Team building refers to forming connections between people. These connections can strengthen a bond, especially in the workplace environment, and form a more productive and communicative company culture. Like many things, there are positives, negatives, and other factors of team building. Team building can affect and work environment, including the ever-changing hybrid work strategy.
The Good
There are plenty of benefits to team building. Especially because many activities you can do are fairly easy to perform. These are a few of the main benefits to team building:
Better Communication
When employees have strong connections and relationships, they are able to better communicate. This being with new ideas, possible conflicts, and it can allow for more shared projects or initiatives.
Builds Trust
By performing team building activities, it can build trust between coworkers or between employees and management. When the employees feel like they are trusted and when they trust in others, it increases productivity. It also can have a huge effect on their morale by sensing that the company has faith in them and them having faith in the other employees.
Another benefit of having employees trust each other and management is that they will be giving more honest feedback and be open to more collaboration.
Higher Productivity
The company’s productivity can drastically change when the workplace encourages teamwork. This means that projects or tasks will be completed faster and as a unit, it can also help balance the skills of employees to create better products or services.
Doing regular team-building activities can also impact your company’s employee engagement. Having engaged workers also increases productivity and assists in building a better working environment.
Encourages Creativity
When you have access to other people, your ideas can flourish. By working in teams, you can use each other for brainstorming or using each other's skills to make projects better. If your company begins having more innovative ideas and new unique concepts it can bring in more customers or sell your products better than before.
More Skilled Employees
By having employees of different skills work together it benefits everyone. This is because they can learn from each other and gain different perspectives and ideas. When your employees are having new ideas and are learning new skills from each other they can be more interested in other topics and added development.
The Bad
With the positives in mind, it is great to understand the disadvantages of team building and possible barriers to effective teamwork. The following are some of the negative impacts team building can have.
Creating Conflict
In some cases, team building activities can cause more friction between coworkers. If the activity is highly competitive and the employees take things very seriously, it can lead to bigger conflict and a rise in tension.
So when organizing an activity or event, keep in mind how your employees can react to certain competitions and try to figure out something that is still competitive, but a lighter topic.
Another factor that can create conflict is the lack of natural chemistry between employees or employees and management. When you are doing a team-building activity, personalities ca
Repetitive Activities
If you have been doing team building activities for a long period of time, those employees who have worked years for your company may become bored or unengaged with the activities or events. We suggest events to be unique and fun to get more employees engaged and active throughout the activity.
An Employee Investment
When you are organizing events and activities, there is always a cost. It is better to think of the cost as an investment in your employees. There can be situations where employees are not active or paying attention and they do not gel with coworkers as you hoped. When these situations arise it would be better to invest in another activity.
There can also be times when things go great and bonds are formed by employees. These bonds allow your company to be more productive and profitable. A problem to watch for is if one of the workers who form these bonds end up leaving the company, it can ruin the mood of the other coworkers.
When you invest in your people, the chances they appreciate the effort are high. But not every investment is successful or long-term.
Resistant Employees
Some employees are actively resistant. They may have disagreements or longer lasting conflicts with coworkers and not want to build better relationships with them. They could also have problems with the management of your company.
Either way, they are not wanting to create a positive environment due to outside issues.
If you want to find ways to get them engaged, you may need to try to work with them to resolve the problems. If many employees are resistant, there may be an obstacle between employees and management that will need to be resolved to see results.
Lack of Instant Impact
Team building events may not have an instant impact. They are ways to start bonds and relationships, but those relationships take time and effort on the sides of the employees and management.
If the employees are not encouraged to work together, they are still going to be hesitant to create bonds. Another factor that can cause hesitation in employees is the turnover rate, if employees don’t feel like the company invests in their growth, they can avoid creating longer-term bonds.
The Ugly of Team Building
Effective team building can be extremely difficult to implement. This is because all workforces and work environments are differently impacted by team building activities. Here are some ways to implement team building for any workforce:
Ask Your Employees
If you are worried about how your employees will react to certain events or activities, the best way to relieve that concern is to ask them for feedback and opinions.
If you give your employees a voice to choose the activity, they will be more willing to engage and enjoy the event. This can bring team morale up from the start and show that their opinions matter.
Perform Research
Doing research on possible activities, impacts of team building, and previously used strategies never hurt. It can help you make smart decisions and decide how to better invest in your employees.
Encourage Teamwork
When your workplace does more than provide team building activities it gets more of the employees involved in the workplace culture. If management can encourage employees to work together on initiatives or projects already, the purpose of team building events won’t be to start the relationships but to strengthen existing relationships too.
Incentivize Fun
If your company takes the team building events or activities too seriously, it can stop your employees from showing personality and getting to know each other enough to start bonds.
Conclusion
Team building has plenty of positives to help your company’s productivity, employee engagement, and project innovation. It also can have negative impacts on company culture if employees are disengaged or if the activities create conflicts.
Team building is an investment into your employees and a majority of the time it pays off, but there are always cases where the events are not worthwhile for the employees. One last note to keep in mind, that team building will not matter in a workplace that does not encourage a fun environment.
Taking the Next Step
If you want a tested way to have engaging activities for all employees, use TriviaHub. With incredible hosts and a focus on fun events, TriviaHub gets the most out of each hosted event.