Stimulate your team with team building
Ever heard of team building? It’s becoming increasingly popular, thanks to its effectiveness in dealing with the ups and downs of the job market. Far from being heavily didactic, this method focuses on the team’s enjoyment of being together. You can propose workshops, conferences, physical training, to solve various problems within a company.
Here’s how three team building experts see it.
Team building 101
First of all, what is team building? Team building is a method that emerged in the American workplace in the early 1980s. The aim? To strengthen bonds between team members, reinforce cohesion and create a positive work environment. Through games, management activities, experiential training, sports, cultural, artistic or creative activities, a wide range of values can be brought to the fore. Team building therefore promotes stress management, cohesion and team spirit.
Situations that generally call for team building include
- team problems
stress management, - the need for interpersonal communication,
- getting to know others and their needs,
- team cohesion,
- solidarity between employees.
We speak of optimizing collective intelligence.
Guy Bourgeois, motivator and trainer
His experience
Since 1992, Guy Bourgeois has been electrifying crowds, particularly in the workplace. Nearly three decades of speaking engagements at an average rate of 150 per year – that’s his track record. For this seasoned speaker, team building is all about “taking employees out of their work environment to create or recreate a climate of complicity”. People take part in conferences, workshops and activities to forge motivating links, without personality or power conflicts, through the playful aspect of the game.
His conferences always have a rallying power. He motivates the players in a company or association “to mobilize for a common goal, as when presenting a new corporate policy.” In an interactive way, he involves the whole team, from the last on the seniority list to the most senior manager.
His conferences
Among his strategies, Mr. Bourgeois offers a range of “games” designed to give concrete expression to projects and links between employees. For example, each participant placed in a circle holds a piece of colored wool drawn from a ball to create a huge canvas. Sheets containing company goals and projects are placed on the canvas. This common project becomes visible and better integrated through individual action. We also rely on the “straws” game, the a priori objective being to create a bridge over which a ball must roll as far as possible. But the underlying aim is to get people who know little about each other and are not used to working together to work as a team, and thus get to know each other. The idea is always to generate team bonds, and this across all departments of the company, regardless of hierarchy.
“It really works! Four years ago, I did a workshop with a Vidéotron team, and those people are still talking about it! It has a welder’s effect. That’s the whole point of team building,” says the energetic speaker. In fact, he points out, this model was very popular with NASA astronauts in the 1960s. Indeed, it was difficult to sulk in the middle of a mission. Before being taken up by the army, then by American companies, hence its name from 1980, Canada having adopted the concept at the turn of the century.
The Team building for Guy
For Guy Bourgeois, team building helps to resolve, among other things:
- Communication problems,
- personality conflicts,
- the bad habit of working in “silos”, either by group or by department.
“Team building forces participants to communicate, to become aware of others in the company team, and above all of the importance of the team as a whole”, he concludes.
Baratanga
The team building for Louis-Daniel
Louis-Daniel Joly, founder of Baratanga, prefers “team building” to “team valorization”, as the team already exists. The aim is to remind team members of the bonds that unite them, and to value each individual who contributes to the company’s growth.
Baratanga experience
Since 2008, Louis-Daniel Joly and his team have been aiming to meet corporate needs by offering percussion workshops in a safe, non-competitive and, above all, fun environment, in addition to a wide range of musical activities. Program activities are varied and adaptable to demand. For example, in a company with around 50 employees and only two salespeople on the road, the team will play percussion together until the signal is given for only the two salespeople to play. The result: a collective awareness of the contribution made by these employees.
Mr. Joly adds: “Another example of a workshop done with a Desjardins team. A hundred or so employees played as a choir, and to highlight one lady who had 35 years’ seniority, she gave the final tones alone.” These “concerts” require no musical training. The focus is on individual involvement, from the “CEO with a big drum to the youngest with a little triangle, all of whom squeeze in on cue to the left, change instruments, and are surprised, like the CEO, that they like playing the triangle!” Here again, no hierarchy.
The activities
For Baratanga, musical instruments serve as metaphors, as a platform for expression to raise collective and individual awareness, as each participant abandons his or her “professional mask” to demonstrate his or her own identity. No competition, no confrontation. Among the most frequently encountered issues are
- Reconnecting the team and eliminating tensions
- Working and managing in “silos”, a situation more accentuated when companies merge
- The importance of interactive communication
- Resistance to change, especially with the influx of new technologies
- Shared leadership, which can undermine employee retention through breaches of trust
- The realization that taking risks as part of a group is fun for individuals.
“Job dissatisfaction factors are not necessarily related to salary, but much more to recognition,” concludes the founding artist.
Cardio Plein-Air (CPA) Joliette
The team building for Justine
When it comes to team building, Justine Venne-Beaulieu, franchise owner of CPA Joliette, would call it “corporate training rather than team building. Because it’s training that we offer, and that’s how we play on team building.” For her, corporate training means a superb opportunity for a company to strengthen ties between their employees, but also towards employers. “It’s a chance for them to rub shoulders in an atmosphere different from their workplace, where everyone learns more about their colleagues,” specifies Ms. Venne-Beaulieu. What’s more, corporate group training is a winning investment for both employee and employer. After all, a happy, successful employee equals a healthy company.
Why Cardio Plein-Air?
The most frequent requests and issues raised? “When companies ask us to come and train their employees, it’s often to give them the opportunity to integrate healthy lifestyle habits into their routine. Given that 68% of Canadian workers are inactive, 61% are overweight and 32% experience moderate or high stress at work, integrating healthy lifestyle habits can be a real boost to a company’s productivity. In addition to having the reputation of a socially responsible employer, this investment creates an attraction and retention factor among employees.”
The benefits
Companies turn to CPA Joliette for help in training to increase :
- Presenteeism
- Creativity
- Productivity
- Commitment
- Service quality
And the most frequent problems?
- Stress is the most common
- Absenteeism due to the impact of stress and illness
- Lack of energy, due to a lack of integration of healthy habits
- Working in silos, resulting in lack of productivity, creativity and employee involvement
- No sense of belonging to the company, leading to resistance to change.
The Hawthorne effect
“Never doubt that a small group of conscious, committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, historically, that’s how it’s always happened” – anthropologist Margaret Mead.
The concept of team building was born of the unexpected results of a psychosocial experiment. Elton Mayo, a professor at Harvard Business School, took the initiative of conducting a study among employees of the Western Electric Company in Hawthorne, between 1927 and 1932. The context and origin of this study were the dehumanizing and counter-productive industrial methods of the time.
In principle, the aim was to study the link between working conditions, such as lighting intensity, and the productivity of employees, who were aware of being observed and studied. The results? Employees, motivated by the interest shown during the study, were more committed to their work. The attention paid to them, the consideration they received, the quality of their interpersonal relations, among other things, were all excellent factors in boosting productivity, reducing absenteeism and boosting job satisfaction. So, coincidentally, Mayo’s study highlighted the paramount importance of leaders’ efforts to motivate their teams, through the creation of shared experiences that have a real effect on employee productivity and performance.
In short, valuing collaboration, mutual support, the desire to win and to achieve a common goal are all managerial concerns that will enable genuine commitment from each team member…as well as an excellent means of preventing psychosocial risks.
