Are you searching for ways to boost staff morale, lower employee turnover and boost productivity in the workplace? If so, you need to focus your attention on corporate team-building activities.

Team-building exercises are an easy way to create a company culture that works. 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 use corporate team-building activities to 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. Find out the benefits of team-building exercises on company culture and how encouraging corporate excursions for your staff can help take your business to the next level. 

Communication

If your staff don’t discuss ideas, go over processes and generally communicate about day-to-day tasks, it could seriously harm the efficiency of your business. 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.

The most successful corporate days out encourage interactivity and can include events such as taking skiing lessons or going on a treasure hunt. 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.

Removing your staff from the familiar workplace and placing them in a new situation with a collective goal organically inspires communication, as everyone is suddenly on ‘neutral ground’ where office politics are redundant. Help 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.

Remember, every member of staff is different. 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.

Productivity

Organising a team-building activity encourages engagement and communication between staff — and these are both essential to 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.

Encouraging team-building activities — such as those that involve building or creating something — can also help to boost originality and imagination, which your employees can then transfer to the workplace. Plus, 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. 

Office morale

One of the main advantages for corporate days is that it shows your staff that you care about morale. 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.

Organising exciting corporate days out can help you inject fun and light-heartedness into your company, giving your staff something to look forward to rather than the same, run-of-the-mill day. 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, perhaps it’s worth beginning by taking action and finding the time to book a fun, group activity that you think they’d enjoy.

Chance to bond

At work, we must work with a band of people that we may not otherwise choose to socialise with, perhaps from lack of common interests or difference in personalities. 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.

Team-building exercises help socialise your workforce, but they also help to build trust, which can work to improve your company’s overall performance. 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.”

If you choose a team-building activity that depends on teamwork, communication and group planning, you will improve the level of trust your staff have in each other and with you. This increased sense of familiarity builds a greater personal connection, which means your staff will feel more comfortable discussing problems — and potential solutions. This will allow for more efficient problem-mapping processes to overcome issues that could be holding your company back without your knowledge. 

Staff retention

Team-building, corporate activities could also improve your firm’s staff retention statistics. Assuming that the advantages stated above come to fruition, your workplace will be 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.

A study conducted by Columbia University also suggests that company culture, assisted by positive initiatives such as exciting team days out, can help lower the amount of people exiting your company. 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%.

If your company has a high employee turnover rate, not only does that reduce the credibility and worth of your company to prospective employees, but it also means you must invest resources into frequently training new staff. 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.

Clearly, corporate days out hold many advantages. If you want to boost profits, productivity and processes; search online for fun, team-building activities suitable for colleagues. 

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