What is the definition of team building?
Team building is defined as the ongoing process of using daily interactions, activities, exercises and other formalized strategies to organize a group of employees into a cooperative and cohesive group. By nurturing a sense of mutual trust, community and cooperation, team building aims to unite employees under shared goals. In turn, effective team building can drive productivity, efficiency and employee satisfaction.
To nurture collaboration, team building generally addresses these skills and characteristics:
- Active listening: Active listening refers to the ability to listen to and respond to another person’s verbal and non-verbal cues and provide thoughtful feedback.
- Communication: Interacting and sharing thoughts, ideas and needs while also remaining open to others’ feedback.
- Problem-solving: Analyzing current or past challenges to find solutions and assessing and understanding previous errors or failures.
- Trust and reliability: A sense of shared responsibility between individuals that supports trust around tasks, deadlines, behavior and other aspects of work.
- Positive outlook: Motivation, excitement and mutual support are all aspects of workplace positivity.
- Conflict management: The ability to mediate and settle disputes with others fairly.
Related: How to Address Poor Communication in the Workplace
Benefits of team building
Team building can provide numerous benefits for your organization, and a thoughtful strategy can highlight specific opportunities within your workplace and even get employees excited about team activities.
The benefits of team building include:
- Performance: Teams are often motivated to perform better when they’re working toward a shared goal, which can increase productivity and give your customers a better experience.
- Employee satisfaction: A cohesive team creates a more positive environment, which can lead to an increase in employee satisfaction and retention.
- Innovation and creativity: Positive team relationships encourage creativity and innovation, which can help your company improve its products, services and strategies.
- Professional development: When a team works well together, individuals can explore or reveal their talents, which might include strong leadership skills. These skills can help improve your workplace and give employees opportunities for advancement.
- Workplace culture: When team building drives trust, empathy and communication, it can likewise promote feelings of inclusion, safety, belonging and support and enable your workforce to embrace its diversity.
Types of team building opportunities
Team building activities tend to fall into one of three categories — natural, internal and external facilitation. Each of these activity types comes with its own requirements and advantages, and how you integrate them into your team-building strategy depends on the unique needs of your business.
Natural facilitation
Natural team building occurs through daily interactions at work. When appropriate workplace conduct policies are established and maintained, employees know how to communicate with the rest of the team and the organization. When everyone understands the importance of workplace procedures, policies and interaction guidelines, trust and collaboration can grow.
Internal facilitation
Internal facilitation refers to tasking an employee to facilitate a team building session. The facilitator is often a member of your leadership team, but you can also assign these tasks to a qualified employee to help them take ownership of team building. These sessions could be a series of “get to know you” meetings to help employees develop relationships, but they can also include structured activities such as team building games, team lunches, sporting events and picnics.
External facilitation
With external facilitation, a third party runs structured team building activities for your organization. The facilitator typically works with a team leader or group of employees to design activities customized to the needs of the team. Activities may include icebreakers, games, workshops, group brainstorming sessions and other tasks. External facilitators help you meet specific goals for each session and provide tools to carry lessons forward in everyday work.
Three components of effective team building
Building a strong team is an ongoing process that you must consistently facilitate and guide. Here are three effective ways to support productive and happy teams:
1. Establish and maintain trust and respect
Building trust and transparency within a team means everyone can rely on each other to make the right decisions and complete their assigned work. It also means that each person believes their colleagues will act with the needs and goals of the team in mind. In addition, team members demonstrating respect through emotional intelligence and self-awareness can foster a safe and supportive working environment.
For successful collaboration, create a space for people to share their ideas, experiment and potentially fail. When people feel respected and safe to express themselves around others, they’re more likely to share creative and innovative ideas.
Related: How to Manage Employees
2. Create accountability
One way to create a sense of accountability is to set ground rules. When employees have clear expectations and rules, they may communicate more openly. These rules could include procedures for managing and monitoring deadlines, communication methods with colleagues and work style.
Holding weekly or even daily team meetings can help build accountability. Frequent meetings can make employees feel seen and heard. Workers can also receive support on projects, provide support to team members and hold each other accountable.
3. Strengthen communication
Strengthening communication between team members can help them connect and grow together. This can include sharing constructive feedback, expressing needs, adapting to different communication styles and more.
Communication includes verbal, written and nonverbal methods. For verbal communication, always focus on solutions for problems. When writing emails or notes, make sure the tone is positive, encouraging and constructive. Demonstrating active listening to a speaker shows consideration and value for their ideas.
Related: Team Building Tips and Activities to Boost Employee Morale and Engagement
How do I choose the right team building activities for my team?
Planning regular team building activities can help improve the team’s dynamics, but it’s not always easy to choose the right activities. Consider the following factors to help you decide:
- Team demographics: Gender, age range, culture and other characteristics may determine what activities are best for your teams. Opt for activities that don’t exclude employees based on their personal characteristics, such as gender or disability.
- Team size: Some activities work better with larger teams, such as an entire company, while some are better suited for close-knit groups. Consider how many people you’ll include in the activities, and choose activities that are appropriate for that group size.
- How much fun you want to include: Effective team building should be enjoyable, but it’s also important to maintain purpose so teams understand an activity’s underlying theme and purpose.
- Employees’ personalities: People exhibit different levels of openness and extroversion. Consider how shy or outgoing your team members are, and choose activities that everyone can feel comfortable trying. Team building should challenge individuals but always encourage them.
FAQs about team building
How often should I plan team building activities?
Every company varies on how often it needs to host team building activities. Monthly or quarterly events make them frequent enough to keep the momentum going without being so often that they get annoying. You might also plan team building activities around changes in the group, such as adding a new team member or combining departments.
How can you get employees on board with team building?
Being clear on your definition of team building and helping the team members understand that can help them get on board. Emphasize the importance of working well together, and choose team building activities that your employees will enjoy and that fit their preferences.
How does team building work with virtual teams?
Creating a strong bond can be more challenging if you have a remote workforce. In addition to setting up effective online communication tools and establishing expectations, you can also plan virtual team-building activities to help virtual employees better connect. If all of your employees live near your office, you might have them all work in person one day per week to help with team building.
Can team building fix a team that doesn’t work well together?
A few team-building activities likely won’t fix a team that has severe underlying issues. Instead, address the issues directly, get to the root of the problem and find solutions to improve the dynamics over time.