After completing team building activities together, employees better understand each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and interests. When the economy is slow, company managers and leaders have to be very cautious with every expense. As a result, we will often put off hiring new employees until more certainty in the marketplace develops. Although natural efficiencies will develop in a downward economy, can team building activities help increase productivity so that we can avoid the expense of adding on new personnel? The answer to that question is… “Well… It depends…”
Don’t Confuse “Morale” with “Productivity”
Team
Building is almost a generic term that is used for both “morale
building” activities and “productivity building” activities
interchangeable, but if you confuse the two activities, you can make
some costly mistakes. Morale building activities can include anything
from going out to a movie together to an office holiday party to
entertainment style activities at annual meetings ans conventions. These
activities provide a shared-experience that builds temporary
camaraderie and provides a fun relief to the normal day-to-day rat-race.
Productivity
building activities are training events or innovations that help teams
do more with less. Although people will often call both of these types
of activities “Team Building”, the activities themselves get totally
different results. Both are needed to create a team culture, but quite
often, managers and leaders will schedule one type of activity hoping to
get the needed result from the other type of activity and be sorely
disappointed.
Although productivity will often improve (sometimes
dramatically) when morale improves, an increase in morale doesn’t always
cause a team to be more productive. For instance, if a manager came
into the office and announced that the entire team would get the whole
week off and still get paid, morale would skyrocket, but productivity
would drop to zero for the week. Morale building activities like team
outings and company parties are extremely important, but they can’t
entirely replace productivity building events and activities.
Since
the team atmosphere created by morale building activities can be
temporary, you’ll want to schedule activities like this regularly so
that the individual team members get to interact with each other in a
more fun way to build camaraderie. Charity team building events at
annual meetings or conventions can be a great way to insert a morale
building activity. These team building functions are very economical,
because the company can generate great public relations without
increasing the cost of conducting a convention or annual meeting. For
instance, most conventions are going to have some type of entertainment
or at least a company outing of some kind. Many companies are replacing
these activities with a charity bike build or a team scavenger hunt
where team members build gift baskets for soldiers. The investment in
each activity is fairly similar, but the results of the charity
activities often provide impactful, lasting memories that build great
camaraderie between team members.
Build Teams by Training Team Members Together
In
addition to morale building activities, a team also needs to develop
new skills in order to keep them productive. Many years ago, a mentor of
mine told me that “You can’t build a team by training individuals, but
you can build a team by training individuals together.” I didn’t really
understand the power of this advice until I started my own business, but
I understand it more and more as my company grows and grows. For
instance, many big companies offer tuition assistance for higher level
degrees for their employees, but what often happens is that a company
will invest a ton of money into the development of an employee only to
have the person leave the company and start working for a competitor.
This happens because the individual employees is growing, but the team
as a whole is stagnant.
Oddly enough, any skill development
activities will work to build the team culture in an organization if the
skills developed gives the team a competitive advantage in the
marketplace. For instance, Apple decided to eliminate cash registers
inside their Apple Stores and replace them with the ability for any
employee in the store to be able to use their smartphones to ring-up
items for purchases on their smartphones. Because Apple is doing
something that no one else is doing, the employees who have been trained
in this new technology feel like they are a part of an elite group that
is different from other retail stores. Whether they are or not doesn’t
really matter, because the team believe that they are ahead of the
curve. Customers can find an Apple employee and within seconds create a
purchase and have the receipt sent to the customer via email and be on
their way. A dramatic increase in productivity and decrease in cost
while creating more of a team atmosphere among employees.
“Soft-Skills” Team Building Training is Most Productive
The
most effective team training to increase productivity comes from
“soft-skills” training, though. While Hard-Skills are ones essential to
doing individual jobs within a company – for example hard-skills for an
engineer might be calculus and physics – soft-Skills are skills that
improve productivity no matter what specific role that a person has
within an organization. Soft-skills would include communication skills,
presentation skills, the ability to persuade people, the ability to
coach and mentor others, etc. If the engineer improves in any or all of
these soft-skills, then he or she will likely improve their individual
success as well as the overall success of the team.
When teams
train together in these soft-skill areas, they automatically develop
that same type of team culture that Apple developed with the technology
change. Team members know that they are a part of a unique, elite group
that is different from most organizations (because most organizations
don’t train this way).
For example, a few years ago, I was hired
by a commercial construction company to help them deliver high-level
sales presentations better. Companies that build skyscrapers or have
groups of construction projects often bid out these huge projects in one
big contract, so they will often ask for huge proposals and have each
qualified contractor come in and do a presentation to narrow down the
field. The company that hired me was closing about one out of six of
these presentations, but wanted to increase their numbers. So we
conducted a series of presentation skills classes with the teams of
presenters. Because they trained together, they developed a team culture
that showed up when they conducted their presentations. Quite often, at
the end of their presentations, the board members who were in the
audience would say, “We chose this group because they just seemed to
work very well together.” The team culture showed, because the
individuals within the group had been trained in soft-skills together,
so they saw themselves as having an advantage over other presenters (and
they had one.)
Presentation skills, people skills, coaching, mentoring, and other soft-skills training can really help teams become more productive as long as the teams are going through the training as a team. I remember my college football coach telling us, “You don’t fight for records or awards, you fight for the guy who is next to you in the trenches.” When teams train together, they build a rapport that lasts.
Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute Team Building and the inventor of many world-famous team building events like the Build-A-Bike Charity Team Building event and the Camaraderie Quest High-Tech Scavenger Hunt. His team of expert facilitators conduct events for groups as small as 20 people and as big as 10,000 people. Visit the Team Building Event website for details about his programs.
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