Teamwork activities

Team Building activities are challenging problem solving tasks designed to help group members develop their ability to work together effectively. Many team-building and initiative tasks are like games for children, others are novel and complex tasks and are designed for specific needs. The more elaborate initiative tasks may include rope courses, night activities and exercises that last several days.

Several work environments require a bit of teamwork to make things work smoothly and with motivation for everyone. Teamwork activities are generally used to create a relationship between co-workers or co-workers. On the other hand, several work environments want teamwork, but employees work separately. Employees who work in jobs like these really need teamwork activities to help them stay connected with other workers.

Teamwork activities are often used in meetings, presentations, workshops, training seminars, educational programs, corporate training, with university, secondary, middle, elementary and preschool school groups, sports teams, teacher training, youth work and correctional environments. Teamwork exercises can be adapted for virtually any environment, young or old, large or small, and in all cultures. An important part of the teamwork exercises is the reflection and discussion of the participants about the activity, how they addressed the situation and the possible learning points. For example, a group could be videotaped during an activity and the video viewed, analyzed and discussed, to help extract the potential learning from team building exercises.

As head of the sales department of a large company, I am responsible to everyone, especially for the performance of all my employees. When sales move slowly, I try to use different incentives to motivate everyone. I used to offer bonuses and prizes for the best performers to work well in order to obtain an improvement in productivity for a short period of time. But, this kind of idea resulted in a competitive atmosphere around the office, which is not what I wanted them to do. I want to use teamwork activities to work in the office, so that my sales force works together to improve productivity, not to work individually.

The first idea that occurred to me is to contact the human resources department to inform them about my wishes to implement teamwork activities among my sales force. The head there told me that they had no employees there who had that kind of experience in teaching them teamwork activities, so he suggested that he use external or other consultants for that type of work. I started to contact the names of some local companies to know their services. I felt very overwhelmed by the selection of teamwork activities that these consulting firms proposed for my sales force.

Employee motivation benefits from team building games, exercises, activities, puzzles and quizzes. I try to use free teamwork games and idea exercises to warm up meetings, training and conferences. These free teamwork games are also great for breaking the ice in training sessions, meetings, workshops, seminars or conferences. Teamwork games and activities are also useful in serious business project meetings, where games and activities help delegates see things differently and use different thinking styles. To ensure that these teamwork activities comply with the equality and discrimination policy and law regarding gender, race, disability, age, etc. Although some of the teamwork activities seemed too intense for our particular needs, many sounded like they were perfect for us. Best of all, you could teach us these teamwork activities during a two-day workshop in our offices. This sounded pretty good, but unfortunately I couldn't get my boss's approval for budget spending.