What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Team Building?

Our teams are where the true value of our business originates. The assembly of diverse skills, perspectives, and personalities is brought together to drive our shared mission towards success. Building a cohesive team isn’t just about assembling individuals; it’s an art that requires intentional planning, nurturing, and strategy. In this post, we dig deeper into the complexities of team building and highlight our key principles and actionable insights that can turn a group of individuals into a world-class team. These insights will equip you with the tools to foster collaboration, create a motivating culture, and empower your teams.

Team building is commonly defined in a business setting as the process of creating and fostering a group of individuals into a cohesive unit that works collaboratively to achieve common goals. This process for many organizations has collectively adopted small opportunities for teams to get together for “icebreaker” style conversations, pizza parties, and celebrations for achieving small goals.

Team building for clients of The Outside Perspectives are taught that the main goal of team building is to foster a positive work environment, improve group dynamics, and boost productivity by encouraging employees to work together comfortably and confidently as a team. The exploration and discovery of activities that enable your teams to connect, to build trust, to gain a deeper understanding, and highlight unique strengths and growth opportunities within your teams is essential to the culture of your business.

Team building can be an opportunity to create a motivated and engaged workforce, which ultimately leads to improved performance and enhanced communication. By allowing time for our individual team members to bond and build personal relationships they gain compassion, and understanding. This enables our businesses to collaboratively problem-solve, innovate, and optimize our processes, policies, and procedures more effectively.

Team building can be integrated into our workflows, meetings, and celebrations, which are not limited to rewards for achieving goals. By creating a culture in which team building is inherent in your machine (systems and processes), you enable your team to consistently build trust, respect, and communication among each other. This can be incredibly fulfilling for personal and career growth, allowing for the exploration and discovery of new skills as well as the development of existing ones.

Start with creating an intentional Talent Acquisition Strategy that takes the culture of your business into consideration as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your existing team.

The Talent Acquisition Strategy is built around the Foundation of your business which takes the Mission, Vision, and Core Values into the interview process to explore alignment between the prospective employee and your business. This strategy takes into consideration whether or not the employee’s career goals can be met within your business and if fulfilling growth opportunities will be present for them. The goal of this strategy is to discover the “Right-Fit” talent that will incorporate smoothly into the culture of your business.

Collaborate with your team to discover team building opportunities that can be incorporated into the daily, weekly, and monthly workflows in a way that creates the space to strengthen the team while promoting the achievement of goals with intrinsic motivation.

Identify some key data points to monitor as the implementation of team building opportunities roll out. Give the team an anonymous voice through survey and ask questions as they pertain to the morale, culture, workflows, and goals, in order to determine optimization strategies for team building.

Team building is essential in creating a motivated and engaged workforce, which ultimately leads to improved performance and enhanced communication. By allowing time for our individual team members to bond and build personal relationships they gain compassion, and understanding. This enables our businesses to collaboratively problem-solve, innovate, and optimize our processes, policies, and procedures more effectively.

The first step in team building is to have an intentional Talent Acquisition Strategy based upon your business’s Foundation. The second step in implementing team building is to identify what opportunities there are to create engaging, exciting, and motivational activities by collaborating with your team. The third step is to collect feedback on how the activities are impacting the key data points you are monitoring to determine how to optimize team building strategies.

1. What does team building mean to you? (Ask each member to collectively define the term for your business) 
2. What are your thoughts on the team building we do here and how can we improve? (Ask each member and collect feedback) 
3. What types of activities, habits, and routines can we implement into our workflows that promote team building? (Make a list and discuss which are quick-wins for implementation and which require more collaboration)

Reimagine, Redefine, Reframe.