As team building events have grown considerably over the last twenty years and it is now common for organisations today to hold annual team building events in Birmingham at both department and company level.

A principal reason for the increase in popularity of team building events in Birmingham is that the majority of managers today believe that team building events help to bond organisation members together both horizontally (between subordinates) and vertically (between managers and their subordinates). It is essential that the concept of team building is fully understood to ensure that the desired outcome is achieved and that the team building event does not end up being seen merely as a ‘jolly’, a one night stay at a nice hotel or an afternoon of games. The concept and the rationale behind the team building event needs to be well understood to maximise the benefits for the time and money spent on team building in Birmingham.

What is Team Building?

Team building is the interaction among members of work teams to facilitate their learning how other members think and work. Unfortunately, in today's workplace, the focus upon team building can be misinterpreted. The key phrase here is ‘to learn how other members think and work’. Team building events therefore should go beyond the concept of being seen as a ‘jolly’. They have to allow for learning about how each member of the team thinks and works in relation to others in the workplace. However, some team building companies today commonly use team building events to simply ‘encourage’ people to work together rather than using the team building to facilitate their learning about how each team member actually thinks and behaves.

The common message inherent in most team building events is ‘you must all learn to work as a team’. Successful companies in Birmingham do more - they provide a structured opportunity to help team members learn more deeply about how other individuals operate in the workplace.

As children special efforts to learn to work with others were unnecessary because children live and grow together. As each of us get older, we learn to become more sceptical of others and this is often culturally reinforced. No longer are we as naïve in our ideas about other people as we were when we were children. This, combined with the rapid shifts in workplace environments and the rapid changeover of personnel, eventually makes it harder to work as a team. So for Birmingham companies corporate team building becomes an integral part of helping them to maximise their corporate performance.

Adults are much less flexible in accepting changes and other people’s values because as we grow, we become more inflexible and intolerant of others. We may not readily accept others views and opinions and therefore may not so easily change ourselves so that we can work effectively with colleagues - we forget that we must try to compromise as we work along. It is therefore not the answer for companies simply to ask adults to work together – adults need to see the benefits that structured team building brings.

Effective Team Building in Birmingham

Working together takes both time and effort - adults will not simply learn to work together as a team by taking part in a one or two day team building event – you often find that some people may not work effectively together even after years of being in the same office. Simply asking people to work as a team is not an adequate philosophy – creation of an effective team requires both thought and work. Teams have to experience and understand other people's ways of working if they are to really believe in their capacity to find effective ways of working together as a team. Therefore, team building events alone are not the answer to all failing teams but they can play an important role as part of an overall strategy.

Birmingham corporates that wish to make their team building events practical and beneficial allow for interaction in the knowledge that it facilitates and leads to understanding. The simple ‘jolly’ will not just work. It may promote interaction and everyone may have a good time, but if the team building event has no structure the best that could be remembered about the event is that they ‘had a good time’. Team building has to be structured after you have first carefully considered your objectives. At what level is it that you want your guests to interact and work as a team? Remember to bear in mind that the purpose of interaction is to create understanding, and that understanding will help individuals know where their colleagues are coming from and why they act in a certain manner. Useful information could be gained - the person’s family background, their pastimes and hobbies, their friends. All this may simply surface from interaction, but generally this needs the more structured prompting and this best comes from a well considered and organised team building event.

Effective team building needs to provide behavioural opportunities for revealing underlying thinking and behavioural patterns. To see how we behave as individuals and as a team, initiative based team building events can have a valuable function. A problem is given to a team to solve or a mission is set for them to achieve as a team. Whilst each of the team members may have different ways of solving the same problem, allowing team members to understand why others make certain decisions will enable the team members to understand better why others make such decisions in the workplace. The team building process is crucial, it is not the end … it is the means. For example, if during a raft building activity your raft sinks it does not show that you are unable to work as a team. Whether or not the raft sinks is unimportant. What is important in any team building activity is how team members reached the decisions they made and how they interacted with their colleagues.

Objective based Team Building in Birmingham

Team building events invariably, but not necessarily, put people in an unfamiliar situation by taking them away from the office possibly in a Birmingham hotel or other venue. People are most likely to be dressed informally and therefore they are seen and seen to behave differently. At these occasions, positions in the corporate hierarchy are often forgotten and the true self appears, people tending to lower their guard and behaving differently. People do not simply act differently, they say things in a different way too. The way that we act and the way that we behave outside of the formal work setting is often our more true self. Team building experiences should help us to show others our true ‘human’ nature. Knowing each other’s true attitude and behaviour will often change our perceptions of our colleagues.

Team building events in Birmingham will therefore be more successful when there is a structured programme that allows specific objectives to be met. Team activities that create the opportunity to reveal the way we think, make decisions and react will create a much better and deeper understanding of work colleagues. Finally, a team building event that allows each others attitudes and behaviour to surface will result in the creation of better relationships within the workplace. However, managers must always be aware that team building does not just happen in a one or two day event, it has to happen in the workplace every day and it takes time. To allow team building to work managers must promote interaction in the workplace between colleagues so that they learn how each member thinks and works. This might require several different training methods including class room training, role playing and profiling tests. Good managers will need to contribute significantly to the process rather than being hopeful for the best results to flow from one or two team building events. Based on the understanding of the principles of team building above, it is hoped that managers will be able to make a better decision when organising future team building events.

For help and advise on organising a structured Team Building Event in Birmingham contact KDM.