Quick Team-building Exercises

Quick Team-building Exercises to Develop a Sense Of Belonging

If you believe that motivation is lagging in your organization, some team building exercises will get you back on track. Read the following article to gain some ideas for the same.
Considered an integral part of today's corporate world, team building exercises help in keeping the motivation levels high, and propagate teamwork. There are many successful corporate honchos who have spoken about the power of "We", and have attributed their own and organizational success to it. Effective leadership is understanding the needs of the employees and co-workers, and then encouraging them to achieve their best. Many times, people spend more time in the office than anywhere else, or think about nothing but work. This leads to exhaustion of body and mind, and at such times, employee motivation becomes paramount. The efficacy of performing together is something, which has dawned upon several organizations, and they have started paying attention to performance enhancement techniques. Activities that instigate personal development of the participants are received well, in comparison to those that are simply fun-filled.
You can develop your own set of exercises to suit your needs. The most important thing, while planning such activities, is to understand the participants and their growth areas. If you are planning to conduct them in the workplace, make sure what lesson you would like to deliver through them. Employee communication and workplace ethics are best tackled by group activities that involve each team member. Here are a couple of examples of quick team-building exercises for improving productivity:
Treasure Hunt: It is an exercise that is fun, and advocates a strong message that will have the desired effect rather than the one, which is drab and workman like. Organize a treasure hunt in the office and hide clues, which can only be obtained after the successful completion of the assigned task. The tasks can be as simple as gathering information about the favorite color of a stipulated number of employees. You can also provide a clue for the treasure, after members successfully complete a puzzle board game. The treasure hunt will promote interaction between the participants, and communication and problem-solving skills will be put to test. Thus, it is indeed one of the best activities for busy managers, for whom getting to know all co-workers is difficult.
Complete Picture: Download few pictures of living and non-living things, and distribute these among team members. Then, give a central theme like workplace ethics, which the members will have to showcase with the pictures they have. Print out pictures of a couple, mobile phones, person taking a nap, and a radio. Distribute these to the participants, and ask them to come up with a short background story of the picture, related to workplace ethics. This game is fun, when participants come with weird accounts about the pictures in their hands. It is also a great way to ensure that work ethics should not be taken lightly, and when adhered to, can generate positive results.
Obstacle Course: It is a game that will help improve inter-departmental coordination. There are many times when accounting employees feel that the people in payroll should do their job efficiently without understanding their problems, and viceversa. In the obstacle course game, you do a simple-assisted role reversal. You take a person from accounting to complete a task in payroll (for example, data entry), and you also assign him a team member from the payroll department, who can only give limited verbal instructions. Then you ask the person from payroll to complete the accounting-related task, with the accounting person giving verbal assistance. This activity will help everyone understand and experience the limitations of the others' work area, and can give some insights into job satisfaction in general.
These quick team-building exercises will help generate awareness about individual responsibility, and most certainly help relieve to some stress. Thus, incorporate these activities, and see the bonding grow.
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