Team-building activities: More than just an excuse to escape the office

Team building events have moved from competition to collaboration.

The word 'team-building' can conjour up a wide-range of reactions. For some it is flinching memories of rock climbing or tug-of-war contests, and one renegade international company in the 1980s placed 'coal walking' on the internal motivation agenda, only to end up with a few law suits and burnt feet and a singed reputation for the rest of the well-run industry.

The reality is and should be that many teambuilding programmes are client driven, which means that if the client has a particular objective for a conference, they will require a teambuilding solution that fits with that objective.

Companies are increasingly evolving the use of team-building to reinforce brand values, rather than purely viewing team events as an opportunity to simply have some fun and some respite from the office.

Team-building is actually increasingly being seen for its high value in ‘brain-friendly learning' - activating the senses and learning by ‘experiential' means - to make a major impact in getting messages across. For the meetings and incentives industry, conference energizers can motivate and engage the audience in powerful ways including:

• Reinforcing the conference or company's key message

• Re-energising delegates to make them more open to absorbing concentrated information

• Serving as ice-breakers and helping bond a group in "team-ship".

The type of teambuilding programmes taking place has also seen a dramaticchange. In the late 80's and early 90's, teambuilding programmes were about competition - having a winning team at the end. The industry then moved from competition to collaboration where group discussions would take place in order to deliver a complete solution together.

We've now moved on to the third phase where teambuilding is happening on a collective basis where everyone knows from the outset that there is a single objective. BeatsWork, Big Picture and Bridging The Divide are all a prime example of this type of approach to teambuilding, and have worked with great success in delivering key messages and motivating staff with the greatest impact.

For example, 'The Big Picture' is an exceptionally good event for demonstrating different styles of people working together.

Teams draw and paint cleverly crafted sections of a picture on authentic artist canvasses. Communication and co-ordination is critical as not all the information is immediately provided, to encourage teamwork and collaboration.

When all teams have finished, the canvasses are joined together to unveil a high-impact artwork to visually showcase an organisation's values, brand positioning, corporate messages or conference themes.

The challenge itself clearly demonstrates the importance of effective communication in a short space of time and the result is both a physical show of teamwork and a very colorful and creative reveal of "the big picture" of a conference or organisation.

So for conference and event organizers, the messages are clear; team-building has proven ways to achieve your key goals as a part of a bigger picture in engaging audiences and staff and getting them all in line with your messages and focus, so you can have all of that effectiveness wrapped in a very fun and memorable way.

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