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.
