The Benefits of Taking Your Team Outdoors

January 20, 2020

Building a team might be the greatest task any Manager can tackle. It often comes with understanding, hard work and a lot of stress. However, often more effective in building a team and collaborative work culture is the collective participation in outdoor team building activities.

These outdoor team building activities are purposeful and suspense-driven, usually tailored to overcome the various differences of people into achieving a common goal.

To effectively power up team morale, improve communication, cooperation, and understanding we have compiled a list of interesting activities you could use.

Egg drop

Need an excellent event to help foster the focus and bond of your team? Then look for no other but a breathe-taking egg drop conquest. Members of the team are shared into groups as they try to case-in an egg when it drops down preventing it from spilling. These case-ins are usually made up of straw, rubbers, plastics, etc. The whole team is geared in unity as they try to protect the egg from breakage and spillage. The team collaboratively prepares the straws and other materials, which enhances interpersonal relationship.

Human Knot 

To give your team a standout blaze, then checkout human knot. Team members stand in a circle, extending their right and left hands to different members of the same team. These hands are held across and a knot is formed, after which they set off to lose the holds off, within a marked schedule. Smiles on everyone, as team members put up a collaborative effort in loosening the knots. This fosters healthy relationships and terrific working conditions among team members.

Blind Drawing

This is an engaging activity that exclusively compels understanding, togetherness, and communication. Everyone is carried away and enthusiastic about each other. Team members are shared in groups and pairs. The eyes of a member is covered and series of items are brought before this member to describe, and the other members draw what he describes. At the end, the drawing draft is compared with the original object. This activity engages team members and helps them to upgrade their listening ability, which is often key to quality partnership and excellent relational bond. 

Scavenger Hunt

A random daunting task might just be another excellent, team building activity. This is often launched during a scavenger hunt. Team members are dispersed in groups and a random daunting task is given with a timeline. During this task which is often amazing and fun-packed, the passion of every member of the team is accelerated and plunged into the completion of the task. This reinforces togetherness and focus between team members.  

Electric Fence

A much more pent up activity is scaling an electric fence. No more funny gestures can be seen elsewhere than before a fence. Team members are to cross over it without making contact with the walls and wire. Members of the team are excited and anxious as well, but bond together to get over the hurdle.

Bridge-building

Nothing great starts without building, No wonder one of the most effective outdoor team building activity is that of bridge-building – a tasking quest that engages full participation and involvement. These bridges, however, are built with scrambles and straws contrary to the road bridges. Team members are engaged with a lot of brainstorming among members to get the right design and materials.  

Game of possibilities

This engages the creativity and intuitiveness of the members of the team as a member of the team is given an object from a random pick and is required to give an alternative to the object. Team members brainstorm together to find solutions. The ideas and views of everyone are harnessed, and there are popular participation and collaboration among the team members, further enhancing a stronger bond.

Truth and Lies

Often practiced rapidly in the local setting, team members meet in array often males to females and vice versa, questioning, and inquiring from each other about the happenings of their life. This is usually an exciting, intriguing, and wonderful activity as team members get to find out interesting things about each other. This, in the long run, removes relationship barriers and encourages internal communication.

Community Service 

The ability to show compassion is not often written on the face of individuals especially in the workplace where they are all subjected to stress and drudgery. Chill, take some time out with your team and plunge into community service. Team members launch out into community services such as helping those affected by disasters, homelessness and more. This enhances team member’s collaboration and evokes the spirit of love amongst team members. And also it bolsters the quality of people management among team members.

Barter Puzzle 

Looking to strengthen the creativity of your team? Then Barter puzzle might just be excellent in promoting this skills between team members. Team members are put in groups and are given puzzles, to match according to roles. Members ravel into reflex thinking and strategising unitedly to proffer adequate solutions. As the quest goes on and on, the different ideas of everyone are pulled and synthesised to fixing the puzzles, and the mind of everyone is engaged as well. 

Conclusion

Outdoor activities are exciting, fun-packed and amazing and much more than that, they are a valuable tool in building teams. Though perfection is a vain quest in human relationships, the regular practice of these outdoor activities helps in building an exceptional team.