Team building has been around for decades, but as teams have gone remote and hybrid, is it really necessary to maintain employee connections? The answer is yes! Team building in the workplace is more than just fun and games—it’s a necessary tool that has many invaluable effects on employee productivity and engagement.
Team building isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the cornerstone of collaboration, creativity, and camaraderie in the workplace. Let’s explore the description of team building and why it’s one of the smartest decisions you can make for your employees and company.
What is Team Building?
Team building is the process of creating a team that cohesively works together towards a common goal. It involves activities, exercises, or events designed to enhance communication, trust, and problem-solving skills while promoting a sense of shared purpose and camaraderie. Team building can take many forms, from structured workshops to more informal gatherings like happy hours or escape rooms.
Why is Team Building Important?
The purpose of team building is to help people see each other in a different light and allow them to connect in a different setting. Oftentimes, departments are siloed at work and employees rarely get to interact with those outside of their department. Team bonding activities are a great way to connect everyone and find common ground within an organization.
One of the most powerful reasons for team building is to get results. Through a series of planned team building events that are fun and motivational, teams build skills like communication, planning, problem-solving, and conflict resolution.
Team Building Meaning Misconceptions
The importance of team building is often underplayed by leaders who’ve never experienced its positive impact on employee connection and engagement. One of our event facilitators, Kevin Pertusiello explains many people’s opinions going into events:
“There are still so many companies out there that have not tried team building that are just unsure because it’s an unknown to them, and they’re just trying it out. And we win them over just about every single time. Sometimes people have in their head that it’ll be corny or people are going to drag their feet, but that’s not what we do. Because if that’s what we were doing, we wouldn’t want to do it either.”
Despite initial hesitation, we’ve found that even the most distant teams can find success when they invest in team building. Effective team building is more than cheesy trust falls and awkward icebreakers. Modern methods are designed to engage and challenge in meaningful ways—not make you cringe.
13 Reasons Why Team Building is Important
A close-knit team will ensure productivity and a good work environment. Here are 13 reasons for team building and why it’s important:
- Facilitates socialization and networking
- Boosts team performance
- Allows for friendly competition
- Increases team spirit and fun
- Fosters innovation and creativity
- Helps employees work better together
- Creates a positive company culture
- Gives employees something to look forward to
- Shows employees you appreciate them
- Builds bridges across departments
- Unlocks leadership potential
- Connects remote teams
- Improves employee engagement and morale
Learn more about the importance of team building below.
1. Facilitates socialization and networking.
Socializing and making friends at work is one of the best ways to increase productivity in the virtual, hybrid, or in-person workplace. According to Gallup, women who have a work best friend are more than twice as likely to be engaged in their work than those who do not. Not only does team building increase engagement in the office, but it will also help virtual teams more quickly solve challenges if they’re comfortable approaching coworkers with questions and concerns as they arise rather than waiting for answers from managers or avoiding conflict altogether.
2. Boosts team performance.
Team building activities also help teams better understand each other: teamwork activities can help employees realize their own strengths within a team, as well as the strengths, weaknesses, and interests of their coworkers. This helps teams more seamlessly work together and find the best people for the best jobs. Each team is different and every individual has something unique to contribute. Once you can identify and encourage everyone to reach their individual potential, your team will be able to reach its collective potential.
3. Allows for friendly competition.
Friendly competition has been shown to increase productivity. By channeling that increased productivity into a fun, inclusive team building activity, teams can bond in a more effective way than by simply hanging out together or working side-by-side. Learning to work well together can take some time, but you’d be surprised at how fast teams can come together when there is an incentive to win. They might even surprise themselves!
4. Increases team spirit and fun.
Have you ever worked somewhere with no team spirit or fun? Everyone stays in their individual cubicle and completes their work and then heads home without saying their goodbyes? It’s a setting that feels more like a collection of isolated individuals than a cohesive team, and over time, it can drain energy, creativity, and motivation. Without connection and camaraderie, work becomes just another routine instead of a chance to make an impact on other people.
Team building is a powerful way to energize your team, creating a ripple effect of motivation and positivity that bleeds into their everyday work. When work feels fun and rewarding, everyone wins and celebrates! The team that works together, wins together.
5. Fosters innovation and creativity.
People tend to have a larger imagination while around people they’re comfortable with. Successful team building events not only bring people closer together, but they also contribute to a more creative workplace with enhanced psychological safety where employees feel confident in voicing their opinions and digging deeper than simple work small talk.
Continuous learning is a key part of innovative work cultures and can be easily incorporated into most team building activities. Professional development workshops offer the best of both worlds when it comes to team building and continuous learning. Breaking Barriers, for example, helps employees work through their own insecurities in order to better understand themselves and their colleagues, cultivating a work culture that thrives on collaboration, respect, and collective creativity.
6. Helps employees work better together.
To no surprise, the main reason people choose team building is to improve workplace communication and teamwork. Everybody wants a friendly work environment where people are comfortable and happy working with all of their coworkers—not just a select few. And this bleeds into business operations as well—in fact, 90% of employers believe fostering a sense of community affects the success of a business. Additionally, more than 50% of employees have left a job because they didn’t feel a strong sense of belonging.
Most people picture old-school team building exercises when they think about the topic, but today’s methods are much more fun and effective, giving your employees the opportunity to build closer bonds while learning new things and having fun. Team building events that support causes close to your company’s values are a great option for boosting employee collaboration. Events like the Charity Bike Build are always a hit with all types of teams, allowing them to practice teamwork with a clear positive goal in mind.
7. Creates a positive company culture.
Company culture can be explained as the values, norms, goals, and attitudes that exist within your organization. Simply put, it defines the environment you work in and makes up the personality of the company. According to iHire, more than 82% of Gen Z employees place a high value on workplace culture when looking for a new role. But unfortunately, almost a fifth of workers describe their current workplace as toxic.
Regularly scheduled team building events can improve your company culture and provide a space to understand your employees’ wants and needs. Sometimes the culture of management doesn’t match up with that of the employees, so finding a middle ground is an important step in creating a more positive environment. Team building activities help to cut out workplace toxicity and get everyone on the same page while working together. The benefits will be sure to follow you back to the office.
8. Gives employees something to look forward to.
Whether it’s once a week or every few months, scheduling team building activities will give your employees something to look forward to other than those project deadlines. No one wants to look at their calendar to see what seems like a never-ending list of tasks. Have your employees get excited about non-work-related events during the workweek, not just on the weekend.
It’s also important to recognize that these events give employees a shared goal that doesn’t have to do with their work. This much-needed break is good for employee mental health and ties back into the idea of creating a more positive work environment for the people who make your company successful.
9. Shows employees you appreciate them.
Along the same lines, team building events show employees that they’re appreciated for their hard work. Many times, great work can accidentally be swept under the rug due to a sea of other things going on. Prioritizing these events shows employees you care about them and appreciate their efforts by rewarding them with a fun activity the team can enjoy together.
Team building activities can be used as part of an employee incentive program to reward workers for a job well done, or can be held on a regular cadence so employees are always motivated to do their best work.
10. Build bridges across departments.
The connections between employees within one department aren’t the only ones that matter when it comes to building a stronger team. “Team” doesn’t have to be confined to the sales team or the marketing team—it is a unified collection of all the working departments that make up your organization. Ask yourself – how well do you know employees in departments other than your own? If the answer is not well or not at all, then team building will surely bring departments closer together to encourage cross-functional collaboration that will benefit your organization as a whole.
Especially as layoffs and organizational restructuring become more common, companies should focus on bonding across all departments before a sudden change leaves employees working together with people they don’t quite understand. Kevin explains the benefits of team building across departments:
“Every now and again, we’ll get called in to connect a team that had some kind of merger of companies or departments. And it may be two groups of people that really don’t trust each other. Whether that’s because of different histories, layoffs on one side, but not on the other side…things that a lot of times there’s just a lack of knowledge, and that fosters some issues when it comes to trust. So it’s our job to get people to the same table to see eye to eye. It’s letting go of titles and departments and saying, ‘We are now on the same playing field.’”
Urge employees to familiarize themselves with people in other departments, instead of working in a silo with members of their immediate team. You will likely find that this practice will help everyone to feel more comfortable in the workplace and open doors to new relationships. Bridging those divides allows for positive relationships to form, which leads to a more productive company.
11. Unlocks leadership potential.
Most leaders are familiar with the benefits of upskilling: it reduces turnover, boosts productivity and engagement, and ultimately increases revenue. But did you know that team building activities are great opportunities to spot employees with leadership potential?
In a more relaxed and creative environment, you may find employees have hidden skills that haven’t been discovered in the office. Leaders can arise in the simplest of activities and may surprise you. Regularly scheduled team building events can feed employees’ confidence in the workplace and help them discover their own skills. You may learn that the quiet new employee is incredible at inspiring their peers and with the right mentor, development opportunities, and encouragement could be your company’s next rising leader.
Consider creating a mentor program or leadership development program to help employees achieve their highest potential. After each team building event, reach out to team leaders and request nominations for these programs based on colleagues who have stood out during these experiences.
12. Connects remote teams.
30% of hybrid workers cite decreased team collaboration as a challenge in their day-to-day work. While in-person teams have plenty of opportunities for small talk and side conversations throughout the workday, remote and hybrid teams have to put in more effort to get to know their coworkers. That’s where team building comes into the picture!
Team building activities give remote employees the opportunity to connect with each other in a more personal, informal setting, creating opportunities for deeper bonds. These bonds often spread into everyday work, boosting team synergy between remote and hybrid employees.
13. Improves employee engagement and morale.
Committing to regularly scheduled team building events will encourage employees to step away from their work and have some fun, which in turn will help them return to their desk feeling refreshed, re-energized, and ready to work. Similarly, it also helps build camaraderie, making employees more excited to come to the office and more invested in their daily work.
It all depends on which activities your employees enjoy. Find common interests among your staff and choose the team building activities that will give them the most enjoyment. When people aren’t working around the clock, they’ll actually get more work done because they’re more engaged and energized when they do work.
Don’t Overlook the Importance of Team Building
Even if a team is composed of the best employees out there, it will never be successful if they can’t work together. From connecting remote teams to creating prospective leaders, team building in the workplace is a no brainer for business success.
Teamwork is a critical skill that’s often forgotten as we grow older, but business leaders shouldn’t shy away from team building just because it’s an unknown to them and they aren’t sure how to plan the details of a team building experience.
At TeamBonding, we specialize in helping teams of all sizes connect and find their groove. Browse our unique team building activities and get in touch with us today to start boosting team synergy and business success!
