Picture of a team bonding over team building activities to represent the power of serious games in team building exercises

Team Building Activities: 10 Benefits of Games at the Workplace

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Team building activities are an ideal way to strengthen company values and teams. Effective team building exercises allow teams to bond, engage, build trust, and often get to know each other on a more personal level.

Why are team building activities important? Despite their reputation for being boring or scary, team building activities and educational games at the workplace can be fun and effective exercises with many obvious and hidden benefits. What are the benefits of team building activities? Are team building activities effective? Let’s dive in.

Top 10 Benefits of Team Building Exercises

  1. Boosting productivity
  2. Improving mental health
  3. Improve team communication
  4. Identify training needs
  5. Leadership training
  6. Building team trust
  7. Respect
  8. Boost creativity
  9. Strengthen company culture
  10. Fun

Benefits of Team Building Activities

Why are team building exercises important? How do they benefit a business?

Boosting productivity

One of the main benefits and goals of team building activities is improving and boosting productivity. How do team building activities increase productivity? With team building exercises, employees learn to work together with a common goal and reduce duplication of work and effort, leading to an improved team productivity. Team activities also help to relieve stress and re-energize a team, making employees more motivated and boosting productivity.

Improving mental health

Employees can also be impacted by non-stop working and burnout. In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized burnout as an ‘occupational phenomenon’, as lockdowns and working from home affected the work-life balance of many. The role of team building exercises and games at the workplace, such as learning games, is key to tackle burnout, as it can only worsen unless it is addressed. When working from home or working remotely, teams can feel disconnected and alone, which can also be tackled with remote team building activities and work simulation games.

Improve Team Communication

Businesses depend on the staff’s ability to perform together. Team activities break down silos and tackle any team communication issues, as they make teams need to work together to solve problems. Not every person communicates the same way, and silo working can endanger a business, affecting productivity, morale, and teamwork. Team building exercises are ideal deal breakers to open lines of communication and establish the right communication methods. Gallup’s study showed that connected teams demonstrate a 21% increase in profitability.

Identify training needs

Team building activities are an ideal way to identify your team’s training needs. As the games advance, team strengths and weaknesses surface and become more obvious. With teams needing to collaborate towards a common goal, team leaders can identify the root of any problems and tackle these issues with further training. Does the team need a morale boost? Do they have poor communication? Are internal and personal conflicts affecting the team?

Leadership training

Team exercises surface both team weaknesses and strengths, allowing management teams to examine how teams solve their tasks. Employers can identify emerging leaders within the workforce by seeing how teams take control of problem-solving tasks and encourage others. Are some employees taking leadership? They will be able to identify employees with leadership qualities.

Build team trust

Team building exercises help employees to get to know each other and develop trust. Google’s study on what makes their teams successful found that the number one factor was psychological safety. When teams trust each other, they feel free to operate with freedom, be vulnerable and take risks. This trust replaces the natural and innate self-protection humans have, which can be very damaging to effective teamwork.

Respect

Nurture respect and develop loyalty in the workplace. For any team to succeed, team members need to respect each other. When working together, trust and respect go hand in hand. Team building activities are a useful tool for employees to gain respect because they can see they need each other and that their teammates are there to help.

Boost creativity

Problem-solving and soft skills training activities encourage teams to think outside of the box and leave any comfort zones behind. Encouraging teams to use their own initiative is key to finding solutions to future potential problems.

Strengthen company culture

A study carried out by Deloitte found that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct
workplace culture is important to business success. Facilitating team building activities fosters stronger relationships within teams and showcases a company’s culture. Building team trust, improving communication, and encouraging teamwork strengthens teams and, with it, a business. Whether it is by working towards a company’s mission or sharing attitudes and practices, this collective force makes a business and dictates its success.

Fun

Last but certainly not least: team building activities can be fun. Team building activities are an essential part of a business, but many traditional training tools can be disengaging and awkward. However, creating a fun environment between teammates is key for them to get to know each other. Business simulation games and experiential learning are powerful tools to encourage learning in a fun environment, as they allow users to get more emotionally involved than in a traditional training session.

Cost-effective simulation games

Many businesses overlook team building activities because of their cost in time and money. At GingrTech, we provide both in-person and remote business simulations and serious games. TeamWork.Inc, for example, is an ideal training tool to improve team communication, teach leadership, break down silos, and develop problem-solving abilities. Our learning games are also cost-effective ways to transform an organization, as they are designed for groups of up to 15 people.

If you want to know more about our learning games and the transformative power of serious games, please contact us. Alternatively, we invite you to learn more during our free insight sessions.

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