Tip # 294: 5 Team Building Exercises For Your Business

Employee Morale Directly Affects A Company's Success.

Businesses are run by people, not machines. When businesses think solely in terms of "productivity," "efficiency" and "time management" they lose focus on what really generates their sales - the people. With that in mind, we did some research and found 5 team-building activities designed to strengthen employee camaraderie and improve morale.

5 Team Building Games Designed To
Re-energize Your Team:

1. Policies & Procedures Scavenger Hunt - Face it, employee manuals tend to be a boring read, so try thinking outside the box when teaching your policies and procedures. Design a scavenger hunt in which employees solve the answers to questions about your company's policies and procedures by exploring the entire workplace (e.g., take out a page from the manual and ask them to find the page and highlight key sections of a particular policy).

2. The Employee P.I. - In many mid to large sized businesses, employees may know of someone but do not necessarily know them. To change this, have employees take a stab at playing private investigator. Gather your employees, pair them up, then have each employee ask their partner 5 - 10 questions. When everyone has been interviewed, have each person give a 45-second overview on what they learned about the other person to the rest of the group.

3. The Connection Web - Have your employees meet and instruct them to form a circle. Take a ball of string or yarn and tell them something you did to help a customer or improve a process/procedure. Then, holding on to one end of the string, toss the rest of it across the circle to another employee and have them repeat what you did. By the end you will have created a huge web that shows how every employee shares something in common.

4. The Business Board Game - Flex some creativity by building a board game out of poster board and base it around your business. Design question cards that will test your employees' knowledge about the company's history and product/service line. Then turn it over to employees to play in small groups. This game makes for a more interesting way to explore and learn a company's dynamics.

5. Respect A Mentor - Everyone has had a mentor in their life, whether it is someone they worked for, their mother, father or an outside business leader. Have employees share who their mentors have been so everyone can learn a bit about one another's values and interests. Team unity strengthens when employees look at each other and see more than a job role.

The Key Is To Follow-Up A Team Building Event.

Keep in mind that if a team building event that doesn't have a follow-up plan in place, your staff will become jaded and regard it as waste of time and energy. Due to recent downsizing and cost cutting by most businesses, people feel as if they are already doing more with fewer resources. So when you plan your team building events, keep in mind what the purpose or objective will be. Quite simply, it is to open communication and let people know your organization is stronger when everyone is working toward a common goal.

Summary: Although there are many successful companies in today's business world, they all share one common element: A High level of employee happiness. So take a page from some of these companies and shake things up a bit to find ways to make the mundane more fun. Not only will your employees appreciate it, but so will you.