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Team Building Activities

By: Crizza Reyes
Submitted: 2007-10-17 13:17:08
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Team Building Activities are stimulating problem-solving tasks designed to help group members develop their capacity to work effectively together. Many team building and initiative tasks are like kids games, others are novel, complex tasks and designed for specific needs. More elaborate initiative tasks can involve ropes courses, night-time activities, and exercises lasting over several days.

Several work environments require somewhat a bit of teamwork in order for things to run smoothly and with motivation to each in everyone. Team building activities are usually used to create a relationship between coworkers or co employee. On the other hand, various work environments want teamwork but the employees work separately. Employees working jobs like these really need team building activities to help them stay related with other workers.

Team building activities are often used in meetings, presentations, workshops, training seminars, education programs, corporate training, with college, high, middle, elementary and pre-school school groups, sport teams, teacher training, youth work, and correctional settings. Team building exercises can be adapted for virtually any setting, young or old, large or small, and across cultures. An important part of team building exercises is participants' reflection and discussion about the activity, how they approached the situation, and possible points of learning. For example, a group could be videoed during an activity and the video watched, analyzed, and discussed, to help extract potential learning from team building exercises.

As the head of the sales department of a large company, I'm the one responsible to all, especially for the performance of all my employees. When sales are slow moving, I try to use different incentives to motivate everyone. I used to offer them bonuses and prizes for top performers to work well in order to come up improvement on productivity for a short period of time. But, this type of idea resulted to competitive atmosphere around the office, which is not what I wished for them to do. I want to utilize team building activities in order to work in the office, so that my sales force work together to come up improvement on productivity, not to work as individual.

The first idea that I was made is contact the human resource department to let them know of my wants to implement team building activities among my sales force. The head over there told me that they don't have anyone employees there that had that kind of experience in teaching them team building activities, so she suggested that I used outside or other consultants for that kind of job. I started to contact the names of a few local firms to find out about their services. I was very overwhelmed by the selection of team building activities these consulting firms proposed for my sales force.

Employee motivation benefits from team building games, exercises, activities, puzzles and quizzes. I try to use free team building games and exercises ideas to warm up meetings, training, and conferences. These free team building games are also great ice breakers for training sessions, meetings, workshops, seminars or conferences. Team building games and activities are useful also in serious business project meetings, where games and activities help delegates to see things differently and use different thinking styles. To ensure these team-building activities comply with equality and discrimination policy and law in respect of gender, race, disability, age, etc. Although some of the team building activities seemed way too intense for our particular needs, many sounded like they would be perfect for us. Best of all, he could teach us these team building activities over the course of a two-day workshop held right in our offices. This sounded pretty good, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to get approval from my boss for the budget expenditure.

I didn't give up on this; still I started searching for affordable or free team building activities online that contained excellent team building activities. I decided to try a couple of these first that I found online with a proof that this team building activities work well. And I have a better chance to my boss of getting approval for this kind of training in the upcoming.

In the end, I've programmed the first round of team building activities for next week. I'm taking in the process very seriously and am spending a lot of time in preparing on this so that I can be fit as a facilitator. I'm very optimistic about the effects of these team building activities will have on my sales force. If you help people with their life-balance and personal fulfillment they become more emotionally mature, tolerant, positive independent, self-sufficient, etc. When the person is okay, so is everything else, including their relationships and communications at work. Developing people involves more than behavior, relationships, skills, knowledge and processes. It's often more about helping people feel better about themselves; helping the person to feel happy and fulfilled. A good leader can facilitate this. Team building doesn't have to involve games and exercises - team building might be better achieved by arranging other things which appear to be unconnected to work.

Jobs like this include service oriented professions in places like restaurants and doctors' offices. The focus of some team building activities involves taking the customer's perspective. Anyone who has visited a restaurant and received excellent service only to return and not receive the same treatment is more likely to leave disgruntled than someone who had ordinary service to begin with.

Here's my experience when I was working in one of the establishment as a waitress and I made sure to take extra time to accommodate customers special requests. While this worked well for me independently it really worked against my coworkers and there are times that you simply cannot accommodate every request. There's an incident happened that, one of my regular customer encountered a different waitresses they were upset when special accommodations were not made. The manager handled this situation by introducing new team building activities that involved taking the customer's side. I thought this accommodating approach would win over the "treat everyone equally" approach.

I've learned that through team building activities I know how to maintain a consistent front for the customer is far better than making special accommodations that can not always be encountered. Mainly, the team building activities centered on inconsistencies. People like consistency. Surprises, especially when it comes to meals, are not well received. One of the team building activities concerned in a taste test. It was a cooking work of art. After we done the test, the chef brought out the same dish. It had sour undertones that didn't suit the taste of the food.

The second cooking work of art does not match the process of a nice testing, and the chef repeated it. He sent the second and the same dish and it tasted exactly like the original. I know that this second-rate dish wasn't nearly as good as the initial sweet dish but we flavored the second because we knew what to expect.

The other side of team building activities can also help healthcare workers maintain consistent information to patients. I get frustrated when one nurse told me to stop breastfeeding after 12 months while a second nurse in the same pediatrician's office suggested that I continue. The conflicting information communicated to me that this staff seriously needed team building activities.

Exciting and innovative team building activities are tailored for our clients to powerfully illustrate the importance of strong teams, and a strong culture. High impact and challenging, yet safe and inclusive, these signature events can be delivered for the entire company, specific business units or any project team or group within an organization. The mixture of action and learning is developed to suit your team and your needs.

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Article source: Expert Articles