The business world tends to go through different phases in which certain methods are emphasized. Currently, research has shown that employee satisfaction and cooperation are some of the most important elements for the success of a business. These elements are all tied to workplace productivity, which is the amount of work that is actually accomplished in a given period of time.
A business wants to maximize productivity without straining its employees. Employees have been found to be more productive when they rest enough, when they get along with their fellow employees, when they trust their fellow employees, and when they have high workplace satisfaction. That’s why team building exercises are so popular; depending on your type of business, collaboration could greatly enhance how much work is done.
What Is Team Building?
Team building refers to a broad category of activities that encourage your employees to work together in productive ways. Team building exercises help to define roles amongst your employees and to improve relationships. For example, team building exercises can reveal which employees are leaders and which are helping hands. As a manager, you would like to know which employees should be given leadership responsibilities.
Team bonding tools are the best way to automate all the efforts that you’d have to put into team-bonding. It is more data-driven, time saving, and effortless. Often, lack of team bonding is the biggest challenge faced by remote teams specially. But thanks to tech, this can be overcome through some effective remote team building tools. They can help increase employee engagement by up to 10 times, leading to up to 250% productive teams, and can be integrated to virtual platforms like Slack or MS Teams. This means that even the easiest prey to team bonding challenges ~ remote employees, can be more engaged with each other, while sitting on different corners of the world through quizzes, watercooler conversations, and more competitive and exciting games.
Team building will also reveal the different learning styles of different employees. Research has found that learning styles cannot be grouped into the three distinct styles that were emphasized in education for so long. However, research has also found that people do work and learn better in specialized ways. Some people might prefer to think quietly, while others prefer to brainstorm aloud, and so on. It’s important to understand that and accommodate to make every employee as productive as possible. One way to do that is by encouraging employees to brainstorm visually.
Brainstorm Visually
Brainstorming ideas visually will allow employees to work together and build off of each others’ ideas. That’s especially helpful in a web design studio. Web design is partially art and partially craft. You’ll need employees who are good at both to put together beautiful websites. For example, an artistically inclined employee might come up with some ideas for how a website should look. The more technically inclined employees might be able to add some ideas for how those ideas might be actualized. One way to put together those different groups of thinkers is with a whiteboard.
Whiteboards allow your employees to write down various ideas, erase them as needed, and group different ideas with different colored markers. However, most whiteboards aren’t large enough to put together artistic ideas and web coding ideas. So, what’s the solution? The solution is a bigger whiteboard.
Dry erase paint is the easiest way to create a huge whiteboard. Whiteboards are just boards that are made with a nonporous surface, which allows the marker to be easily wiped off. If you choose a paint specifically designed for that purpose, you can turn any surface into a dry erase board. That means you could paint an entire wall or multiple walls. Your team will be able to work together with brainstorming ideas.
Art as Collaboration
As previously stated, web design is partially an artform. Anyone who has worked in artistic fields knows that art is collaborative. One person might bring in an idea for how the website can be organized. Hearing that idea might spark a color scheme idea in someone else, and so on. Working on a whiteboard is a great way to accomplish that but there are also other ways.
It’s important to think of art not only as a collaboration between your employees but also between your employees and previous designers. That’s why so many web design studios start with a WordPress theme for their own websites. It might seem like buying a great theme from other designers is a shortcut, but it’s more like a starting point to help your team come up with new ideas. It’s just another form of collaboration. Buying a quality theme gives you something on which to build.
Craft as Construction
When building a great website, it’s not necessary to create the site out of thin air. Architects design buildings based on the amount of space, the location, and the materials. Painters choose certain kinds of canvasses and paints before they begin their work. Construction workers build from existing materials based on the templates they’ve been given. All of these crafters build on what they’ve been given. In the same way, your team can build on the theme that you’ve been given.
So much of building a website is bare bones coding that takes up time and energy without providing much return. That’s why many web design companies choose to buy themes designed for web design companies and treat them as frameworks on which to build.
Other Team Building Exercises
Aside from working together on a giant whiteboard, there are activities that can enhance your team’s cohesion. A few of them are classic exercises that employ problem-solving skills and creative thinking ideal for web design.
A classic exercise is building a package that will allow a raw egg to sustain a ten-foot drop. The goal of this exercise is to divide the group into fairly large groups so they have to work with many competing ideas. You can even use the giant whiteboards to discuss different ideas. At the end of the allotted time, they will test which eggs survive the drop.
Another common task for web design companies involves an instructor building a sculpture out of blocks, Legos, or something similar. They’ll hide the sculpture from the groups. Each group is allowed to send one employee to inspect the sculpture for a short amount of time. They then return to their group and try to instruct them in recreating the instructor’s sculpture. After a few minutes, each group is allowed to send another employee. This helps build communication skills, specifically the ability to express what is in one’s own head. That’s an important skill in any task involving creative collaboration.
Charity Team Building Events
If you have a bigger group, you can add a lot of energy and fun to a team meeting with a team activity for charity. These team events take more planning, but they make a normal team meeting fun and interactive. They also add an emotional impact to the meeting. For instance, you can hire a team building company to organize a team bike build. Teams work together to solve challenges to earn bicycle pieces. Once they get the last piece, they assemble the bikes. Then, as a surprise, kids from a local children’s charity arrive as the bikes are being completed to receive their gifts.
Charity team activities like this create an emotional draw. And, the participants also go back to work feeling good about the organizations they work for. It’s a win-win-win experience.
