Reinforcing Relationships With Corporate Team Building Events

In this fast-paced world where it seems impossible to go anywhere without seeing others talking or texting on some high-tech gadget, being so “connected” almost feels like a “disconnect” from building collaborative, authentic, real-world relationships. Here’s how corporate team building events can reinforce your relationships and make them stronger than ever:

Put the Trust Back in Your Working Relationships

Corporate team building events are a good way to shake off the rust after a long winter and help your employees focus on the importance of building relationships with their co-workers. Whether you’re zip lining through the canopies, helping each other through an obstacle course or just spending time talking about your families over a nice meal, corporate team building events help people recognize each other as individuals that are important to the success of a company.

Different Types of Team Building

There is no shortage of corporate team building events. Some, such as charity and food drives, are done in the office to benefit others while promoting a sense of teamwork. Others, such as adventure team building, are accomplished at remote sites that offer two advantages. One, by getting away from the phones you are actually able to focus on the tasks at hand. The second is that an outside event allows co-workers to see each other in a different light. Corporate team building events usually blossom when taken to a location away from the office that has structured activities designed to improve morale and leadership while accomplishing clear goals and objectives. Rather than design a team building event yourself, it’s well worth the investment to utilize a company with years of experience that provides both a safe and fun environment.

Work Together to Solve Problems

Business demands that employees cooperate to identify potentially-problematic areas of concern, conceptualize doable solutions, and consistently provide exceptional, world-class customer service. Unfortunately, the creation of personality conflicts and apathy over time can sabotage everyone’s best efforts. Get your employees out of the office for a day or two and head to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania where the Refreshing Mountain adventure team has organized a number of corporate team building events that will rejuvenate and relax your entire team. Refreshing Mountain staffers have a long list of available exercises that they can tailor to your specific company needs. Your employees will renew their ability to depend on each other while developing communication skills and trust that will pay off back at work.

Make it an Annual Event or Reward

Much like a holiday party or summer picnic, corporate team building events are a fun and exciting experience that rewards employees for a job well done while building even stronger collaboration skills in the future.  Corporate team building events provide a great chance to remind employees of your business culture and affirm the importance of your company values. Scheduling an overnight retreat at Refreshing Mountain gives the benefit of structured events and some down time where workers can get to know each other better and develop friendships that foster outside the office. By committing to annual corporate team building events, you reinforce the belief that your employees are important and that you are willing to invest the finances and time to help them be successful. By showing your appreciation for each individual, you can expect an increase and dedication that will reduce turnover and create a more stable business environment. Corporate team building events can also be a fun reward for reaching a major milestone or securing a large contract. Your generosity will reap benefits in the future as your staff learns the values of communication and leadership.

The Benefits of a Corporate Teambuilding Event

Every employer knows the importance of having a team that is innovative, creative, and united in their goals. To achieve the ambitions and dreams of the company, everyone in the business must have a clear understanding of the company’s vision, as well as the values that the company is built upon. It is necessary from time to time to re-focus and re-evaluate with your team and employees to ensure that all are united in their vision.

It can be difficult during the busyness of the workweek to find the time to have these essential re-evaluations. It’s easy to become distracted with the actual work of running a business and not have time to really step back and re-focus. It’s also important for your employees to once in a while be removed from their normal office surroundings to re-ignite their innovation and creativity.

This is where a corporate teambuilding event can be very beneficial for your business. A change of pace and a change of scenery can be just what is needed to keep your business moving in the right direction. Let’s explore some of the many benefits of taking a corporate retreat.

Building Relationships

While working in an office, employees rarely show their personalities in the same way they do outside the office. This can be due to the pressures of the workplace, or just their natural disposition around other people. At a corporate retreat, the atmosphere is more relaxed, allowing employees to interact more freely without the work pressure that is usually present. This can allow for building closer relationships between employees, as well as relationships between management and employees. At an offsite event, there is less of a hierarchical structure, allowing everyone to feel important and valued, as well as making them feel more free to express their opinions.

Increasing Creativity

Being in the same location day after day can sometimes lend itself to a stagnation in creativity. Just as thinking outside of the box is necessary for creativity, so too being physically outside of your normal “box” is necessary to get the creative juices flowing. The fresh air of the outdoors, the beauty of nature all around you, and the meeting spaces outside of your usual conference areas all lend themselves to a creative environment that is necessary in today’s business world.

Learning to Work Together

Teambuilding Challenge – Gossip Table

Obviously, working together is one of the most essential aspects of a successful team. Learning how to work with different personalities while overcoming obstacles is essential for a team to run smoothly and efficiently. There are many team-building exercises that you can do on your corporate event that will help the various teams in your business to function more cohesively.

Teambuilding Challenge – Great Wall

At Refreshing Mountain, we have a variety of teambuilding activities that you can incorporate into your corporate retreat, including team-building challenges that require your team to work together to solve specific challenges; a physical challenge course that combines physical activity with a scavenger hunt; and customized team building events that allow you to specifically design exercises for your teams. Working together to solve problems in a fun, relaxed environment will lead to a more cohesive, focused team at the workplace.

Education

In addition to all of the team building activities, a corporate retreat can also be a great place for providing your employees with additional job training. After all, you want as much as possible to take advantage of the opportunity of having your employees all together in a fun, relaxed environment. In the same way that a change of scenery can help to increase creativity, so too can a change in scenery help to present useful information without your employees becoming bored or feel as if their time is being wasted. Refreshing Mountain offers ample meeting facilities with audio/visual equipment to help meet your meeting needs.  We also have a full commercial kitchen and provide catering service to larger groups.

Corporate Team Building

Employee Rewards

A corporate teambuilding event is also a great way of rewarding your employees for the great work they’ve done throughout the year. You may consider inviting your employees’ families to the retreat, to break up the work routine even more and to give the retreat more of a “vacation” feel, rather than just another work-related activity.

Here at Refreshing Mountain, we are dedicated to making your next corporate event as rewarding as possible. Our helpful staff will work with you in planning the logistics so that you can focus on making your event as beneficial as possible to your employees and company as a whole.

How to Deflate Your Team’s Morale with a Bad Team Building Activity

Is your team working together just a little too well lately?  Looking for a way to take things down a notch? Consider these horror stories of office team building activities gone wrong:

A slam book for grown-ups: “During a previous job, I worked in a team that was having trouble getting along, so they brought in someone to help us work together as a team. First activity? We had to go around the room and tell each other what we didn’t like about each other. We might have also had to add what we did like about each other but I honestly only remember the criticisms and the people bursting into tears. We went from simply not being able to work together to actively disliking each other in about 30 minutes. Then we ate a boxed lunch and ended the day by filling out personality tests.”

Lions and monkeys: “We had an exercise run by a consultant who determined what kind of workplace animal each of us was. The boss turned out to be a ‘lion’ (surprise!). I turned out to be a ‘monkey,’ which was great. My coworkers were told that they weren’t allowed to tell me to tidy my workspace because it would stifle my natural simian creativity.”

The temple of the dolphin: “I once had to sit through two hours of a team-building exercise that first involved us all sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding hands with our eyes closed, while the leader described us flying over the ocean into the “temple of the dolphin.” She got very vivid in her description of this imaginary place. It was incredibly difficult not to laugh. After we opened our eyes, we had to watch videos of dolphins and point out the leadership skills they were demonstrating. I am not joking. We did that for well over an hour.”

Read more from the article “The 10 Most Horrifying Team Building Exercise” by Alison Green

Or consider this team building fail:

Of course the point of this article isn’t to encourage a rash of new team building disasters, that was just to get your laughing a bit before we get down to the serious stuff.  If you lead or work on a team, you know the importance of working better together and team building activities can be a great tool for improving team effectiveness.  You also know it can be counterproductive to hold a poorly organized event.  So how do you avoid these mistakes and create the perfect environment for team building?  There is no magic bullet, but here are some top tips that should help you identify good activities:

• Make it interesting: Just because it worked last year doesn’t mean it will this year, try something different
• Keep it relevant: The activity needs to be interesting, but it also has to have some application to what they do, otherwise it will feel like a wast of time
• Involve everyone: Try to find activities that will keep each person engaged
• Maintain dignity: One of the biggest fears people have about team building activities is the fear of being embarrassed, don’t let it happen on your watch!
• Check out our blog post: “Do Corporate Team Building Events Work?” for even more tips

Excited about holding a team building event but worried you might not be ready to organize one on your own?  Let the experts at Refreshing Mountain build your next event.  We’ve been hosting groups on our 80-acre property for over 30 years and offer a wide variety of team building and outdoor adventure activities.  We also offer meeting rooms, catered meals and overnight accommodations.  Learn more at refreshingmountain.com

Build Your Team, Build Your Business

The team at Bolt Insurance put together this great infographic on the importance of building your team as a strategy for building your business.  Interested in kick-starting your own team building efforts? Check out the Refreshing Mountain website for our team building event options.  We work with you to create an event that is fun and engaging and can tie it in with your business meeting.  In addition to our many team building activity options, we offer outdoor adventures, conference space and catered meals.  Looking for a longer event?  Check out our all-inclusive corporate retreat packages.

“Build Your Team, Build Your Business” Infographic by Bolt Insurance

 

Do Corporate Team Building Events Work?

What is a Team Building Event?

According to Wikipedia (the ultimate source of information about anything these days) “Team building refers to a wide range of activities, presented to businesses, schools, sports teams, religious or nonprofit organizations designed for improving team performance. Team building is pursued via a variety of practices, and can range from simple bonding exercises to complex simulations and multi-day team building retreats designed to develop a team (including group assessment and group-dynamic games), usually falling somewhere in between. It generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development, but can also be applied to sports teams, school groups, and other contexts.”

More simply put, team building is a tool for helping a team of individuals work better together.  For instance, team building activities can help individuals learn different ways of communicating and help develop more positive perspectives on change.  Or, if you prefer a “glass half empty” perspective, it’s a way to work on team issues such as poor communication, lack of trust or unrealistic expectations.  The reality is that many people talk about working together as a team, but few people really know how to develop an effective team.

Using Team Building Events to Improve Your Team

Working as a team is a journey and certainly isn’t achieved through one meeting, but a corporate team building event could be just the thing your team needs to kick start their development.  We all have examples of “bad” team work, but sometimes it’s difficult to pin point exactly what good team work looks like.  A well-organized team building activity can provide a fun context for developing practical experiences that your team will remember forever.  The Small Group Research journal paper “Does Team Building Work?” analyzed data from 103 studies conducted between 1950 and 2007 and provides strong evidence that team building can have measurable, positive effects on team performance.

Of course, not all team building activities are created equal.  Many have attended poorly organized team building events and as a result have formed less than positive feelings towards participating in future events.  One study from Citrix found that 31% of respondents said they can’t stand team-building activities!  That being said, research from the American Psychological Association (APA) found that team building activities helped employees feel valued.  In fact, “almost all employees (93 percent) who reported feeling valued said that they are motivated to do their best at work.”  Now that’s a result any employer or team leader would like to achieve!

Organizing an Effective Corporate Team Building Event

To summarize what we’ve learned so far, team building events can be a key tool towards achieving harmonious bliss in your team…but only if they are done well and make people feel valued.  So what kinds of events have proven effective?  In an U.S. News & World Report interview, David W. Ballard, head APA’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program, shares the following top 5 team building activities: volunteering, physical activities, field trips, professional development activities & shared meals.  In other words, get your team out of their work environment and give them something constructive and active to work on together.  Even better, find a way to tie in back to honing their work skills and feed them when you’re done!

Many organizations find that great leaders don’t necessarily make great team building event planners.  In fact, it’s better for the leader to be an active participant in the activity versus being stuck running the event. The key is to find a company that has the resources to create the right environment and activities to give you’re the space to do something fun and meaningful together.  For instance, here at Refreshing Mountain, we’ve provided a wide variety of outdoor adventure activities that are fun, interactive and foster teamwork.  We have trained facilitators who will lead your group through a series of problem solving challenges, all designed to promote more effective communication, conflict resolution and other positive team behaviors.  We also offer conference meeting space and catered meals.

In summary, teams need fun activities outside of work to help foster good team work and it doesn’t have to be hard or expensive.  Refreshing Mountain offers corporate team building event packages starting as low as $14 per person.  If you don’t have the time or budget to organize a full event, consider at least getting the group outside of work to share a meal together!

The Wall

Gossip Table

Giant Ladder

Challenge Adventure Zipline Tour