A company's most important asset is its human resources.
In order to differentiate itself from its competitors, it is necessary to know how to manage it properly, boosting its talent, creativity and motivation.
What is team building?
The concept of team building has its origins in 1920 when the British psychologist William McDougal, a specialist in social psychology, published his book "The group mind" with which he tried to raise awareness of the importance of forming working groups and the conditions for these to be cohesive.
Another of the pioneers of this concept was Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, who said "coming together is the beginning, staying together is progress and working together is success". With these words many entrepreneurs became aware of the importance of teamwork.
Team building has evolved over the years and what began as a technique in the human resources departments to foster relationships between the company's employees began to be applied in all departments as the main technique for creating good work teams and for solving possible conflicts.
Today, team building consists of a set of certain workshop activities organized by companies and associations to promote team spirit and cooperation among their employees to ensure a collaborative working environment. In short, activities that have been strategically designed to improve the performance of their teams.
Certain activities allow employees to get to know each other better, especially in situations different from those they usually face, so that they adopt a certain feeling of belonging to an organization and feel part of a group, not an independent individual.
Types of team building activities:
Presentation
Through this activity, a personal approach is aimed, so that the different people who are part of a professional team get to know each other better. What we would know as breaking the ice.
Trust
This is one of the most difficult and at the same time most important aspects to achieve. To generate this confidence, it is typical to do physical activities in even groups where one depends on the other.
Competitiveness
The aim is to work on healthy competitiveness by achieving objectives without turning to rivalries. In this case employees are usually divided into two teams to compete against each other. It is important that, once the activity is finished, an evaluation is made of the positive and negative points of the winners and losers, as the conclusions obtained can help to work on the errors and successes in the working environment.
Resolution
These activities aim at solving problems and conflicts together in order to enhance strategic thinking and the development of a plan to deal with a crisis. They are activities that can be both intellectual and physical.
The benefits of applying team building
It increases the motivation and positive attitude of an organization's employees.
By taking employees out of their usual work environment, it helps to improve absence from work and reduces demotivationand increases resistance to stress.
Improves leadership skills and the ability to delegate responsibility.
Encourages teamwork by stimulating confidence in oneself and in the other members of the group, thereby enhancing the spirit of teamwork. This is achieved through communication and integration between different areas and members of the same organization. These are employees who spend more hours in the day with each other than with their own family and friends, so it is vitally important that there is a good working environment and cohesion between them.
To encourage personal and professional growth by increasing their creativity and their ability to solve problems by learning to clearly identify objectives and goals. They also improve their ability to cope with situations of pressure and change.
Identify strengths and weaknesses within a team by observing in a playful way in which issues they fail most and in which ones they excel.
Examples of team building activities
Contact rounds
This is an ideal personal approach activity to establish a first contact. It consists of forming two concentric circles in which the people sitting in the inner circle should be facing outwards, looking at their companions in the outer circle who will be facing the centre.
The monitor will time 30 seconds in which the participants must introduce themselves to the person in front of them. After this time the participants in the inner circle will move one position and start again.
Lipdub
It is a well-known option that helps build trust among the members of an organization. It consists of making a music video in which the whole company participates synchronizing dance steps with playback to the rhythm of the music. With this activity, employees become less inhibited and create bonds of trust. An example of Lipdub is the one made by Fnac.
Paintball
This well-known activity works very well to promote healthy competitiveness among the members of an organization through a sporting activity. It consists of dividing participants into two teams in which each individual carries marker guns that work with compressed air and are filled with small balls filled with paint, each team has an assigned colour.
In this game, players who are hit by the paintballs are eliminated. The goal is to eliminate all players on the opposing side. This is a very useful strategy game when it comes to encouraging teamwork.
The six hats
This method was designed by Edward Bono and consists of breaking down an enigma by distributing different thoughts that it generates and then analyzing them one by one. In this sense the conflict could be divided into the white hat that contains the thoughts related to the information, the blue one the feelings, the red one the difficulties, etc. In this way they will be studied one by one and a way will be found to solve them.
With this method you learn to face the obstacle of difficulties and to work in a team to solve a crisis.
As you can see, there are infinite possibilities when it comes to implementing team building.
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