Why invest in team-building?

Why invest in team-building?

In an offsite, informal setting, team building provides an opportunity for the leaders to get to know their team. Leaders often spot members who surprise them with their ability, initiative and potential. The way members behave in different exercises and games, gives leaders strong reason to make career decisions for their team members.

At the end of one of our team building intervention, the CEO said “This program gave me wonderful insights about people in my team. Now I know what resources my people have, and how can I use them wisely? In a day to day situation you are so busy fire-fighting, you don't have time to learn about other people, and find out what skills they have”.

Organizations benefit from a good quality team-building program in a number of ways. People get to know each other, spend quality time together, get a chance to learn about each other, specifically develop and demonstrate new team skills.

Going to the club, having a pizza together, playing cards, and going bowling for months can’t give you the results that a well-structured one day team building program can produce for you.

In our team building programs, participants will learn how to be more effective, efficient and achieve results while at the same time having lots of fun. The Result: The Company will make instant benefits. If everyone makes one change, or 1% change, then the cumulative figure will hit the business with a bang!

Many organizations may still have doubt whether investment in team building will pay off? Investment in a structured program with well thought-out goals and outcomes can actually give you a many fold advantage. A team-building event at a certain level gives you a lot more than just a fun day out. It really can make a significant business difference.

The cost of not investing in the team is often not realized by organizations until they go for a team building program. Team-building experience can sometimes be uncomfortable because you have to bring your head out of the sand, have a look and realize you’re maybe not where you thought you were. You don’t have the team you thought you had.

If you feel pain to know where you are with relevance to where you want to be, a well thought out team-building can be the answer.

As a team building facilitator, it took me a while to differentiate between team-building by chance and team-building by plan.

You can do a fun team-building event and maybe somebody will pick up on it, maybe they won’t; maybe they’ll go back to work and make a change, maybe they won’t, but if you run a structured program where we might see the clients before, then we run the program, then we go back afterwards and we say ‘ Right, what did you learn from the program? What can you change at work?’

We make a commitment with the participants to someday come back to them and monitor their progress. And we actually go back to the workplace and check on the changes. We make further suggestions and put something in place so they do change. The truth is that the companies have spent a huge amount of money and they want value.

Client does get value and benefit from the programs. The evidence is repeat business and recommending us to other companies. You know why? Because we did not offer a team-building by chance program our approach is ‘team-building by plan’, where client requirements establishes the design. 

We were planning a team building program with a client. Of course, offsite team building was an expensive option. The proposal didn’t get materialized. Organization decided to do it themselves. HR department decided to do it themselves. The result was quite different, program got back fired.

Reason? HR hires people, transfers them, picks promotions, and decides on pay-rises and so on. And if the same HR person is then running a team-building exercise, participants become little uncomfortable, wondering if there is a hidden agenda? Am I being assessed for my job? Is there anything I don’t know yet? Even if people don’t express their apprehensions, they still will have these feelings inside.

On the other hand, if you bring in somebody completely from outside, the slate is clean. An outside facilitator can ask questions – even the dumbest, most obvious questions – but they come clean and it’s amazing what people will tell them and what people will share. There’s also inevitably no hidden agenda, people don’t know them, they don’t know how to react; it’s a different situation. There’s no history for example with an outside facilitator, whereas with an HR Director, an HR Manager, there is.

That’s why, we work in association with the HR department. HR team in a company is our guide. Because they know about the company, and that’s vital. As external facilitators we hold hands in a professional fashion, with the HR Manager, and we both get an excellent result.

1. Not doing team-building can cost you a great deal of money. So spend the money, invest in Team-Building and make the difference.