1. Intra-office Competitions: Organize informal competitions like sports or karaoke to encourage teamwork and fun.
2. Adventure Outings: Plan outdoor activities such as camping or trekking to strengthen interpersonal relationships in a relaxed environment.
3. Voluntary Activities: Engage employees in social work, helping them bond over meaningful causes while building corporate goodwill.
4. Creative Happy Hours: Host informal events like lunch outings or creative workshops to boost interaction and motivation away from work stress.
Employee engagement has become the key to ensuring an organization’s consistent growth and success. So, team-building activities are becoming popular as they enable employees to interact, have fun with their co-workers, and feel more engaged.
Employee engagement is the level of emotional attachment that employees have towards their job, organization, and their teams.
Engagement is crucial as it influences the willingness of the employees to learn and perform at work.
It is also clear that their relationships with their co-workers are essential to employee engagement.
However, building strong relationships with co-workers cannot happen overnight.
Both employees and management must invest time and effort in developing strong, lasting relationships based on mutual trust.
This is how team-building activities can help organizations to achieve this objective effectively.
The critical objective of team building activities is to get employees out of their professional mode and interact with their co-workers informally.
These activities help to improve communication between coworkers and establish a sense of trust between them.
They foster better collaboration and coordination between employee groups and help them develop practical team skills.
They understand the benefits of working together to solve problems and overcome challenges.
Most importantly, these activities help create a sense of belonging, safety, and comfort with their co-workers.
All these factors contribute to improving the overall engagement level of employees.
Organizations need to conduct team-building activities considering the differences in employees’ personalities.
It should foster teamwork in a fun-filled and interesting manner rather than being forced into it.
So, here are a few ideas for such activities that can ensure better engagement:
1. Organize Intra-office Competitions
2. Arrange Adventure Outings
3. Plan a Voluntary Activity
4. Invest in Creative Happy Hours
Intra-office competitions can be one of the most effective team-building exercises for almost every organization.
So, with various available options, such competitions are easy to organize regularly with high employee participation.
Football tournaments between different teams or departments or karaoke competitions can motivate employees to participate in an informal activity.
Another team-building activity that is becoming quite popular with organizations is adventure outings.
The informal and relaxed atmosphere helps to strengthen interpersonal relationships between employees.
The organization can arrange for employees to stay at a resort or camp and participate in different games and activities.
In addition, various group activities provide opportunities for team building in a fulfilling, exciting, and purposeful manner.
For example, a trip to a nature camp can enable employees to enjoy group activities like trekking, camping, rappelling, etc.
Providing opportunities to do social work together is also a great way to help them bond.
Especially, if the organization already contributes to different social causes, then employees can easily volunteer for such activities.
This can be a win-win situation as it helps co-workers bond over a good cause while creating corporate goodwill.
For example, organizations can work with charitable organizations contributing to adult literacy and environmental preservation.
A happy hour may not just mean going out for drinks or bowling with the team.
Happy hours be any activity that enables employees to interact with each other without worrying about work.
Making employees feel detached from their work can sometimes boost employee motivation significantly.
This can include activities such as an informal lunch outing, a movie outing, or even a cocktail creation course.
Selecting the right team-building activities is important to employee engagement and ultimately the success of a business.
The above ideas can serve as a guide, but organizations should always experiment with other ideas.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of corporate and entrepreneurship experience. In the past, Sagar has worked in leadership roles with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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