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Three Categories of Team Building Programs for New Employee Orientation

Team building plays a critical role in the new employee onboarding process. It’s as essential as getting set up with a company email account or watching your company’s safety videos—and does even more to get new employees productive quickly.

Part 1 of this series detailed why team building is crucial in new employee orientation. It detailed four ways that these programs can help new employees get to know, understand, and trust their team members.

This post showcases three different types of team building programs that can help new employees get comfortable with their teammates and up to speed as contributing members of the team faster.

Charitable CSR Programs

As noted in our post, Seven Fun Activities for Bringing Teams Back Together Post-COVID, corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs combine the benefits of team building activities—teaching problem-solving, leadership, communication, and collaboration in a fun, engaging way—with giving back to the community. The result is a powerful, emotional experience that increases employee loyalty and engagement.

An excellent choice for an employee orientation activity is our Bike Build Donation®, one of our signature trademarked programs. This is a great exercise to build your team while they build bicycles for donation to disadvantaged kids locally. When people go through that experience of giving back to the community, it brings them together and forges strong bonds. Other popular CSR “Build” programs include Build-a-Wheelchair® and Build-a-Guitar®.

SmartHunts® (High-Tech Scavenger Hunts)

Best Corporate Events’ sister company, SmartHunts®, combines mobile app technology and games with traditional scavenger and city hunts to take these activities to an engaging and interactive new level. In addition to testing participants’ knowledge and collaboration skills, SmartHunts are a great way to discover a new campus, museum, or city. One popular option that’s an excellent choice for employee orientation is the Amazing Chase SmartHunt®.

This program enables your team to star in its own Amazing Race with a technology-driven scavenger hunt. Once formed into teams, participants are given iPads loaded with instructions to explore an area. Along the way, they’ll hunt for clues, complete photo and video challenges, answer quiz questions, solve puzzles, and more as they race to cross the finish line first.

If your goal is to have an enjoyable and memorable shared experience, building camaraderie to move things forward, there’s nothing like an Amazing Chase SmartHunt. It gets competitive juices flowing but effectively bonds a group of people together as they have fun and work through challenges, trying to rack up as many points as possible.

Professional Development Programs

Professional development workshops enhance your employees’ career growth and value to your company and are a productive choice for new employee orientation. They focus on the critical core competencies required to succeed in today’s business environment—from conflict resolution to time management skills. These workshops combine professional facilitation with an engaging and dynamic approach to learning and retention.

One popular professional development option for employee onboarding is Competition to Collaboration®, an engaging, trademarked training program highlighting the positive impacts of organizational synergy, both in sharing best practices and celebrating colleagues’ successes.

This activity gets people doing something that at first seems to be competitive, but then the twist comes when participants suddenly realize they need to communicate with a different group about the activity they just went through, including all of the rules, regulations, and strategies. They need to do this so well that the other group can beat the benchmark that was just set. Neither group is considered successful unless both benchmarks are surpassed.

A second excellent option is our DiSC Profile Workshop, which helps participants understand communication differences, motivational differences, some of their own tendencies, and some of the preferences of their fellow new employees to figure out how to work better together.

A third alternative is Emotional Intelligence Training. This program gives participants improved self-awareness as well as better recognition of the emotions and motivations of the other team members here. So, as they’re starting work in a new environment with some of their colleagues, they’re much more aware of how they’re coming across, how their coworkers communicate, and how to work with them more effectively.

In Closing

Team building activities play a vital role in the new employee orientation process, whether those new employees are just joining the company or they’ve been working remotely and are only now meeting many of their coworkers in person for the first time.

It helps establish trust, build personal connections, understand communication styles, and create shared experiences. Three types of team building programs that are particularly effective as part of the employee onboarding experience are Charitable CSR programs, SmartHunts®, and professional development workshops.

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The Role of Team Building in New Employee Orientation

Team building activities should ideally be a vital and integral part of your employee orientation process. Here’s why—and it includes a significant impact you may not have thought about.

Every company has an onboarding process for new hires: get all the necessary forms signed, assign them a laptop, create their access badge, set up an email account, provide login credentials for the appropriate software systems, and so on.

Many corporate leaders have a general sense that team and relationship building are an essential part of that onboarding process as well, but may not be able to articulate precisely why.

Unfortunately, that can make it tempting to skip this step when budgets are tight, the department is short-staffed, or when a new manager comes on board. It’s easy to view team building as the “fun stuff” that can be skipped because there is “real work” to be done.

Here are four critical reasons to avoid that mistake and make sure team building is part of the new employee orientation process.

It Builds Trust

As business author Patrick Lencioni points out in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, trust is the foundational element of team effectiveness. Unless you have trust within a team, you won’t get constructive conversations, accountability, or the results you’re looking for.

Team-building at its core starts creating that element of trust through understanding each other and developing relationships. It does this by allowing the team to work together on a problem or challenge that is non-consequential in the sense that, if the group isn’t able to solve the problem, nothing’s at stake. It enables teams to “work out their bugs” without business risks.

And it gives team members the sense that they can rely on each other. Obviously, trust won’t be fully established during orientation, but a team building exercise is highly effective for laying the groundwork.

It Fosters Personal Connections

As workers return to the office post-COVID, many companies are dealing with significant employee turnover as well as bringing back staff who’ve been working remotely, possibly in a hybrid work arrangement.

That means, frequently, companies are not only onboarding new hires but also bringing in people hired within the past 18 months who’ve never physically met many of their coworkers.

Most employees, even those who enjoy the flexibility of remote work, are anxious to get back together in person. Company leaders can sense that people are getting worn down by the isolation, and things need to change.

When everyone is remote, there’s less connection. There’s less of the element of “We’re a team,” and a lot more of “This is a job,” and “We’re a workgroup, not a team.”

There’s a definite difference between a workgroup and a team. A team has energy. People feel like they have each other’s back. They talk about “we” and “us.” A workgroup is just a collection of individuals working on the same project. Both work groups and teams work on tasks, but they work on tasks in two very different ways.

In-person team building activities let workers see each other in full, three-dimensionally, head to toe, not just as a torso within a box on a Zoom screen. They can interact directly and enhance relationships that will lead to more of those informal, ad hoc hallway conversations that are difficult and awkward to manage virtually.

At in-person team-building events, participants get a different perspective; they see a completely different side of coworkers. Returning to the idea of trust, one of its foundations is showing some degree of vulnerability: that you can’t do it all, that you do need other people, that you have some challenges and weaknesses. Just showing that vulnerability in a team exercise where you do need to rely on other people can be incredibly valuable.

It Improves Team Dynamics

Often during a team-building activity, participants learn about each other’s communication do’s and don’ts, about what approaches resonate, and which ones drive a person crazy. When they’re working in a team environment, they can understand some of those aggravations. For example, if it’s analysis paralysis, they can see the frustration that creeps up—or they can see that pure enjoyment at areas of success.

When we understand and appreciate those value differences, pet peeves, communication styles, and what truly motivates people, we can really start to apply those into the work we have to do on a daily basis. Fundamentally, team-building exercises help with new employee orientation by establishing a foundation they can build upon as they start their journeys working together.

It Creates a Shared Experience

Establishing trust, connections, and communication may seem like obvious benefits of team building within the new employee orientation process. But a less apparent and easily overlooked bonus is the memorable, shared experience it creates.

The initial feedback from new employees after a team building exercise may focus on the fun, or the different perspective they got of coworkers, or the sense that the company cares enough about them to make sure they are engaged, that it’s not just “get straight to work.”

But when employees are asked about their overall orientation experience two, three, or more years later, the team building experience is what sticks. They may not recall much about the orientation videos they watched or the policy manuals they read. Still, they remember details from the team building program because of the emotional impact it had.

That makes the lessons learned in team building incredibly strong. People remember that it was a great way to get to know their coworkers and get started in their roles. For employees who went through that team building program together—and even coworkers who went through the same exercise, though not together—it’s a common, shared experience that creates a strong and valuable bond between them.

The Wrap

Team building activities can play a vital role in new employee orientation. They are as critical to setting up employees for success as getting them the right laptop with access to the right software systems.

By helping to establish trust, build connections, understand team dynamics, and create shared experiences, team-building prepares new employees to contribute productively to group efforts more quickly.

Part 2 of this series will showcase specific team-building programs that can be highly effective as part of the employee orientation process.

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Seven Fun Activities for Bringing Teams Back Together Post-COVID

As vaccination rates rise and COVID cases fall, live business events and meetings are coming back in a big way.

The recent IMEX gathering in Las Vegas drew more than 3,300 meeting professionals for in-person education and networking, and Smart Meetings is reporting that urban venues are seeing the return of group business. Concerts are back.

And according to AdWeek, while virtual and hybrid events are here to stay, “Few believe the limitless audience of a virtual event is worth the in-person trade-off of a live event…What we’re seeing is b-to-b events come back first, (as) it follows the back-to-the-office trend.”

We’ve noted why team building should be a top priority as your employees return to the office or other workplace. You may not have everyone back in the office full time. You may have new employees still getting familiar with your people and operations. At the very least, you may have employees who haven’t physically worked together for a long while.

So, if you are bringing your people together (or back together) and are interested in the value team building can provide as part of that process, you may be wondering: what are some of the specific activities we should consider? And what are the unique benefits of each?

Here are seven fun in-person activities that are great for bringing your team back together in the post-COVID work environment.

Charitable CSR Programs

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs enhance the benefits of team building activities—teaching problem-solving, leadership, communication, and collaboration in a fun, engaging way—with the element of giving back to the community. The result is a powerful, emotional experience that increases employee loyalty and engagement. Here are details on three of the most popular CSR programs.

Bike Build Donation®

This is one of our signature trademarked programs. In February 2018, we delivered the largest bike build in history: 3,500 employees from Lowe’s built and donated 1,058 bicycles at one program in Las Vegas (watch the video here). Our facilitators have been delivering Bike Builds for more than two decades.

We continue to pioneer the future of this charity event with the use of our proprietary apps and Apple iPads®. This worthwhile program incorporates engaging audio/video clues and fun challenges and activities, enabling teams to earn the parts necessary to assemble bikes for children in need.

Mini-Golf Build and Food Donation

This is a fun charity team building program where, working in teams, groups design, construct, and play a mini-golf course using canned and boxed food items. Each hole has a unique theme and rules.

After the course has been built, an entertaining tournament ensues with scoring and friendly competition. Once completed, the course gets deconstructed and the food donated to a predetermined food bank or other charitable organization.

Build-a-Wheelchair®

Build-a-Wheelchair is another trademarked program, an engaging, worthwhile event that benefits wounded American veterans and other people with impaired mobility. Beginning with various iPads® activities to earn the needed materials, teams assemble, safety test, and decorate new wheelchairs for donation. Whenever possible, a representative from the selected charity arrives to accept and thank the group for their donation.

SmartHunts® (High-Tech Scavenger Hunts)

Best Corporate Events’ sister company, SmartHunts, combines mobile app technology with traditional scavenger hunts and games to take these activities to an exciting, engaging, and interactive new level. In addition to testing participants’ knowledge and collaboration skills, SmartHunts are a great way to discover a new campus, museum, or city. Among the most popular of these is the City SmartHunt®.

City SmartHunt

This program is a creative way to experience the essence of your chosen city. Photo missions, video challenges, and trivia questions guide teams on a fun scavenger hunt through monuments, historic sites, and local attractions.

All SmartHunts programs include destination-specific points of interest, fun trivia, pop-culture missions, clues to solve, photo & video missions, GPS mapping system, social media sharing, team tracking, and a live leaderboard with an event slideshow.

Team Building Events

Whether your focus is on strengthening connections and communications within your employee team, professional skills development, enhancing employee engagement and loyalty, or just enjoyable competition, team building events improve trust and performance. Here are three of our most popular programs.

Competition to Collaboration®

This engaging, trademarked training program highlights the positive impacts of organizational synergy, both in sharing best practices and celebrating colleagues’ successes. It begins with two sub-teams completing various challenges separately, attempting to improve their own performance and reaching goals for the other team to beat—then adds a surprise twist that reinforces the message of team collaboration.

A Minute 2 Win It!

As seen on the popular TV game show, and adapted for team play, groups participate in rounds of fast-paced tabletop challenges. The competition heats up as one-minute games are practiced and scored using commonplace items like pencils, plastic cups, and a deck of cards. Teams cheer and have a blast as they vie to be named champions.

Igniting Team Performance Series™

Whether your team is a newly formed group or an existing project team, this dynamic training session will measure your group’s teamwork proficiency, identify areas that need improvement, and deliver activities custom-tailored to those needs.

Fun and fast-paced, participants will engage in increasingly complex challenges, each one preceded by brief yet powerful group discussions. This program is customized to meet your organization’s unique situation and objectives.

Conclusion

With proper safety protocols in place, live events are coming back. People crave togetherness and connection.

In-person team building programs are an investment your company makes in its people that pays off in improved retention and loyalty, greater workplace collaboration, and enhanced interpersonal skills. As offices and other workplaces reopen after COVID, bringing employees together in a fun and productive way is more important than ever.

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‘Tis the Season for Team Building – a Baker’s Dozen Insights from the Morning Briefing Podcast

Roy Charette, a founding partner of Best Corporate Events, recently joined Phil Brandt, president, and CEO of AAIM, on The Morning Briefing podcast. They discussed the current labor market, team building, philanthropy, employee retention, social media, and much more.

The full podcast runs 33 minutes, and it’s well worth listening to. But we know many of you are pressed for time, so here are 13 bite-sized nuggets of wisdom Phil and Roy shared during their conversation.

1.) Host Phil Brandt shares some eye-opening statistics about “the great resignation” and the top business challenges facing leaders today. (1:04)

2.) What’s the most popular type of team building program? Roy answers what it is, and why. (0:42)

3.) How do companies choose from among the 120+ different types of team building programs that Best Corporate Events offers? Roy explains the detailed, up-front assessment process used to help clients choose the ideal option. (0:41)

4.) Here’s one of the most important reasons business executives are doing team building events right now. (0:45)

5.) Roy details examples of two programs that are very popular currently. (1:06)

6.) Here’s a brief explanation of why team building events are more important than ever right now. (0:48)

7.) In-person, virtual, or hybrid events—here’s how Best Corporate Events accommodates the preferences and comfort level of every client. (1:24)

8.) Roy explains how team building helps accomplish several different business objectives. (1:15)

9.) Here’s how team building intersects with social media and personal branding. (0:39)

10.) In this tight labor market, here’s how team building can help to not only retain employees but turn them into enthusiastic advocates who help recruit new talent. (3:14) 

11.) Not every employee is always excited about participating in team building events. Here’s how to increase attendance, and what even those hesitant workers usually come away with. (2:04)

12.) Roy has personally led more than 1,200 workshops and seminars. Here’s one particular experience that stands out. This story will touch your heart. (1:21)

13.) From research, these are the two main factors in employee retention—and how team building supports both. (1:03)

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How to Teach Collaboration Through Competition

Most team building activities are competitive—and for good reasons.

Competition is fun, it’s engaging, and it helps set clear goals for the exercise. And business itself is, of course, a constant competition for the attention, loyalty, and dollars of clients and customers.
But success within an organization frequently relies more on collaboration than competition. People need to work together to design the best products, make the best decisions, and deliver the best customer experiences.

How do competitive team building activities provide value to organizations? How can they be used to teach collaboration? And how can team building combine competition with collaboration to deliver the “best of both worlds”?

Here are the answers to those questions and more.

Teaching Collaboration is Hard

Why? Because for most people, competition is their default. It’s innate, hard-wired into us. Collaboration is not.

Think about it. Turn a group of small children loose on a playground, then sit back and watch. What do they do? They race. They see who can get to the top of the monkey bars the fastest. They play tag—and try not to be “it.”

When you’re in college, you’re competing against other students for grades. When you’re going out to get your first job, there may be eight people vying for that job, and only one person is going to get it. When you get the job, four people are being eyed for promotion; you’re one of them. You’re always competing.

Even within the same company in the same sales department, people will compete for regions, compete for clients…no matter how much collaboration there is, people are usually rewarded for shining, for standing out.

The results of competition are also much more straightforward to measure. It’s easy to see who crossed the finish line first, who got the high score, who’s numbers look best.
Even in team sports, where collaboration is crucial, it’s hard to tease out its exact value. To what extent did the New England Patriots win six Super Bowls because they out-collaborated their opponents—and to what extent was it the individual performance of Tom Brady? The same could be asked about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, or Maya Moore with the Minnesota Lynx.

Collaboration doesn’t come automatically. Competition does. All of that makes teaching collaboration much harder than simply telling people to share information.

So, when it comes to teaching collaboration in a team-building workshop, it is one of the most difficult things to do. An effective facilitator can model the behavior, point it out, and celebrate it. But to actually teach it and have it ingrained takes a highly skilled facilitator plus great program content. Leadership, problem-solving, and communication are teachable. Collaboration is the most difficult skill to ingrain into people.

Competition Can Be Constructive

Of course, the competitive aspect of team building is certainly valuable. It just depends upon what the goals are. At Best Corporate Events, about a third of our clients just want competition. They’re thinking A Minute to Win It, Catapult, Corporate Survivor, Go-Kart Competition, Team Olympics, or a scavenger hunt. They want groups of x employees to compete, and to have one winner, or three teams to win the Gold, Silver, and Bronze while all the other teams are losers.

We offer many different programs, in-person or online, wherein one team is going to have the most points. They win the gold medals. Competition can drive people to make extraordinary efforts to win, which is great.

But what makes these team building competitions even more impactful is that although participants are competing against other teams, they are working highly collaboratively with the other people on their team.

Team members are problem-solving, brainstorming, looking for solutions, and pumping each other up. Within each group, the efforts are tremendously collaborative, but all the groups are competing against each other. So these programs provide the best of both worlds.

But Collaboration is More Powerful

Another way to teach collaboration in a competitive team building situation is to add all of the teams’ scores together and make that the score for the activity. When participants realize the goal is to maximize every team’s score rather than simply out-scoring the other group, they will share information and discoveries in order to help the other team(s), and therefore maximize the overall point total.

Organizations often identify that realization as one of the highlights of the entire day: that even though the program was set up like a competition, someone recognized collaboration, verbalized it, and got the entire room to understand. Suddenly these teams of employees, who were all too willing to immediately compete for the highest score, started sharing information instead of hoarding it.
A twist on that is to recognize the high-scoring teams but also add the scores of all the teams together and calculate the average. Then there is a “half time” called. The highest-scoring teams are asked to share what they did, to identify and share best practices so that every team does better in the second half.

And then in the second half, though all teams are still operating and being scored independently, all the scores are added together again. The goal is for all of the teams combined to achieve a 25% or 30% improvement compared to the overall scores in the first half. That’s collaborating to compete.

Bringing It All Together

The business benefit is the mindset those employees take back to the workplace. They look for opportunities to collaborate, and are excited about it. They focus more on how their activities and communications impact the overall organization, not just their own roles.

Virtually all of our team building programs involve competition. Most incorporate some level of collaboration as well. And if the idea of improving collaboration through competition sounds really intriguing, you may want to check out our trademarked Competition to Collaboration® program.

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The Impact of CSR on Employee Loyalty

If Charles Dickens was writing his classic novel today, the opening line might read “It was the weirdest of times.”

Job openings in the U.S. hit a record high in September, as companies across industries and regions struggle to find enough help. There are a record number of container ships waiting to unload off the California coast because there aren’t enough dock workers to unload them. Even if there were, there aren’t enough truck drivers to pick up the containers. Even if there were, there aren’t enough warehouse workers to unload the trucks.

And so it goes, across companies and job categories. The economy is rebounding, but a record number of workers are quitting their jobs. In many industries, there aren’t enough employees to go around now. Businesses are struggling to find enough employees.

Employers have to think hard about retention and recruitment. Many are raising wages, but know they need to offer more than a paycheck. How does a company become an employer of choice—a place that people want to join and don’t want to leave?

One answer is to emphasize corporate social responsibility (CSR). How does community philanthropy impact employment choices? While its importance varies from individual to individual, as a whole, people feel pretty good about reaching out and helping others. And when a company does that, it’s not just saying, but showing that its leadership cares about more than just the bottom line.

Invest in Your People

Any type of team building activity—whether the objective is to improve collaboration, problem-solving, or professional skills—improves employee engagement.

It demonstrates to employees that their worth to your company is more than just the immediate value of their daily efforts. You’re willing to invest in improving their skills and their work life over the long term. You’re paying them not to do their regular jobs for a few hours because you place a priority on team building.

Even more than holiday bonuses or employee surveys, team building programs let individuals know your company really does care about them, by investing in developing their leadership and interpersonal skills, while having fun doing it!

We all know the statistics about how difficult and expensive it is to retrain someone when a good person leaves your company. So, retention is so critical. Employee engagement done correctly equates to retention and enthusiasm.

Show Your Heart

Incorporating CSR in your team building takes it to a whole different level. It’s tremendous when a company is willing to do something charity-related or philanthropic in combination with developing their people.

From the perspective of employees, it has to do with heart. It has to do with the spirit of the company, with the culture that your company embraces. At one of our recent team-building events, the client said, “I feel like every time we do one of these activities, it enhances who we are, the culture that we have as a company.” That’s a pretty powerful statement.

This manager felt that the fact the company took some time to do a team-building activity enhanced the culture; it had the entire group feeling unified because they had just worked through a very difficult activity together. They had just celebrated together, with each of the participants sharing something they learned from the activity.

At our Bike Build Donation® events, we usually don’t tell the participants that kids are going to be there; it’s a “reveal” at the end of the activity. When those kids come in, it’s very emotional.
Many of those kids have never even owned a bike before. And when the facilitator asks everyone to close their eyes, and they sneak the kids in and tell a story, when everybody opens their eyes and the kids are standing there with the bikes, it’s really powerful

It’s so emotional that it has an impact on employee engagement and employee retention. It’s above and beyond working.

A bike-build program has all of the pillars for a team-building event. It’s got a goal, roles, fun, communication, competition, collaboration, and problem-solving, plus it’s got building. Everything an organization could want in a team-building program happens in the bike build. All of our charity events have an inherent team-building foundation. It’s a double bonus.

Or there’s our Build-a-Wheelchair® events, often done in collaboration with Disabled American Veterans and other veterans’ support organizations. In one of these programs, a charitable representative came with two retired service members in wheelchairs…that really had an emotional impact on the participants.

For our Project Alzheimer’s™ program—we get calls from people who go to our website and might say, “I just went through this very difficult situation with my mom with Alzheimer’s. And I saw you have an Alzheimer’s program. I know one of my workers is dealing with the same thing. We’re absolutely doing this program.”

All of our CSR programs allow participants to reach out to others. It’s about emotions, caring, company culture, the community. Those are all things that any of our charity programs represent.

Make It Part of Something Bigger

More often than not, our team building program options are a part of a full-day or multi-day offsite employee meeting. In those cases, the company is making a broader investment in enhancing the knowledge and skills of its employees, as well as defining their corporate culture.

Team building is a vital piece of that investment. A CSR program might even be a surprise piece of that because it has such a tremendous impact.

But whether the CSR team building event is hosted in a hotel, conference center, or on the campus of a Fortune 500 company, it enhances company culture in a powerful way.

Make an Impact on Your Community

Some companies allow employees to take a few days off each year, separate from their vacation days, when they’re paid to volunteer for different nonprofit organizations such as Habitat for Humanity or their local soup kitchen. For employees who value giving back to the community, any type of CSR policy or activity has a powerful impact on loyalty, engagement, and retention.

Again, any type of team building program has a positive impact on employee morale and engagement. But incorporating CSR takes those effects to a higher level.

For any team building or professional development program we deliver, we can end with a surprise CSR component. It’s the best of both worlds when team building is combined with charity.

For example, we’ll take off the tablecloths, and lo and behold, there are all these school supplies. What are these school supplies for? Because we’re going to be putting them into backpacks and donating them.

How about our Golf Build Food Donation program? In two hours, your group gets to build a mini-golf course using canned and boxed goods, play a round of golf with medals to the winners, and then donate all the canned and boxed goods to a local food bank – it doesn’t get any better than that!

BEST CSR activities increase employee loyalty and engagement by enhancing your culture and creating an emotional as well as practical impact.

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The Four Roles of an Effective Team Building Facilitator

An impactful and memorable team building event starts with effective facilitation. Having an experienced, engaging facilitator is vital to creating an experience that teaches leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills to participants while also being fun and engaging.

Why is that person called a “facilitator” instead of something else, like a team building leader, organizer, or instructor? Because facilitator is the most descriptive term and encompasses all the different roles involved in creating an enjoyable and valuable experience.

An effective team building facilitator is able to transition through several distinct roles very quickly, ultimately going from initially being the focus to transitioning to making the team members the focus seamlessly. Here are four essential roles that the facilitator progresses through during the course of the team building exercise.

The Four Roles of a Facilitator

The facilitator’s first role is that of organizer. This happens before the team members even arrive or any activities begin. In this role, the facilitator has spoken to the client/meeting planner (if necessary) and has assured that the activity(s) that have been chosen is the best one for the team based on goals and shared outcomes. Upon arrival, the facilitator will spend time making sure the room/outdoor space is set up ideally for the participants to enjoy and will get the most out of the experience, including making makes sure the tables and chairs are arranged properly and the sound system works. They ensure that all of the materials and equipment needed are on hand. That the room isn’t too hot or cold. They know where the bathrooms are.

The critical objective in this role is to create an environment for success. The facilitator works to make sure the room or other event venue is comfortable, organized, and as free of distractions as possible so that the participants can focus on working through the activity (and on having fun doing it).

The second role is that of (temporary) leader. Once the team members arrive and are ready to take part, the facilitator introduces the activity, explains the objective, answers any questions, and provides the team members with the information and materials they need.

The third role is to be a coach. As quickly as possible, the facilitator makes the participants the focus. In this role, the “coach” applauds team members, celebrates their successes, gives feedback and guidance, keeps the activity running smoothly, allows fun and friendly competition, and, if applicable, recognizes team members when they come up with solutions that everyone in the group can learn from. Like any good coach, they put the spotlight on the “players,” making the team members the superstars of the activity or program.

The final role of the facilitator is to be a role model. Part of the way they teach communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and engagement is by modeling that behavior. They communicate clearly, answer clarifying questions, and collaborate with the participants.

A facilitator needs to be able to adjust to any situation that arises once the program has started. They problem-solve on the spot, manage change on the fly, and demonstrate everything they want from the participants, so those team members know they are in the hands of a facilitator who can confidently and competently “drive the bus.”

Bringing It All Together

Through the course of the team building program, what the facilitator asks from team members evolves as well: from attention and observation to participation and collaboration. Great facilitation is key to enabling participants to walk away with a valuable and enjoyable experience.

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Choosing the Best Venue for Team Building: Considerations for the (Not So) Great Outdoors

An effective team building program can accomplish several important business objectives: improving employee communication, engagement, collaboration, problem-solving, and leadership skills, among others.

It requires an investment in time, resources, and taking employees away from their regular roles. To optimize your return on that investment, it’s essential to create an environment where employees are comfortable and able to focus on the team building activity.

While it’s natural for workers to want to get out of the office and enjoy the fresh air, outdoor venues are usually not the best setting for team building (with the obvious exception of scavenger hunts or other activities specifically designed to be held outside).

Here’s why—and how to create the best environment for success, whatever environment you choose.

Focus on the—hey, squirrel!

Team building facilitators want to introduce activities in a way where nothing will interfere with the group’s ability to succeed. With any outdoor venue, almost anywhere and at any time, weather is a concern: heat, cold, wind, and/or rain can make conditions miserable. In a public outdoor setting such as a park, there are also potential distractions from other people, pets, extraneous noise, Frisbees, balls of various types, and other sources.

The goal of the facilitator is to explain and deliver activities in an environment with as few distractions as possible. This maximizes your group’s ability to succeed and increases the positive impact of your workshop.

In a purpose-built indoor space—such as a large meeting room on a corporate campus or a ballroom in a hotel or casino—it’s much easier to eliminate distractions so everyone can focus on the team building activity. The climate is controlled, the sound system is built-in, and tables and chairs can be easily arranged to fit the program.

But if you really want to be outdoors…

There are times when the allure of the outdoors is hard to resist. Maybe it’s (forecasted to be) a gorgeous Friday afternoon. Maybe it’s (forecasted to be) one of those first 70-degree days of the spring in Minneapolis, or the fall in Phoenix.

If that’s the case, here are a few strategies to maximize your chances of success:

  • Have a backup indoor space where you can host the team building activity in case the weather doesn’t cooperate.
  • Choose a private, dedicated, or reserved location where you’ll be free of distractions from other people, animals, and extraneous noise.
  • If you are traveling to a different city and your backup indoor space isn’t adjacent to your outdoor space, arrange for transportation in case it becomes necessary.
  • Three to five days out from the program, check the current weather forecast. If it looks less than ideal, consider moving the program indoors. If that’s not an option, decide if you simply want to warn employees to dress for the weather (e.g., it looks like it will be gray and cool but dry) or postpone the event (storms are likely). You want participants to benefit from and enjoy the activity—not to be miserable because they’re too cold, too hot, or too wet.
  • Have a “plan A” and a “plan B” to address the conditions. If it looks like the day will be damp, but not a washout, you may choose to move activities indoors, or keep it outside but use different materials (e.g., no paper or cardboard).

Wrapping it up

It’s easy to understand why people love the idea of doing team building activities outdoors. But nature doesn’t always accommodate.

Depending on your situation, you may decide the risks of trying to pull off a successful outdoor event are too great, and an indoor venue really is preferable. Or you may arrange for an outdoor location, with a backup indoor space or at least a “plan B” in case the weather doesn’t cooperate.

What’s most important is to create an environment where distractions are minimized; where you have plenty of space for the activity (follow the recommendations of your team building provider); and where employees are comfortable and able to focus on the activity. That will maximize the enjoyment for participants, the benefits they get from the team building program, and the return on your organization’s investment in increasing employee engagement.

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How Team Building Increases Employee Engagement

Improving employee engagement is always a productive move, but it’s crucial now more than ever. Here’s why, and how to accomplish that goal.

Highly engaged employees see their work as meaningful. They feel trusted and respected and often feel an emotional commitment to their organization. As a result, they are more productive, more consistently, which ultimately leads to a happier workplace attitude and higher profits for their employers.

That’s always been true. But with the structure of work changing in this post-pandemic environment, increasing employee engagement is both more vital and more challenging than before. Many employees are coming back to the office on a part-time basis, while others work remotely most or all of the time.

Maintaining engagement when employees are physically separated is difficult but essential to preserving that sense of connection and high productivity. Team building programs can be highly effective in sustaining and strengthening the bonds that keep employees highly engaged. Here’s what you need to know.

Team Building is Inherently Engaging

By their very nature, team building activities and initiatives incorporate certain essential pillars for engagement: communication, leadership, problem-solving, and establishing roles.

Whatever the specific program, the foundation is the same: bringing together a group of co-workers and presenting them with a challenge to solve or a project to complete. Out of necessity, the group must begin communicating, asking questions to understand the activity, goal, rules, and guidelines.

The team (or teams) then work together to achieve the objective. It’s fun, collaborative, and engaging. And when it’s over, this experience translates directly into positive workplace attitudes and behaviors.

Team building takes engagement to a new level when it involves corporate social responsibility (CSR). Engagement, problem solving, team bonding, and doing good for the community are all objectives of CSR activities.

Get a GRPI

GRPI stands for goals, roles, personalities, and interpersonal relations. This is a core component of effective team building. What are the goals the group must accomplish? What different roles will team members establish to complete the task? How will the different personalities in the group affect the roles chosen? And in terms of the interpersonal aspect, how are team members getting along? How effectively are they working together as a unit to complete the task?

Again, these are skills that employees will learn and hone as part of the team building program—and have fun doing it! And they will bring these new and enhanced skills back into the workplace with them, increasing their engagement with the organization.

Another benefit is that with many programs, the unique skills of certain employees come to light – skills needed in the position the employee fills in the company. Management often observes employees in team building exercises displaying abilities they didn’t know they possessed.

Create a New, Shared Experience

Team building increases engagement by encouraging communication, collaboration, and problem-solving in an activity the participants have never done before. It’s not basketball, or rock climbing, or bowling. The facilitator is introducing activities that are brand new to everyone in the room.

That puts all team members on equal footing, starting on a level playing field with the same information. Everyone starts with the same (limited) knowledge, so no one is “the boss,” and no one is shy about asking questions. As participants engage more in the activity, the facilitator acknowledges fruitful collaboration and recognizes individuals for solid communication.

Today’s team building activities are less physical than old-fashioned team building: “trust falls,” obstacle courses, boot camp. Now, team building is more cerebral.

These activities allow for full and active participation, regardless of the physical condition of any participant. Every team member, even someone with back problems, a sprained ankle, or mobility limitations, can take a full and active part in the team building because everyone has roles. That structure keeps all participants engaged.

Enhance Engagement by Showing What Matters

Employers are in the midst of the great resignation. There’s evidence that labor shortages will persist as companies compete for a shrinking pool of workers. Engagement is more critical than ever. How can companies retain their best employees and make new employees feel like part of the team, even if they aren’t physically in the office?

To maximize engagement, you need to make your employees feel that you care about them as individuals. Every employer offers a paycheck and benefits. What sets some employers apart in this competitive environment for talent is hosting social events for employees (live or virtual), giving back to the community, and team building activities.

Send employees (particularly those working remotely) little gift boxes with cheese, crackers, and beverages. Maybe an engraved wine glass or coffee mug. Conduct surveys to help increase engagement—report on the results. Announce what you’ll start doing, do differently, or do more of.

Show employees they are important by investing in team building activities: a scavenger hunt, a charitable event, a Trivia Game Show. All these types of actions show you care about each person beyond what they do to drive revenue for your company.

The payoff in engagement means you retain your best people, bring new people up to speed more quickly, and make all of your employees happier in their work and more consistently productive.

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    Programs can be delivered anywhere in North America.




      If you have immediate questions, please contact us at:


      Phone: 800.849.8326
      Email: Sales@BestCorporateEvents.com

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      Keynote Speakers are experienced, professional communicators who engage an audience, capturing the essence of a client’s meeting. They are able to highlight it to their audience while simultaneously delivering their own key concepts and proprietary content in an entertaining and impactful way. Most companies understand that this specialization is very much worth the time (around an hour) and the investment.

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