Strong team relationships stem from intentional efforts to foster trust, communication, and collaboration among employees. Implementing well-designed team-building strategies enhances workplace satisfaction, reveals individual strengths, and supports overall team performance.
Key Insights
- Apply diverse team-building strategies such as icebreakers, collaborative exercises, and workshops to strengthen interpersonal connections and improve communication.
- Use real-world simulations and cross-training to enhance team collaboration, increase empathy among roles, and ensure operational continuity.
- Incorporate mentorship, peer recognition, and social events to build a supportive work culture and reinforce appreciation among team members.
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Let's talk about the importance of team building, which really gives opportunities to foster positive dynamics between your team members, and it results in very strong team relationships. As people get to know each other as human beings, as people understand more about the other person as a person, what we find happens is that there becomes greater trust between team members, and that usually promotes better, more open, and effective communication. It can also really boost employee satisfaction to have these opportunities to team build and to have stronger relationships with the people that you work with.
It can also be a conduit to promote creativity and innovation, and it certainly is an opportunity to reveal individual strengths and weaknesses as well. Something that you absolutely had no idea about someone else, you may discover through a team-building exercise. So I want to go through some of the team-building strategies that exist.
For each of these, I'm going to describe what they are and then actually give you an example. So the first team building strategy is icebreakers, and those are activities usually at the beginning of a team meeting that really encourage team members to get to know each other and to feel more confident. I often recommend that leaders do this at the first five or 10 minutes of their meetings with their team.
It's a great opportunity. You can have different team members assigned to each week, come up with a question, and everybody answers that question. Icebreakers don't just have to be fun, like, what did you do this weekend, or what's your favorite holiday, or what would you do if you won a million dollars, but they can also be work-related.
What's your biggest professional achievement? What do you wish people knew about your job? So there are lots of different icebreaker-type questions that can come up, or that can be utilized for this. Another example of an icebreaker is two truths and a lie, and many of you may have participated in this before, but basically, you come up with three things about yourself. One of those things is not true, and you tell the other people your three things, and participants guess which of the three things is not true, and it is just so much fun and so interesting, and you end up learning so much about your colleagues.
Another team-building strategy is to utilize team-building exercises, and these are exercises that really challenge the group to work together. So they're working together to either solve a problem or accomplish a goal. So an example of this is the marshmallow challenge.
This is when teams compete to build a tall, freestanding structure, and they are competing against the other teams to see who can create the tallest freestanding structure. The trick to this is that you have to use everyone's given the same materials, equal amounts of spaghetti, tape, string, and one marshmallow, and they all have to be used in this process. Another team-building strategy is utilizing team-building workshops or retreats, and I think sometimes leaders think that team-building can only be done when you're off-site or when you have an outside facilitator, and that's certainly not true, as you can see by our earlier strategies that we just discussed.
But workshops and retreats are helpful. They often do utilize an outside facilitator, and they focus on specific team-building skills like communication, conflict resolution, or leadership development. So, an example of a team-building workshop or retreat is a self-assessment communication workshop, and this is when your team members are given a self-assessment, and they then attend a workshop, and they compare their communication styles based on their self-assessment results.
A great way to get to know each other and to not only get to know each other better, but to specifically talk about and discuss communication styles and their similarities and differences. Another team-building strategy is team collaborative projects, which involves giving a team a project that really simulates a real-world scenario and asking the team to work together towards a common goal. So you're given a scenario, you get to work together, and it's a great way to get to know how each other works together, how people make decisions, how people communicate, how people, you know, think through things.
So an example of this is a customer service improvement project. So team members are given a work scenario about improving customer service, and then they work together to outline the project details. So it's a great opportunity for team members to be given a project and to work together in a simulated environment.
Cross-training opportunities also function as a team-building strategy. So team members get opportunities to learn about each other's roles and responsibilities, and this can be really great for building understanding in what the other person does, but even some empathy, because somebody else's job may actually be more difficult than yours, and you may not realize that until you have the opportunity to do this cross-training. So an example of this would be a cross-training week.
So over the course of a week, employees would take turns training colleagues on their responsibilities, and then they would have a test at the end to see what was learned. And of course, there's an added benefit that when people are properly cross-trained in each other's jobs, you have backup in case someone is out, for instance. Another team-building strategy is mentorship, and this is when we pair someone who has more experience with someone who has either less experience or maybe even someone who's brand new to your organization.
And it really gives an opportunity to share knowledge and to support that person. So an example of this would be mentor month, where less experienced team members are assigned a mentor to work with them for a one-month period. Appreciation and recognition, of course, are a normal part of work, but they can also be a team-building strategy.
It is an opportunity to show appreciation and recognize the contributions that employees are making. You can do this through specific celebrations, such as particular achievements, or when different milestones are met. So an example is appreciate and celebrate.
Employees submit statements of appreciation about fellow team members and their accomplishments to the team members, which are announced and celebrated at the end of each team meeting. A great way to appreciate and recognize, not only as a leader, but to have colleagues be able to recognize and appreciate colleagues as well. Social activities are also team-building strategies.
So, planning social activities that just promote bonding and allow people to get to know each other in a more relaxed environment. So an example could be a Thanksgiving celebration, having employees bring food and celebrating Thanksgiving as a team.
