Generating Interest and Excitement for Team Building – Perth Experts Share Tips

March 2, 2016

A few days before your scheduled team building event is about to commence, a handful of your employees ask you whether they are required to attend the said event. Puzzled, you ask yourself why your workers are not excited about the prospect of getting together outside of the office environment.

There is no doubt that a well-planned and well-implemented team building activity offers plenty of benefits, both for the organisation and its members. However, planning and implementation are just two important facets of one whole. At the other end of the spectrum, event organisers are tasked with generating excitement for the event itself.

You might be excited about the idea of a team building event helping you achieve your goals (sparking employee loyalty, increasing productivity, building a cohesive unit, etc.) but what if your employees think otherwise? What's the reason behind this gap?

There is no single right answer to this question. Perhaps, sometime in the past, your employees have attended team building events and found them boring. In their minds, team building is all about going through rope courses and trust falls (which is not entirely correct). Team building Perth, employees sometimes think, is geared toward the more physically fit. Past participation found them sitting on the sidelines, watching in disappointment while other team members hog the spotlight.

Or maybe one of the past events they attended turned into just one corporate outing with things turning back to normal upon going back to the office. Of course, there is the possibility that the events you have lined up are simply not challenging or exciting enough, or that you scheduled the event on a long weekend when most of your employees are keen on spending time with friends and family members, instead of spending that time with co-workers and bosses.

If you want your employees to truly look forward to team building, one of the first things that you need to do is to break these preconceived notions of theirs. Simply put, you cannot choose the same cookie cutter activities that they may have already tried.

Generate excitement by engaging your employees right from the start. You can start off by giving them a say on which activities to try this year.

Next, instead of focusing on competition, steer clear from this. According to many experts, competition brings out the worst in people and can leave some of your employees at the sidelines. If your goal is for your employees to bring home some learning experiences, competition should be out of the equation.

In exchange of competition, design your team building activities around cooperation. Sure, you can reward top performers, but you can also allow those who helped others in their achievements to share the spotlight. Also, leave ample room for reflections about learnings that your employees can bring back to the office.