The Team Building Blog

It can take several days for your team to really get back into the full swing of things after the Christmas break so it’s imperative that you are already thinking of novel employee motivation ideas to kick start 2010.

January is a great time to motivate the workforce

Although the right attitude, application and work ethic are important throughout the year, we’ve assembled some employee motivational events that will inspire and invigorate your personnel during a gloomy January. Read the rest of this entry »

Fresh Tracks uses ‘Belbin Team Roles’ to develop teams but what are they? For this months video blog actor Andy Taylor explains.

A Belbin team role as defined by Dr Meredith Belbin is: “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.”

We all try harder when there’s a prize at stake, no matter how small.  The desire to win is in all of us to a greater or lesser extent and even those who wouldn’t be described as ‘competitive’ still enjoy playing.

The plan to increase productivity by canceling coffee breaks flopped!

In business, sales teams have included competitive measurement and reward to drive productivity for generations with such great effect that very few sales roles exist that don’t have some form of prize built into the remuneration package.  So it’s strange that other departments haven’t created their own ways to combine play with productive working. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how good your project or the technology you have to work with, if your team doesn’t mesh – your project’s in trouble.

A recent research study on collaboration, conducted by BNET and Harris Interactive, revealed some illuminating facts about interpersonal team dynamics. Watch Stephen Howard-Sarin, Vice President of CNET’s business sites, on the video above as he shares the findings.

Please let us know what you think of this video by comments link below.

It’s generally accepted that team based working is preferable to individuals serving a single line manager, but what evidence supports this?

Sometimes being in a team can be very helpful.

Team based working gained popularity during the late 80s and 90s following initiatives such as kaizen and Total Quality Management. All too often we simply accept that the team way is the right way, but perhaps we should spend a moment testing this assumption.

Firstly, it’s worth considering different kinds of teams that can exist within an organisation; Read the rest of this entry »

The theories behind team building could be a much older than originally thought.  In fact Plato may have been  the first ever team building expert!

Plato & Aristotle possibly talking about their team building event.

For some years we’ve been saying “teams that play together, work together” and it seems that although team building is thought to be a comparatively new addition to business training Plato, one of the world’s most influential philosophers, had a similar view over 2000 years ago; “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” Plato
 
So we’d encourage you to make time to play with your colleagues this week, take a ball to the park, eat ice cream in the afternoon or play darts at lunchtime – whatever you think would be fun.  We spend most of our waking lives with our colleagues so let’s enjoy it.

Meetings can take up a large portion of anyone’s working day and for many of us, demands on time in the office are already high. So in an ideal world every meeting should count, with specific objectives and results making the time invested worthwhile. 

Allowing conflict to get out of control = chaos

All too often though, meetings – even during and afterwards – are perceived as a waste of time by those invited. This can usually be attributed to a lack of understanding about what the meeting was for. To avoid the sense that it was all worthless, here is a list of ten reasons why meetings can fail for you to use as a checklist when planning your next meeting:

1.      No agenda = no purpose
2.      No advance communication = surprising behaviours/responses
3.      Not encouraging participation = no interaction
4.      No time management = cost to organisation – time is money
5.      Allowing conflict to get out of control = chaos
6.      Not reaching consensus = waste of time and company resources
7.      Allowing sub meetings = no focus or direction
8.      Not controlling difficult behaviour = everyone becoming difficult
9.      Not summarising actions = misunderstanding of next steps
10.  Not motivational = attendees leave feeling flat and despondent

This list is based on an article written by Nuggets of Learning and Development.

In our 18 years of helping teams develop ‘communication’ has always been listed as one of the areas team members would most like to improve. In the case of the crew on US Airways Flight 1549 which successfully ditched into the Hudson River, it was the difference between life and death.

Is communication important?

Despite all our high tech gadgetry it seems we could all be more productive if only we could communicate more effectively. Here are a few techniques we’ve discovered: Read the rest of this entry »

Travel budgets slashed, bonuses unlikely, the prospect of redundancies.  Now is probably not the time to ask for cash to fund the annual team building day but it might be the precisely the right time for some team development.

Team Building vs Team Development

The phrase team building has risen in prominence in recent years as employers realised the value of a happy workforce where, despite their differences, team members are able to get along.  For many, team building is simply about getting away from the office for a celebratory meal, drink or day out and there is some value in this.  It creates a social context and allows colleagues space to become friends.

In the same way that a builder differs from a developer in the property world, team development is similar but distinctly different.  Builders will turn up and build a wall, whereas a developer sees the potential for that wall to become a terrace of houses.  Team development is a process in which a team takes time to explore its potential – how it can become greater than it’s been before. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal* suggested that while team-building exercises may be fun (for some people), they really don’t do much to solve workplace issues.

Team building doesn't just mean getting the team together

For example, sales executive Paul Garvey claimed that the most insightful team-building exercise he ever participated in involved paintball, which in no way helped to resolve the relationship issues back at the office. Speaking of his former company, he said that colleagues would poach each other’s deals while their manager played favourites. Someone decided a paintball exercise would help. It didn’t, and merely reinforced the divisions and favouritism already present.

Another instance of completely inappropriate team building involved the team from a contractor on an Apollo space project. They were asked by their HR department to participate in a role-playing exercise where they had to return safely from the North Pole. Their day-to-day job involved helping astronauts return safely from space. What additional insights into teamwork did HR think this role play could teach them? Read the rest of this entry »