All team building programs are not suitable for every business. If you are a beginner how do you differentiate between what is effective and waste of time corporate team bonding events?
Believe me you cannot. You need help from a professional team building company. After all they are trained to do what they are being paid. They have proved it before and they can do it for you as well.
If you are on a shoe string budget and have time to explore your trails and errors, here is a quick escape for you…
We possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature. The renowned biologist, naturalist, and writer Edward O. Wilson explained the urge of humans to affiliate nature and other life forms in his book Biophilia.
Humans are close to nature because we are part of this ecosystem. Therefore it is ingrained into us to work at an optimal capacity when we are surrounded by greenery.
Our office spaces often disconnect us from our natural environment. We tend to spend most of our time indoors working for better tomorrows.
How great would it be if there is some way to connect our outdoor environment with an indoor workplace?
A breakthrough solution for this is, ‘Indoor plants’
Indoor plants are important for a productive office just like team building programs and team bonding ideas. They facilitate an environment of harmony by uplifting moods and thus contributing to productivity and thereby business profits.
Take a look at the upfront benefits of placing indoor plants around your workspace…
1. An office teeming up with vibrant greenery spreads positive vibes
Green plants offer meditative experiences that lead to happier productive employees contributing to the growth of the organisation.
Relaxing and calming effects of green plants help in reducing…
Sealed air in closed rooms has more pollutants than the outside air. The culprits found in the pack rooms are mold, formaldehyde, dust mites, carbon monoxide, and chemical cleaning agents.
Indoor plants are helpful in improving indoor air quality by removing harmful pollutants. It helps in increasing humidity levels. These plants further assist in reducing symptoms of, ‘Sick building symptoms’ or SBS.
This will help in reducing absenteeism thereby helping employees to be more engaged and productive in the workplace.
3. Indoor plants can obstruct noise
Placing plants around different corners of your office can help in reducing the distracting effects of background office chatter. This will enable your employees to focus better and thus doing a good job.
4. Get a creative boost with indoor plants
Creativity is the byproduct of a green environment surrounding your workplace. Indoor plants have a unique attribute to spur up your employee’s creativity.
So why not make green plants part of your office setting? The benefits far outnumber the cost.
Take a look at Indoor plants that must be part of your office family.
This air purifier plant improves air quality by 60%. It absorbs mold spores that grow indoors. These harmful agents are absorbed through leaves and pass it to the roots as food.
With enhanced air quality, your work environment will be brimming with freshness. So order your piece NOW! Visit here
It purifies homes with positive energy and increases oxygen flow.
As per Feng Shui, it is to be placed near computers, wifi routers or television. Placing money plants at a sharp corner or angle helps in reducing anxiety levels.
What are you waiting for? Stop wasting time on silly arguments. Buy your money plant Right Now!
It is the perfect indoor plant. This air purifier plant helps in getting rid of toxins such as formaldehyde, xylene, toluene, and nitrogen oxides.
To put it simply, it helps in filtering pollutants that are present in cleaning products, toilet paper, tissues, and personal care products.
The unique property of this plant is that it converts carbon dioxide into oxygen at night. It also helps in fighting Allergies and Sick Building Syndrome.
Businesses can’t flourish in a vacuum. It is important for HR managers to strengthen the relationship among employees to work in harmony.
In order to build this team bonding, it is a must for co-workers to spend quality time together. This will help them to bond together and share their ideas with each other.
Therefore, organizing an effective team building program should be your aim to build such a team. If you have never done it before it does not fall within your expertise.
It is a smart move to hire specialists for the task. They have done it before and can do it again for you. However, before handing it over to the experts it is good for you to have a basic knowledge about it.
Scaling up requires new ways of doing things. When you work with a team your team’s efforts should be directed towards the overall goals of the organisation. Being a head, you must tune in to utilise the strength of every team member to achieve your business goals.
For that your team must be working in harmony. Being a team leader, how can you make this happen? Organizing a team building program can be the best way to bring a team together. But how do you know what are the effective team building activities for your team?
To get insights on how you can take a step towards effective team development programs, Dive in this blog…
Adult education has a different perspective. It mostly deals with learning skills as needed.
Adults are inclined towards gaining new knowledge, attitudes, values, and skills. So, before organizing team building events in your organization, it is very important to brief employees on the highlights and takeaways from the team development programs.
Assure your employees that they are investing their time in team development programs rather than spending aimlessly on programs.
One of the best ways to emphasize the importance of incorporating experiential learning programs is to showcase the case studies of those organizations who had executed and benefited from it.
To make it further clear, introduce your employees to these two case studies on how experiential team building programs helped employees of the corporate organization to build a better future for themselves as well as the organization.
In order to foster deeper learning, problem-based learning or project-based skills, continuous learning is a must.
In the 21st century’s communication and collaboration, these are the two essential skills which are a must for the career growth of an individual and organization.
To further improve workplace performance, you can apply the 70:20:10 model to put learning and development into practice.
What is the 70:20:10 model of learning and development?
This model digs deeper into how development takes place at the workplace and how to take employee performance to the next level.
Every development hangs between current and future needs.
It begins with the realization of where you are and where you want to reach.
The 70:20:10 model of learning has shone a light on how the learning process takes place.
The on-job experience provides 70% of the learning. The following 20% is through feedback from co-workers and managers. The formal education program contributes to the remaining 10% of our learning needs which is through seminars, training programs, and online courses.
This is how the model is formed and this is how we learn.
So get your employees into this model of learning and see them revealing their true potential.
To make this happen, take a look at these experiential team building events which may be helpful.
Did you get an idea on how to get your employees enrolled for team building events?
Are you aware of any experiential team building activities?
Did you find the experiential team development activities mentioned in the blog helpful?
Were you able to inspire your workforce with experiential team building case studies stated in the blog?
Let us know in the comment section below. Meanwhile, share this blog on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to help organizations build a better future for themselves with their employees.
Human psychology plays a role in whatever we do. There are pre-determined norms in which we act. These may vary but under ascertain circumstances the reactions are mostly the same.
This blog will take you through the Pygmalion effects which can help you motivate your workforce to function effectively.
Take a look at the flow of the blog here…
Every organization is striving to achieve team building and employee engagement. To achieve harmony in an organization, it’s important to get your team enrolled in various team development programs.
However, many organizations ignore the concept of team bonding because they see it as a waste of time.
What they DON’T see is that unless employees are brought together and know each other well, they won’t know how to function as a team.
This will hamper their productivity which in turn will affect the organization’s progress.
You must make sure that all your employees believe in the importance of working as a team. Teamwork not only distributes workload but also raises the overall standard of the work done.
This is because every team member will be allotted with work that resonates with his/her expertise. In other words, you’re optimizing your workforce.
But how exactly should you go about this optimization process?
Charles Kettering rightly said,
“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”
Oftentimes, such high expectations are deemed false until they turn out to be true. But this trick only works if expectations are realistic and achievable.
Take a dig at this story to realize the transformative power of high expectations.
Pygmalion was a sculptor from Cyprus who fell in love with the statue of a beautiful woman he created. His work appeared to be so realistic that all the other women in the town paled in comparison before his work of art.
He expected so much out of his work that he started visualizing it like a real woman. Goddess Aphrodite then granted his wish and when he kissed the statue, it infused life into it.
In essence, your positive expectations can also build a productive team. A team whose goals are aligned with that of the organization.
Here is one more example of positive expectations blooming into positive results.
The Pygmalion effect was studied in detail in the elementary school setting by Rosenthal and Jacobson. They decided to experiment with students who were considered late bloomers.
The ‘late bloomers’ were termed as such because they progressed slower than the rest of the students. The late bloomers were chosen at random for the experiment.
The Pygmalion effect required teachers to have high expectations from them without any change in their methods of teaching.
To everyone’s surprise by the end of the year, there was a substantial increase in the grade of the chosen strata. The high expectation from teachers made students believe in their potential which was reflected in their performance.
Thus positive expectation leads to better performances that became self-fulfilling prophecies.
Can this virtuous cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies be applied to the workplace environment?
At work, we are constantly searching for ways to upgrade our performance. If you are managing a team, you’d seek ways to upscale the performance of your subordinates.
To make the Pygmalion effect work with your team, you must treat them like stars. You must set realistic goals for them and believe that they’ll achieve them.
More importantly, your subordinates should believe in themselves. This is called the Galatea effect.
Livingston describes this role of belief in one’s own abilities as follows:
“What managers believe about themselves subtly influences what they believe about their subordinates, what they expect of them, and how they treat them. If they have confidence in their ability to develop and stimulate subordinates to high levels of performance, they will expect much of them and will treat them with confidence that their expectations will be met. But if they have doubts about their ability to stimulate subordinates, they will expect less of them and will treat them with less confidence.”
Thus it can be concluded that examining your own beliefs about your subordinates is an essential part of the leveraging the Pygmalion effect for business success.
After setting expectations from your team members, the team manager must also go through some self-introspection. The leader must be very careful about not committing these 5 mistakes.
1. Comparison amongst team members during team building activities
A healthy comparison helps build strong teams. However, there’s only a thin line between competition and rivalry. It is okay to praise the person who has done a good job. But pointing this out to other team members with the intention of putting them down isn’t a clever idea.
2. Giving the Silent treatment
Ignoring the people who make mistakes will either turn them complacent or make them demotivated. If you don’t tell your team what to rectify, they will not take any initiative towards their progress.
So, talking to them and showing them ways to improve their skills is the only way to develop productive teams.
3. Disregarding the opinions of your subordinates
Encourage your subordinates to put forth their ideas. Most importantly, make sure to implement them if they’re good enough. This gives your subordinates a confidence boost and also strengthens the team bond.
To gain the trust of your team, you must be one among them. You can’t always be seated on the high chair and pass orders to your subordinates. On the contrary, you’ve to be very compassionate and considerate while making sure that your team meets deadlines without any compromise on the quality of the work.
Engaging your team in team-building events is a Herculean task. So, resorting to a bossy way will not yield fruitful results. Instead, find new ways to engage your team among themselves.
After all, it’s an engaged workforce that will pave the way to achieve an organization’s goals.
What has been your experience with team-building activities and increasing employee engagement?
Do you think Pygmalion is useful/ has any drawbacks?
Let your thoughts fly in the comment section below. Don’t forget to share this article with those who need to focus on team-building.
Who doesn’t want to scale high? To scale up your business incorporate employee communication programs. These programs not only help your team to come together but they also encourage them to work together towards a single organisation’s goal.
It is not a secret that traditional methods of employee communication are ineffective. In order to mitigate this problem, anexperience-based team event sprung up. These methods encourage your workforce to see, learn and do simultaneously. This is the only reason why modern ways of learning are more reliable because they are focused towards learning by doing rather than learning by rote.
To understand the concept more precisely, take a look at this blog…
Team Building Ideas 