High morale, efficient cooperation, and trust are one of the most important traits of every contemporary team. Good leader and manager must ensure that the people they work with trust them and each other. You can achieve it with team-building exercises, ceremonies, and events that can happen both offline and online.
What is team-building?
The most comprehensive definition describes it as an effort to create stronger bonds among the members of a group. The individual members respect each other, respect their differences, and share common goals and expectations.
Putting it more broadly, it is every work activity that requires the attendance of more than one person. It’s especially important in Agile teams – every event (or ceremony), such as Daily Sprint, Sprint Planning, or Sprint Review, can serve as a part of your work and a way to engage your employees. Even alignment meetings, a gathering of all interested parties where people share their short and long-term goals, have the potential to be a team-building exercise. This emphasis on common understanding is a key for every Agile project and program, increasing trust and common knowledge.
Team-building is also much more than your duties and the more unofficial activities. Every party, game, or quiz night is an opportunity to strengthen the bonds between the people. But use it wisely. Not everyone is a fan of out-of-office activities with coworkers. In that case, respect the boundaries of these people and let them focus on their lives. It’s not always about being best buddies – purely formal relationships also works.
Why does it work?
Properly executed team-building can strengthen the bonds between team members. As Brian Scudamore states in his Forbes article, it builds trust, mitigates conflict, encourages communication, and increases collaboration. Effective team building means more engaged employees, which is good for company culture and boosts the bottom line.
Team Building, an organization that provides this type of event, emphasizes this activity influence on healthy work culture and improvement of organizational metrics, such as job satisfaction, employee retention, productivity, and profitability. It also breaks it down into six key areas:
The importance of team-building – some data
According to TeamStage:
- The fully-engaged workforce has the capacity to double the revenue.
- 2,500% more companies have adopted a virtual team-building approach since COVID-19 struck.
- 75% of staff believe that teamwork and collaboration are essential.
- 86% of executives believe that lack of collaboration is responsible for company failures.
- Organizations that promote collaboration and communication are 4,5 times less likely to lose their best employees.
- You can improve the team’s work ethic and innovation with team-building up to 10 times.
- 50% – a number of employees that have stayed at a company because they felt like part of a team.
- 33% – a number of employees believe a collaboration culture improves their loyalty.
What are the benefits of these activities?
We already know why team-building is important, but what are the main advantages of this kind of activity? It covers the most crucial aspect of every work: relations between the people. You can have the best people on your squad, but if everyone considers themselves a lone wolf, you have a huge problem. One person can’t achieve satisfactory results for every aspect of the project. It is a tool to build bridges between the people, so they can work together as a pack and reach satisfactory results.
This is only the beginning. In the next article, we will be covering the more fun activities – games, and initiatives, that you can implement within your workspace to strengthen the bond among your team members. Both for Agile and Classic (Waterfall) approaches.
