Do you wish for your employees to work effectively in the long run? Your team is in tatters, squabbling rather than collaborating, and you are at a loss about what to do, realizing all too well that such an operation is only a road to hell. Go for teambuilding!
The entire system of teambuilding activities works with three basic pillars which are: adventure, feedback and new experience. The result is streamlined team operation through oiling the wheels in the work team´s power train.
A horror experience, or an outdoor game for adults?
A bus comes to a stop in the middle of nowhere. It is dark. About thirty people, all blindfolded, are getting out of the vehicle. Might it be a mass exodus of people abroad, or perhaps something worse? In no time everybody will be assigned a starting number, given a torch, a map and a tubular compass, for it is a teambuling exercise here called Night Drop-In whose participants are supposed to find their way back to the civilization on their own.
The Drop-In, sometimes also called „Escape to freedom“, ranks among the ever-more-popular teambuilding activities. It can be enacted both in the rural and the urban settings, in daylight or by night, each arrangement working its own magic. The night environment, in addition, is reminiscent of the popular scout camp night games.
In the final analysis, it does not matter what the environment of choice will be, this teambuilding exercise is designed to strengthen interpersonal relations in the team and establish strong bonds among the employees. In the Drop-In Programme, the focus is heavily on group decision-making, the ability to orientate oneself, speed and improvisation; last but not least, the programme´s „by-product“ is a strong shared or individual experience.
One foot, one ski? Come on, I wasn´t born yesterday!
Running about the forest is not the cup of your tea? How about this? „Right, left, right, left, now slow down, and all at once, mind the stone ahead, the right one a little bit to the left.“ We are in a meadow where a group of people is trying to make it from the start to the finish as fast as possible along a set out track with a pair of team skis bound to their feet.
All the team is supposed to cooperate, the speed and the precision matter. Besides, if five-strong teams are competing, everybody is going to have quite a lot of fun. The wooden team skis equipped with a multiple binding for five pairs of feet also have hand-held ropes to make the whole exercise easier, yet, of course, it always takes some time before the competitors get well coordinated and fast. This is why the team skis are a time-proven way of building the team.
It is the kind of fun you do not need to get any special gear for. The team skis as well as an appropriate location will be provided by the Company programmes, all you need to have is some sportswear and footwear. The competition is absolutely safe, one everybody can manage. At the worst, someone might step on your foot. The exercise fits both the summer and the winter seasons.
Vroom, vroom... Look out, sharp to the left!
Driving and navigating 1:10 scale models of real Grand Prix race cars? This is what a teambulding exercise can look like too, suppose your employees do not exactly revel in outdoor sport activities. In such cases, specialized agencies offer indoor/outdoor events like an RC Rallye.
The RC Rallye is not particularly space-intensive; true, an outdoor range may provide a greater variety of racing circuits, yet holding a Grand Prix race indoors poses no problem whatsoever. All you need for this purpose is a minimum area of 5 x 9 meters. The RC models are remote-controlled and powered by electric motors. In order to eliminate electro-magnetic interference, the control units all work on different wave-lengths. In addition, the models tend to have even working lights, so the race may become appropriately dramatic.
Different ways, long-term effect
Teambuilding activities take a variety of forms and, invariably, are custom-made to fit the needs of a particular company. Companies today can pick and choose from countless numbers of agencies that specialize solely in organizing company events. Alternatively, such events can be organized either by specialized departments or PR departments of individual corporations.
Regardless of the apparent advantages teambuilding may bring the companies, there are also some disadvantages accompanying such an organized activity. A timid employee who is unable to relax at a compulsory company event can markedly erode the team spirit, as can „insurmountable“ animosities between individual members of the team. The aforesaid problems notwithstanding, the teambuilding events tend to offer fun, good humour and fond memories upon which a proper foundation for the company´s long-term functioning can be built rather than anything else.
Prepared and compiled by Firemní programy.cz