When it comes to your workforce, they matter intrinsically to the business. They are the lifeblood that keeps the wheels turning and hopefully enables plenty of profit and turnover as a result.
If you’re not looking after your employees, then problems will likely occur, and that can result in failures within a business that you likely care a lot about seeing succeed.
With that being said, if you’re looking to improve your teams, the efforts you make within team building and away days are important. Define goals and objectives for these team-building opportunities
With every team building or away day, it’s important to identify what it is you’re looking to achieve from the time spent. Whether it’s a day or a few days of team building, it’s important to identify what the goals and objectives are.
That way, you’re going to be able to achieve more and do more as a result. Defining these goals will be dependent on what you’re trying to do with these away days for your business. For example, you could look at the following as objectives or goals:
- To connect departments more successfully with one another
- To help build trust amongst the workforce
- To boost confidence in certain individuals who need it
Defining these goals and objectives will make the team-building days or excursions you do, more fruitful.
Choose the activities carefully
When it comes to team building, it’s important to assess what activities you are looking to do in order to inspire and motivate your teams. That means finding activities that everyone is going to enjoy beyond just the go-to options that maybe the executives or regulars within the workplace would prefer to do.
Try to find something that’s more out of the box or that you haven’t really organized before when it comes to team-building days, like the best escape room, for example. This can be a form of team-building without making it too much about the business and doing business-oriented activities.
Pay attention to how well the activity is going with staff and try to keep it varied in the activities you plan.
Mix up departments
Typically, when it comes to a team away day, a lot of the staff will cluster up into their departments or hang out with their work friends instead. While it can be fun for them to have their work friends as part of their team, it doesn’t always do well for keeping everyone connected.
With that in mind, it might be worth trying to mix up the departments and having people put together who would never typically engage within the working environment. By doing so, you’re going to give everyone the opportunity to get to know the people whom they may not have approached or worked with.
The tighter your workforce can be when it comes to knowing one another, the better.
Engage with your employees throughout and get feedback
It’s always good to engage with your employees both before, during, and after the away days. That way, you can improve the efforts you make for any future team building and away days you do.
Speak to every employee as they partake in the activities, and be sure to conduct an anonymous feedback/questionnaire that you can then get honest opinions on how well it went.
If you’re finding some people aren’t engaging so much in the activity, try to be encouraging where you can be and try to motivate people in any way you can so that they get the most out of it.
Don’t make it too much about business
There’s often a thing that happens with team away days where it leans a little too close to business. While team away days are business-oriented in the way that they’re educating or building skills for your employees, it doesn’t really need to be about their job or workplace.
After all, your employees are coming away from the office. They don’t want to be reminded of work when they’re supposed to be having fun and building relationships with other members of staff.
Make improvements when things go wrong
Finally, when there are mistakes made or activities don’t go quite to plan, make a note of these before you plan any future away days or team building weekends. That way, you’ll go into the next one with preparation and changes made that will hopefully result in a better output for these investments into the company.
Team building and away days are great for business, so where you’re lacking them, try to include more of them in your annual calendar as a company.