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If staff morale and a productive working environment are important to you, you need to invest time into team-building events.
Company culture may seem like a buzzword, but it actually describes a very important part of the workplace. Company culture involves the environment, values and goals of a business and its staff. If your company was a human, it’d be its personality. Businesses like Google and Twitter lead the way in building happy, positive company cultures that attract and retain a high-performing workforce — but how do you engender a successful company culture that will benefit staff and profits?
With an average of 1,900 monthly searches in the UK for the term ‘team-building exercises’, it’s surprising that many employers have still not implemented regular corporate days out into their company calendar. Discover why you need to integrate corporate team-building activities into your workplace and how encouraging these types of events can help boost your business.
Workplace productivity
Communication between staff is a big part of team-building days, and this factor is essential to workplace productivity. The more engaged and productive your staff are, the more efficient your daily operations will be, which both have a positive effect on your profit margin. According to Gallup, a research-based consulting company, employees who are engaged are around 17% more productive and show a 41% reduction in absenteeism. What’s more, highly engaged companies are reported by Gallup to be approximately 21% more profitable than those that aren’t.
Go for an event that involves creating something to get creative juices flowing among your staff. Working together outside of the office will help highlight personal strengths and weaknesses among staff, which will give management a greater idea of the type of training and development courses that could improve performance.
Happiness at work
It’s vital that your staff are happy with where and how they work. According to the Department of Economics and the University of Warwick, happy employees are up to 20% more productive than other workers. Since staff morale is intricately linked to happiness, you should implement initiatives, like team-building activities, companywide to ensure that your staff feel positive when they walk into work.
Fun, entertaining and ‘something different’; team-building days out of the office give your staff something to look forward to. Many expert psychologists have conducted experiments showing that anticipation is a key stage of cheerfulness. According to Action for Happiness, an organisation that helps people take practical steps to create a happier society, feeling good about the future is important for our happiness and motivation. If you want to encourage your staff to be ambitious, book an activity they’d enjoy.
Improving communication at work
Talking about processes and what’s going well or badly in a business can make the difference between success and failure. Not to mention create an inhibited company culture with disconnected employees. Solving issues that affect your business can only be achieved with clear, concise and confident discussions between members of staff — which is where team-building exercises come in.
Book an event that’s interactive and relies on communicating to achieve a goal. Choosing a team-building exercise that is fun, original and challenging will help your staff engage with the task at hand and you’ll have a greater chance of everyone pulling together to get the job done — a process that will then be adopted in the office.
Collective targets and creating a ‘neutral ground’ can help make people work together with less inhibitions. Break down those barriers further by choosing an activity where teams must follow instructions and swap ideas to help bolster creative thinking in the workplace and help individuals learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
We’re all different when it comes to socialising. Some find it easy to talk to others in a professional environment, while others don’t. Once those barriers of communication have been removed, your staff will feel more confident approaching each other for help and guidance on work-related matters, which will encourage a more open and fluid company culture.
Keeping good staff
Did you know that team-building exercises and corporate events can help you maintain your workforce and reduce the number of employees leaving their roles? These events will work towards making your workplace a more productive, happy, sociable, communicative, and trusting place to spend a weekday. This positive company culture should decrease the number of staff choosing to resign and keep talent within your company.
Columbia University found that company culture, created partly by positive team events, can assist in reducing the number of exiting employees. The research showed that the chance of job turnover at a business with a positive company culture is only 13.9%, while the likelihood of a high job turnover rate in places with poor company cultures is 48.4%.
A high turnover rate is never good. Your company will look less credible to prospective employees and you will have to invest in training new staff more often. Consequently, you lose experience, money, time, and the best chance of attracting a wide network of new, quality talent. Therefore, it’s a sensible tactic to devote a small portion of company time to constructive, team-building corporate events in order to start improving your employee turnover rate.
Staff participation benefits
Just because people work together Monday to Friday, it doesn’t mean they socialise often or even know each other that well. Therefore, it’s critical that you find a way to bring your staff together — and holding a regular corporate day out could be the simplest plan.
Implement a team-building schedule, and you could help boost trust among your staff — essential to productivity. Senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, Jim Dougherty, claims that: “Managers will never learn the truth about their company unless they have their employees’ trust.”
An increased sense of familiarity, which team-building exercises help create, builds greater relationships. This will make your staff feel more comfortable discussing problems and solutions and enable more efficient problem-mapping processes. Could your business solve company-wide issue quicker?
Clearly, team-building events are a worthwhile venture for employers. Look online for opportunities today to boost productivity and profits.
Sources:
http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/208487/right-culture-not-employee-happiness.aspx
https://tech.co/team-building-activities-productivity-2017-06
https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-company-culture-2062000
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238640
https://www.gthankyou.com/blog/research-shows-happy-employees-are-more-productive-by-gthankyou
https://www.business2community.com/sales-management/boost-sales-team-morale-year-end-01973983
http://www.tgdaily.com/enterprise/9-benefits-of-team-building-activities-in-the-workplace
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100218125204.htm
http://www.actionforhappiness.org/10-keys-to-happier-living/have-goals-to-look-forward-to
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238640
I love this! A lot of businesses don’t realize that productivity in work also comes from employee happiness. Just take Google for example. Their company is one of the best when it comes to employee benefits and their offices around the world are fun and interactive. Many companies are following these same strategy as well. But for small businesses that can’t afford big renovations like these, simple team dinners, team building events, company events can really bring the whole company together. These can build a better bond and relationship between employees and the management and can definitely boost company loyalty and morale.