Quick Team Building Exercises

An integral part of today's corporate world, team building exercises help in keeping the motivation levels high and propagate teamwork. There have been many successful corporate honchos who have spoken about the power of 'We' and who have attributed their own and organizational success to teamwork. Effective leadership is understanding the need of the employees and co-workers, and then encouraging them to achieve their best. Many times, people spend more time in office than anywhere else or think more about work than anything else, this leads to exhaustion of body and mind, and at such times employee motivation becomes paramount. The efficacy of performing in a team, is something which has dawned upon several organization and they have started paying attention to performance enhancing techniques. Quick team building activities which instigate personal development of the participants are received well, than activities that are just fun to do in a group.

You can develop your own team building exercises to suit your needs, the most important thing when planning such activities is to understand the participants and their growth areas. If you are planning team building in the workplace, make sure what lesson you would like to deliver through these activities. Employee communication and workplace ethics are best tackled by group exercises that involve each team member. Here are a couple of team building exercises for improving productivity:

Treasure Hunt: A team building exercise which is fun and advocates a strong message will have the desired effect rather than one which is drab and workman like. Organize a treasure hunt in the office and hide clues, which can only be obtained after successfully completing an assigned task. The tasks can be as simple as gathering information about the favorite color of a stipulated number of employees. You can also give the clue to the treasure after members successfully complete a puzzle board game. The treasure hunt will promote interaction between the participants and communication, and problem solving skills will be put to test. It is one of the best quick team building activities for busy managers, for whom getting to know all co-workers is difficult.

Complete Picture: Download a few pictures of living and non-living things and distribute these among team members. Then give a central theme, like workplace ethics, which the members will have to showcase with the pictures that they have. Print out pictures of a couple kissing, mobile phones, person taking a nap, and a radio, distribute these to the participants and ask them to come up with a short background story of the picture related to workplace ethics. The game is very fun when participants come up with weird accounts about the pictures in their hands. It is also a great way to ensure that work ethics should not be taken lightly and when adhered to, can get good results.

Obstacle Course: A game that will help inter-departmental coordination and which propagates working together and understanding others limitations. There are many times when employees in accounting feel that the people in payroll should do their job efficiently without understanding their problems and vis-a-versa, people in payroll, think that employees in accounting are slackers. In the obstacle course game, you do a simple assisted role reversal, you take a person from accounting to complete a task in payroll for example data entry and you also assign him a team member from the payroll department who can only give limited verbal instruction to complete the task. Then you ask the person from payroll to complete the accounting-related task, with the person from accounting giving verbal assistance. This activity will help everyone understand and experience the limitations of the others work area and can give some insights about job satisfaction.

These quick team building exercises will help generate awareness about individual responsibility and will most certainly help relieve some job stress. So incorporate these activities and see the team bonding grow.