What does an escape room and a business venture have in common? Answer: the foundation for both lies with solid teamwork.
It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of any company, be it a young start-up like Breakout Escape Rooms, or a conglomerate such as Pepsico, depends on how well its individual employees can work together as a team. Team-building is such an essential part of running a business that the most flourishing organizations dedicate hefty budgets towards activities and events that help maintain it at healthy levels.
Today, an entire industry has been created around the significance of team-building, where companies arrange and offer several methods and activities to help enhance corporate team spirit. Let us take a detailed look at how and why this phenomenon is so important to businesses:
What Are Team Building Activities?
If your office does not accommodate a balanced work-fun atmosphere, then it is inevitable for your employees to soon feel burnt out and unmotivated. This is the time for you to start experimenting with your workspace and open them to team-building activities.
These activities help the team bond and work together effectively. They encourage employees and workers to open up from their shells and talk to each other, forming a deeper bond beyond job roles. The main aim of these activities is to inculcate team spirit and boost productivity levels while having fun.
Most of the team-building activities are an initiative for the team to know each other better and connect with each other. Before the outbreak of COVID-19, executives would usually organize special days for the teams to know each other better through such activities. During the pandemic era, most of these sessions have shifted online. But the bottom line remains the same- get all individual team members together for a fun and interactive session for a few hours and help them get to know each other, work together in a productive manner, and create personal bonding.
How Can Team Building Activities Boost the Business?
Team building activities are the best way for the team to meet each other informally and communicate better. Strong teams are not just an outcome of good hiring, but they are formed through collaboration and willingness to work together as a whole. Some of the benefits of team building activities are:
1. Make employees feel valued:
You tend to work better at a place where you feel valued. Hence, it is important for teams who work together to value each other. When the employees get the respect they desire, they tend to give their 100% in work. Including team members in crucial decisions and taking their opinions and expertise into consideration is a great way to assure them that their actions hold value in the organization.
Many businesses thus do smaller things like making an employee page or creating an About Us page introducing their employees as a form of acknowledgment and appreciation. This not only helps boost morale but also creates a better image of the company in the eyes of its audience base. When consumers see that an organization is graceful enough to acknowledge individual hard work, they tend to trust in the authenticity of the brand. This, in turn, helps boost your business.
2. Enables employees to see others with a different perspective:
It has been observed that teams that share a great bond tend to be more productive. Incorporating activities like escape rooms, fun games, bonfires, and more can help the team to open up to each other at a personal level. You see the best in a person when they are at their happiest. Team building activities help you explore each other’s nature by creating such an atmosphere where everyone can let their guards down.
Someone who might be an introvert while doing work can prove to be a great asset to the whole team while playing activities. Some things that might get hidden behind the screens of computers tend to shine out in nature in team-building activities. You might discover the same fanatic of movies like you or a person with the same interests in politics. While playing games, employees use their heart and mind, and that results in the formation of an inner bond.
3. Increases collaboration:
The best part about team-building activities is how it enables inter-departmental bonding, something which is very rare in a normal working environment. In mid-size and big companies, different teams dedicated to different operations almost never get to interact outside of work. However, with a comprehensive team-building activity, employees across departments and job roles can get together and have fun in an informal atmosphere.
This enables a better workplace environment at the office and encourages coordination and cooperation among teams. Once the barrier of awkwardness and unfamiliarity is lifted through these fun activities, teams become much more comfortable in working side by side with minimal time spent on conflicts, thus producing better results in a collaborative project.
4. Positive reinforcement:
Office politics can sometimes be a bit too negative. Especially at this time when the world is witnessing a pandemic, having a positive outlook towards working can be daunting. And when you have a constant fear or confusion going around in your head, you cannot work properly. Team building activities help employees distract themselves from the complications at work and come together as a whole for a much lighter, enjoyable purpose. It helps them unwind and relax in the presence of one another, thus creating a safe space to interact.
When team members are not very worked up and frustrated, only then can they effectively communicate their issues and challenges at work. And it also makes it easier for the executives to understand what their employees are going through in a much more effective manner. Overall, team-building activities create a mindset towards collective problem solving and also send a message about the internal values of the organization itself.
5. Improves Communication:
Communication is the backbone of any good team. If your individual members cannot effectively communicate with each other outside work, they surely would not be able to understand each other in a much more tense situation in the professional sphere. Team-building activities such as escape rooms are ideal for enhancing active communication among team members. Every individual needs to learn the best and most effective way to communicate their ideas, frustrations, or boundaries to their colleagues in order to have a healthy and functional work environment within the team. By enabling teams to learn this vital soft skill, team-building activities ensure that none of your teams waste time on avoidable conflict or errors due to lapse of communication.
Conclusion
No business is an isolated unit that can operate as a monolith. Businesses are made out of individuals who work together towards some shared goal, vision, or motive. Only when the smaller component parts are well oiled and functioning together can the bigger machinery of the company work and make progress.
So, for any business owner, team-building activities are never an option but a primary investment to take care of as soon as the budget allows them to. Don’t settle for generic ideas; explore the newer, more effective educational experiences and invest in them. The rewards will follow in plenty.
Author Bio:
Aniya more is one of the brightest content writer at Breakout escape room.
She is a passionate writer who loves to read books and explore different escape rooms. With a great work ethic, she spends most of her time researching and reading. When she is not working, she likes to relax with a cup of coffee and enjoy watching her favorite tv show or walking her dog peanut.
