Every day, employees, both management and staff, in businesses and organizations, work toward ensuring the success of their enterprise. As with any relationship though, each individual employee brings to the table his own set of values, practices, and beliefs, making the work environment a dynamic place that is charged with rich diversity and energy. For the organization to work successfully though, there is a need to harness all the diverse energies of employees into a cohesive force that will work well and willingly together as a team on an ongoing basis. This is where teambuilding activities that build group cohesion come in.
GROUP ACTIVITIES THAT ARE SURE TO IMPROVE TEAM COHESION AND TEAMWORK
Fun team building exercises are a proven way to bring a diverse group of people together to use their range of skills, abilities and personalities toward creating a unified approach to achieving a task or set of tasks successfully with team fulfillment in focus. These corporate exercises and games that build unity of purpose among employees vary in intensity, and can run from the very high-energy type that are held outdoors, to those that are marked by quiet engagement in an indoor environment. Below are 3 of the best team building activities for building group cohesion that can be used as is, or modified to suit the size and other needs of a corporate workforce.
1. MINE FIELD
This team building activity is intended to build trust and mend rifts in relationships. It can be done either outdoors or in a large indoor space.
Set up an obstacle ‘mine field’ by placing objects such as chairs, boxes, and cones, in an irregular pattern with adequate space in-between objects to accommodate someone walking through.
This group exercise will be carried out by placing chosen employees in pairs, and choosing one person as the ‘mine trekker’ who will walk through the minefield. That person will be blindfolded. The other half of each pair will stay outside of the mine field and give verbal navigational instructions to the trekker to get through the minefield safely and successfully. Be sure to set up rules for this game, for example, if a person bumps into an object, they might have to stand still for one minute while other people advance to the finish line to win an identified prize.
2. PICTURE PIECES
This is a problem solving group activity that will highlight how each person’s contribution is vital for the success of the organization.
To do this cohesion building exercise, choose a well known cartoon character or picture that has lots of detail and cut this into as many squares as there are participants in the game making sure they are all of equal size. Next, distribute a piece of this puzzle to each participant along with sketching tools such as pencils, rulers, paper, and markers, and ask each person to redraw the elements of their piece of the picture, but five times bigger than what they were given.
At the end of their drawing, let participants place their up-sized drawing on a table and fit all the pieces together to see if they fit. By doing this, each person will see how important their individual activity at a task is important to the success of ‘the bigger picture’.
3. THE GREAT EGG DROP
To do this fun and exciting cohesion building exercise, the participants are divided into two groups of equal amounts of persons. Each group’s aim is to construct an egg holding package that is sturdy, strong, and insulated enough to protect the eggs from breakage on impact. Each group will have access to the same range of materials and tools which they will choose from to build their package. When the packages are built, each group will take turns in presenting and promoting the virtues of their contraption, then they will drop the package containing eggs from a height of approximately eight feet. The group whose package withstands the impact best, wins.
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