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Discover how to engage your employees & get your teams pulling together to achieve their goals through team-building activities.
Team building exercises might get a bad rap, but if you get them right they can do wonders for your employee engagement levels.
Get to grips with the four stages of team building and the five types of team building activities and you’ll know exactly what you need to do to get your teammates pulling together to achieve their goals.
Read on to learn how to use simple team building challenges to boost employee engagement across your business.
Every team goes through four distinct stages. Learning how to recognize which stage your team is at will help you understand how to get the best from them.
The four stages of team building are:
When a team is forming, team members tend to be equally excited to be part of a new team and anxious about how they’re going to fit in and how things are going to go.
You can expect team members to ask a lot of questions at this stage as they try to find their footing and relieve their anxieties.
It’s crucial at this early stage that you focus your team’s energy around:
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Teams always set off with big goals. But sooner or later, they’re going to fall short of their own high expectations. This is the storming stage, and it’s when your team learns how to handle setbacks and conflict together. It’s the team building equivalent of the terrible twos – which every parent is well acquainted with.
When you hit this stage, it’s time to regroup and:
Any team that makes it through the storming stage comes out the other end stronger. Team members become more comfortable with how the team operates and where they fit in it. They feel free to express their “real” thoughts and feelings, and can start to give and receive the kind of constructive criticism that’s going to take your team’s performance to the next level.
Telltale signs your team has shifted into the norming stage are your team members:
You can help encourage this with some well-chosen team building activities (we’ll dive into some examples later).
When a team hits the performing stage, they’re comfortable asking for help when they need it and offering it where it’s needed.
Team members look out for each other, roles become more fluid as members take on responsibilities where they’re most needed, and the whole team is fully engaged. And each team member believes that when the team wins, they win.
As a leader of a team that hits this stage, it’s essential you keep your team going in the right direction with some team bonding activities (more on those in the next section).
The right activities at the right time will fast-track your team through the four stages of team building.
To help you get things note-perfect every time, here’s a rundown of all five types of team building activities – and some examples of each one you can try today:
It’s all about breaking the ice with teams in the forming stage. The faster your teammates get to know each other, the sooner they’ll be comfortable sharing their honest thoughts and feelings with each other.
Here are some classic icebreakers to help get a new team opening up with each other:
Need more icebreaker activity ideas? Check out a list of over 400 icebreaker questions.
Good communication is the cornerstone of any effective team. And when your team hits the storming stage you need to develop effective lines of communications – fast. These simple exercises will help:
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The faster your team can solve the problems they’re inevitably going to face, the more effective they’ll be. These simple activities will help your team learn how to work together to overcome obstacles:
Helping your teammates unlock their creativity is one of the best things you can do for their performance. These exercises will encourage them to think outside the box:
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For a team to reach the performing stage, its members will need to form strong relationships with each other. Encourage that with these activities:
Once you recognize which stage of the team building process your team is at, you can pick the perfect activities to help them reach the next stage as quickly as possible.
Stick to the tips we’ve laid out here to make sure your team bonds as quickly as possible.
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