You’ve got the best resources on the team. With years of experience and knowledge, they bring the right set of skills that help you achieve goals efficiently.

But let’s face it; bringing the right skills to the table is no longer the only factor to meet your targets and align with the goals of a business. You need to build a team that feels comfortable communicating and collaborating regularly to reap the desired results.

However, team building can be challenging, especially when everyone has a different personality and prefers following their own process to make things happen at work.

Don’t worry. With the best team building process in place, you can overcome multiple challenges and achieve work goals effectively. Before we dive right into the step-by-step approach to building a process at your workplace, let’s briefly understand what team building means.

What is Team Building?

Team building is a process where you bring together a group of people working with each other. You plan and initiate group Activities or events that motivate them to cooperate and collaborate at the workplace successfully. Some of these team building activities include but is not limited to:

• Team dinners
• Movie nights
• Office debates
• Office buddy for new joinees
• Field trips
• Laser tag
• Paintball outings
• Bowling
• Office tournaments
• Community service
• Scavenger hunt

And, the list goes on. These effective yet engaging team building activities help you meet all targets hassle-free.

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Why Team Building Is Essential at Your Workplace

There are various benefits an organization can gain from building its own team building process besides meeting their goals regularly. Here’s a quick list to help you get acquainted with them.

1. Enhances communication and productivity:

One of the biggest advantages of the team building process is that it makes your employees more productive at the workplace. All things considered, your team will only work effectively when it communicates to accomplish goals, especially if the goals are well-defined. Unfortunately, as virtual working increases, communication gets more structurally difficult. You can deal with this problem by utilizing knowledge base tools that facilitate the creation and smooth communication of the information through a structured window, such as an internal knowledge base.

2. Makes problem-solving and critical thinking simpler:

With the communication barriers out of the way, team members find it easier to connect with each other when stuck in a tricky situation. They sometimes prefer sitting together to identify a solution faster. This makes it easier to meet a task deadline and move forward with other priorities in hand.

3. Improves task delegation both internally and externally:

Another benefit that one can gain from the team building process and activities is identifying the right person in the team who can perform the required task hassle-free. Once you know the resources and what they are capable of pulling off with their skills, it gets easier to delegate tasks with confidence and trust. You know that the task will be performed by the right person and will get delivered within the deadline.

You can further improve task delegation using tools like ProofHub. It will help you create tasks and assign them to the right stakeholders faster. What’s more, you can track the progress of each task in real-time and how close they are to completion. Once completed, you can assign a new set of tasks to individual members to ensure you are close to finishing one of your projects.

ProofHub is an intuitive and easy-to-learn task management tool with a wide range of capabilities, enough for any small to the large team to handle a project. It includes tasks, milestones, Gantt charts, time tracking, reports, notifications, a calendar, in-app chat, and more features. ProofHub provides you with a few additional communication options. You can message another team member at any time without leaving the project management space thanks to an in-app chat box.

4. Boosts employee morale:

Team building activities are another way to boost employee morale and help them stay positive about the workplace and its duties. They’ll take their duties more seriously and start learning to place their trust in the organization and its people.

5. Helps in identifying the right leaders:

Let’s give team building its due credit for helping organizations bring new leaders to light. As your employees participate in team building activities, you get to identify who works well in leadership roles and how they lead a team during various activities.

Besides these benefits, you can also count the following in the list:

• Helping employees boost work motivation and confidence at the workplace.
• Connecting better with the remote teams and making work happen before the deadlines arrive.
• Promoting a great environment that takes employees’ mental health into consideration.
• Avoiding internal team conflicts that result in quality work.

With these amazing benefits, there is no way one can deny creating their own team building process. The pressing question is, how do you build one from scratch?

A Step-by-Step Approach to Create a Team Building Process From Scratch

In this section, we aim to explore the steps that enable a business to create a team building process from scratch. Let’s dive in.

1. Put a team together

Putting a team together won’t be as easy as Captain America saying, “Avengers, assemble.”

You will need to do two things as you decide to put a team together for a certain department:

• One, identify the need for building this particular team in your organization.
• Two, understand the skill set you want each member of that team to have.

Both these pointers will prove beneficial if you wish to create a team of newly hired employees or just bring together your existing employees who can help you with your new marketing campaign. Nonetheless, it will be easier to put together a team of highly skilled employees if you consider these factors.

2. Explain individual roles and responsibilities

Once you are done putting the team together, it is time you Explain Individual Roles and responsibilities. Understand that simply explaining the roles and responsibilities to each member once would not be enough.

It is important that you set them in stone. Create a simple online internal documentation on your company’s intranet so it can be accessed by the employees frequently. Not only would it prove to be beneficial for the existing team members but also for those who are new joiners. You won’t have to sit and explain it multiple times to each member.

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3. Encourage employees to communicate by introducing activities

Team building activities are popular for one very good reason, they help you promote communication within the team and outside. They are great at helping people overcome awkwardness and feel comfortable talking to each member. When your team is new, it can get uncomfortable for people to talk to each other freely. They may hesitate to collaborate at work because they may not be sure about everyone’s temperament on the team.

For these factors, creating internal communication channels ought to be one of your top priorities while assembling your teams.

In particular, if your team is distributed, you need to make sure they have the tools to interact.

Also, when you introduce team building activities like lunches, dinners, movies, trips, group activities like debate, and others, you give them an outlet to start getting to know people. These activities become a breaking point for them to start communicating and collaborating effectively.

4. Identify ways to help the team strengthen their trust

You must have heard about the trust fall game where one person trusts the other person to catch them when they fall. Well, that’s the kind of trust building you need to work on when building your team. While trust fall is an activity that can be done rarely, you need to find ways or situations that replicate the same results.

For example, there are times when a team member may not be present at work but there is a pressing task that needs to be tackled right away. When someone takes ownership of the same task, both the individual member and others in the team will learn to trust one another in terms of work. This exercise builds trust and strengthens relationships in the team.

5. Make cooperation the core value of your team building process

Simply strengthening trust between team members is not enough. You need to use cooperation as one of the core values when you start building the team to ensure all the goals are achieved hassle-free. When there is no cooperation, it can get awkward for the team members to reach out to other employees both internally and externally.

To help them learn how to cooperate with one another, try sending them for group activities like paintball or organize a tag game where they get divided into groups. These activities will encourage them to cooperate in trying times and avoid losing their calm with one another.

6. Appreciate team members who take accountability and task acknowledgment seriously

Not everyone in the team is proactive at taking ownership of their mistakes or even the assigned tasks. If someone makes a mistake, they would end up involving others rather than taking accountability of the situation.

So here’s what you can do to avoid such circumstances in the first place. When you see someone taking accountability for a mistake, appreciate their attitude during the team meetings. Try setting a precedent so that others in the team don’t shy away from their mistakes. Let them know that it is okay to make mistakes and if the team puts their efforts in the right direction, it’ll be easier to overcome the situation unscathed.

7. Evaluate individual and team performance together

When you put your team together, it is important to monitor how they perform regularly. Here’s how you can go about the performance management part. You can evaluate both individual and team performances simultaneously.

Outcome?

Well, with individual performance reviews, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of each team member. Whereas, the team performance review will help you understand whether each member can really work together as a team and how their contributions have helped you achieve your goals.

8. Identify short-comings and possible ways to rectify them

As you evaluate each member’s performance, you will easily identify their shortcomings or what stops them to give their best at work. To rectify these shortcomings, you can sit with each member in a one-on-one interaction. First, help them understand the shortcomings you’ve identified. Once those are discussed, identify the best ways to rectify them.

While some may resolve within a few sessions, others may take time. Create an action plan that helps them overcome their work hiccups over a period. Also, make sure to check in and ask how they are doing while following the action plan you made.

9. Learn to celebrate both big and small team successes

Finally, it is important to appreciate your team members for performing well. No matter how big or small their successes are, being appreciated helps them stay motivated and perform well in the future. Your appreciation can either be verbal, written, or shown by gestures like team outings.

Embark on Your Journey to Building a Team Successfully

Team building can seem like a challenging task for anyone. That’s because you are trying to persuade people with different abilities and personalities to work together. But if you have the right approach and strategy at hand, you can avert any team building challenges hassle-free.

Considering this dilemma, we’ve listed a step-by-step approach for your organization. It will help you create a team building process from scratch. The best part is it’ll allow you to know your team members more closely and encourage them to achieve their goals.

So, do not hesitate about the challenges you might face, and start building your team today!

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