While your employees are all excellent individually, they could benefit from some of those popular team-building exercises—spending time in treetops or skimming down zip lines building trust. However, such exercises are not within your small business budget. The good news is there are many much more cost-effective ways to tackle team building.
Volunteer together
You can plan to have your employees lend a hand in the community–volunteering costs organizations little or nothing and is a big morale builder, particularly when they involve the participants’ own community. You might, for example, give workers a chance to pull together and help clean up a local park. Not only can they feel good about helping the area kids, but they also may find a spot to later proudly enjoy their own lunch. By volunteering locally, you show that you value your collective community.
Such volunteering not only brings employees together with a sense of collaboration, but it actually makes them appreciate their workplace more1 with a greater inclination to recommend it to others. And, according to Council on Foundations, employees who participate are more likely to stay on the job for at least two more years.
To foster community involvement, give your team members a common goal. You may try linking up with a charity like Ronald McDonald House, which often works with businesses to accomplish various tasks. This can be anything from helping with traditional business tasks such as accounting and marketing, which can allow your employees to share their skills, to starting a toy- or food-donation drive.
Get moving together
Another possibility is to get employees physically moving2. This may be something as simple as having employees take part in a fund-raising walk or “fun run” for compelling health issues such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s disease. This not only builds team morale as they tick down the miles, but may also improve your employees’ own health as well and also encourage perseverance. In addition to team building, such activities can also improve on team fitness.
Team up
If you are concerned about employee cohesiveness, you can literally start a team3, or some kind of club. For example, put together a company softball team, which can get employees thinking about each other in a different way and building company unity as the team works together to defeat others on the field. Or, start a book club, offering employees the chance to discuss and share their ideas on what they’ve read.
Hunt together
Create your own smart phone scavenger hunt. No longer considered just child’s play, such hunts encourage employees to work together efficiently in teams to solve clues and meet objectives. To design such a hunt, you can download an app4 like Klikaklu, which enables team members to work together to find sites from provided images and retake pictures with their smart phones to show that they have been there. Teams of workers can compete against each other to see who can locate the most sites in the least time.
With the aid of such budget-friendly activities, your employees should be working efficiently as a team both in and out of the office in no time and, as a bonus, may bring even more value to the company.
Sources:
https://www.breakoutfinance.com/4-team-building-tactics/
https://www.teambonding.com/five-fun-team-building-activities/
http://iq.intel.com/tech-based-scavenger-hunts-let-you-build-your-own-adventure/