Wondering why should you conduct team building games and activities at workplace?
Effective team building means more engaged employees, which is good for company culture, eventually boosting the bottom line. It can also be exciting and enjoyable if you do it with a little pizzazz.
In this post, you’ll discover 5 hidden benefits of team building games and activities. Let’s get started:
1. Lots of Fun!
Team building activities and games let the teams come together to have fun at work! Creating a fun environment between coworkers can help in so many ways- from reducing staff turnover and sick days to increasing productivity and, in turn, profits.
Let’s take a look at these scary stats:
- A recent survey found out that 23% of employees face burnout in the office
- 50% of employees have one foot out of the door
- 25% of employees leave their job in the first year
And if you can avoid these with simple fun activities at work, what’s the harm?
Happy employees = happy customers = better bottom line
Happy employees are the ones most likely to be innovative and effective. Much of that begins with making work an enjoyable place to be. We are not advocating that you should turn your office into a sports arena. We need to get the balance right and ensure that we build in some time for fun activities and games that do not distract from core business.
2. Build Trust
Team building activities can play a huge role in helping employees get to know each other better. They can learn from each other, accomplish a task faster without any hesitation and develop trust.
Teamwork requires a lot of trust, and team-building games build trust fast. No team member can win a team game alone, so your coworkers come to rely on teammates’ help and expertise. When employees can trust and count on each other, they operate with a sense of freedom, leading to better results.
A Harvard study found that employees performed better when working with a team they were familiar with than when working with a new one. This study teaches us that being familiar with and understanding how your team work improves your performance over time.
3. Encourage Creativity
Team building games can be an excellent chance for your employees to get creative. For example, you might ask your team to build a boat that floats successfully in the pond. To compete with others, employees bond together and think of creative ways to accomplish this task.
The values of this task echo beyond the challenge and encourage people to think of out-of-the-box solutions. The next time employees encounter a potential problem at the workplace, they will be encouraged to think creatively and find a solution. When employees get playful, they open up to creative and innovative ideas as well, which is good for the company.
4. Improve Morale
When employees participate in different team-building games, they feel a boost in their morale. This happens due to two reasons:
- They undertake something new which excites them and breaks the monotony..
- Your teams feel that you are caring for them as an organization.
Team challenges give employees a sense of solidarity and boost their self-efficacy. This sense of solidarity makes your team feel more invested in each other and their work. A boost in morale will lead to increased confidence in one’s efforts and other team members in the workplace.
5. Uncover Hidden Talents
As humans, we make quick judgments about other people, making it hard to see an individual’s true potential. When we only see our colleagues in one way, for instance, by job title, we overlook other abilities.
You never know how some of your team members can be good at problem-solving until they are put in a place where they have to perform for a reward. For instance, perhaps Kat in accounting is a talented artist who can give some amazing ideas to the graphic designers during crunch-time.
Therefore, team-building games can be an excellent reason to unravel your employees’ true potential. This way, they can be utilized in the real-world scenario and help solve a workplace problem.
The article was originally published at Springworks blog