Thinking about new and innovative ways to supercharge your teams can be overwhelming. From team building adventures to attempting to change company culture, the list of things to do can often scare us away from actually doing anything. That’s why we put together this quick list of simple and easy ways you can help invigorate and recharge your teams. These micro-activities and simple changes are great ways to help inject new life into the office.
Embrace Flexibility Where You Can
Super strict work hours and schedules are slowly becoming a practice of the past. Many companies are reimagining the “normal” work day to help employees manage stress, work loads, and self care. It’s been proven that introducing flexibility into your company’s best practices can result in boosted team morale and productivity. We’re not telling you to go and tell your employees to work from home for the rest of time. But w do like the idea of taking simple steps towards embracing flexibility, especially if you want to invigorate your teams. Getting out of the office can supercharge creativity and a new environment, well, that gets teams excited!
Flexibility Tip: Implement half-Fridays or late-Mondays. These will be days that your employees can look forward to because they can work from home. Or just give them one day a week when they can choose their hours. If they want to work from 10-7pm, and your company has the means to allow it, let them. Offering this kind of flexibility helps employees get some control. They’ll feel empowered to take initiative and be more productive.
Reward Your Employees for Their Hard Work
A recent O.C. Tanner survey reported a staggering 79% of people who quit their jobs, listed lack of appreciation as a factor in quitting. When your employees feel undervalued, they lose motivation and work ethic. The stress of feeling of underappreciated can even impact their personal life. This is why showing your employees that you value them and the work they do is a crucial element to team productivity. The benefits of praise and recognition should never be overlooked, especially during hard or stressful times. Whether you decide to put in place incentives for hard work or recognize individuals for excelling in a certain task, showing your employees you appreciate them is never a bad investment.
Recognition Tip: Make a weekly recognition board listing projects, accomplishments and positive feedback. Seeing each other’s achievements will boost overall team morale and make everyone feel like what they do matters. Think outside the box when it comes to recognition. Social media can be a strong tool for sharing these kind of accomplishments. Not only will your teams feel appreciated, but your customers will see the positive side of your company culture.
Trainages FTW
Trainages are designed to help your teams improve on or learn a skill as a group. The key to an awesome trainage: the activity has to be fun! A well planned and creative trainage will help teams bond and boost morale. The idea of a trainage might be a little overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Take one or two hours out of the day or night to invest in your team’s overall improvement. Remember a trainage isn’t necessarily about learning a skill that will immediately affect your ROI. It’s more about nurturing your team and the smaller skills that affect work performance overall.
Trainage Tip: Think about your company culture, your industry. What is something all employees could benefit from learning (your CEO included!)? Is your company culture high-energy and busy? Hire a mindfulness professional to educate staff on taking time to breathe and relax. Don’t forget to ask your team for ideas. They’ll know what skills can boost their performance at work. After, as a group, you can think of unique ways to improve those skills.
Team Build on the Regular
We’ve talked a lot about team activities that help foster growth and productivity. Team building can be crucial to overall company success. The important thing to remember is that team building isn’t only for when your company is struggling with morale or motivation. Yes, team building activities can help in those situations, but they have to be constant to have real impact. Investing in regular team building activities, whether big or small, will help create a mindset of cooperation and trust within your employees. Don’t forget to include high level managers and even the CEO in team building activities. Team bonding isn’t just about the “office team,” it’s about the company as a whole. Plus, the CEO could probably use a bit of fun too.
Team Building Tip: Introduce small activities that promote team bonding to your daily or weekly tasks. If you have a weekly meeting for the Sales Team or Marketing Department, throw in a few cheeky icebreaker questions. Have a monthly meeting with the whole team? Go on a field trip. Change the location of the meeting to somewhere new and exciting. Small activities like this will help make larger team building activities more successful.
The small steps you take to create a company culture of creativity, openness and appreciation are what will drive your team forward. Use these tips to recharge your teams and to show them that you appreciate everything they do, both small and large. Take the time to ask them what they need and what they think will help boost their spirits!
Interested in learning more about effective team building? Send a quick email to info@museumhack.com for more info, and we will get right back to you. Or click here: Team Building.
