space as they may be more comfortable having casual discussions with each other, particularly if the workplace structure is hierarchical. This is not to say that team members must have personal discussions with each other, but rather discussions that connect them from a non-status or work dynamic.

4. Create Teams Strategically

One of the advantages of small businesses is that you may be aware of the work politics, cliques, and perceptions that may form among your team members. One way of breaking such divisive elements is to pair and team people who otherwise might not have chosen to be in the same company. As people mix to perform different activities, they may realize they had misconceptions about each other or decide to let go of the disgruntlement that may have formed and work together within the business amicably. As a result, you help fix hidden grudges and keep long-term employees in the long run.

5. Reach Solutions As A Team

At the end of the team building, satisfaction is also derived from team members who created solutions to business problems. Involvement, appreciation, and acknowledgment contribute to motivation and determination to excel within the business.

Conclusion

Some ways to hold successful team-building activities for your small business include outsourcing activity planners who save you time and create fun sessions for your team. You must also encourage teamwork rather than competition, and consider holding your team building offsite. Moreover, create strategic teams and encourage each team member to contribute solutions to problems within the business.