How to Better Educate Your Team Through Team Building Activities

Every company strives to boost its workforce in order to achieve better results. For this to happen, many decide to try out various team building activities, because they are aware of how important it is to have a strong, cohesive team that continually works towards advancing its capabilities.

The key to education via team building activities is using the best possible methods that are at your disposal. You want to teach your employees all you can about how to think in order to become more productive and efficient.

Classroom-type training with an instructor

One of the most common, but still very effective approaches, is basically gathering your team in a classroom-like environment and having a well-trained instructor explain everything to them. It pretty much looks like a college course, with a professor using a presentation to teach the students about an important subject.

Now, you may ask yourself—where is team building in this approach? Well, in this kind of environment, team members get to interact in the way students do in college, with the important difference of still being a team that is there to work together in the best possible way. They will get to ask questions, and discuss certain aspects of the lecture among themselves.

Furthermore, not only will they build relationships with each other, but they will also form an essential one with the trainer, which will teach them both to follow and to be creative.

The importance of building trust

Now, the very core of a close-knit team is a strong relationship based on trust. You want your staff to be able to work with each other on a daily basis, so you have to make it possible for them to generate the best possible results through working together. In order to do that, they have to trust each other, and also to trust you. And trust is something that is earned, not given.

A great team building activity, in this case, is an obstacle course. You need an open space to practice this one. Set up certain obstacles and make smaller teams made out of tree people. One member of the smaller team is going to be blindfolded. At the same time, another one is going to turn their head away from the obstacle, but will have the task to hold and guide the previous member. Finally, the third team member is the one that sees the course and does their best to explain to the guide how to pass it in a non-verbal manner.

This is, basically, a great way of teaching your team how to give out instructions to each other, and also trust each other during the process.

Introduce hands-on training

As an alternative to the first kind of training that we have covered in the article, you can also introduce hands-on training which a lot of people prefer. It is basically enabling people to jump right into action in order to instantly apply what they have learned. This is another great combination of a training approach and a team building activity, as it enables everyone to work together in the same environment, trying out what they have been taught, often failing, but getting back on track thanks to backup and feedback.

It does tend to last long and may lead to exhaustion, which is why you need to make sure that you look for the best training materials for sale, because you want to make the most out of these sessions. As a result, your team will learn to retain information much better, due to all the focus that put on the new tasks that they are taught.

Get people to know each other.

It is also very important to get your team members to know each other on a more personal basis so that they can truly open up, especially during some of the more complex situations.

There is a game that can be of great use in this case. You can write a lot of numbers on a ball and have your employees throw it to each other. Every number is going to correspond with a particular question that you have on a list. So, when a team member catches the ball, they have to answer the question marked by the number that is the closest to their hand.

In summation

What we can ascertain from all of the above is that, in order to properly educate your team, you need to both come up with an effective training program and to use team building activities as the tool to teach people to work better together as a cohesive whole.

The best solution is a good combination of fun and serious lessons where they can discuss and test what they have learned instantly.