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Things to do after team building
Teamwork, team spirit, team building – these words starting with ‘T’ define the work culture today. Helen Keller sums it up so nicely “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”.
One way to promote this spirit of ‘oneness’ at work is through team building activities and that is why today organizations are investing so heavily in team building. HR teams across organizations keep organizing team building activities, both indoors and outdoors, and some are even seeing impressive results.
But as soon as the team building activity gets over, most of the people get engrossed in their routine lives and the memory of the fun they had and the lessons they learnt start fading. Leaders and HR managers can help them hold on to the experience but how,
Through our own experience, we have picked three key steps that can help leaders and HR professionals keep the spirit of teambuilding alive in the individuals, long after the event has been said and done.
Ask for Feedback
Wait for a couple of days and then ask your team to share their feedback on the team building activity they recently participated in. You can prepare a questionnaire and share it via an email or can have a face-to-face interaction. Ask questions like – What did they enjoy or not enjoy? What did they learn? What could be improved? It will help solve two purposes. Firstly, you will get to know if they enjoyed the activity or no and if the team building provider was efficient and engaging and secondly, it will help you understand what lessons they learned from the activity and how they can implement those learnings into their daily work.
Informal Team Audit
While asking for feedback is one way to know the effectiveness of session, conducting an informal team audit is another. You can conduct an internal team audit through questionnaires or through face-to-face interaction. This assessment will help you uncover common team working challenges that your team might be facing and, if, they are applying the lessons learned from the teambuilding activity to solve those real-world problems at work. Create a list of what was learned and ask the team for actionable items to follow up on in routine office life.
Click Photographs
Be sure you take some candid pictures of the team while they are engrossed in the activity and after the event gets finished, post those pictures on the company’s social media pages, employee portal, whiteboards, or share them through email with the team. While you post or share these pictures, do write in a message that talks about the outcomes you focused on with this activity. This will help the team members re-live the moment together and will also re-instate the purpose of the event which is – learning through play!
Organizing easy and fun team building activities is important but it is even more important to follow up with the team to ensure people implement the learnings into their day-to-day lives.
How do you know you’ve gotten team building right? If you can see some happy faces around and an improved and enhanced work culture, you’re definitely on the right track!
If you have some more ideas around the topic, reach out to us and share your experience at @hello@focusu.com.
