1. Make Sure You're Actually Doing It
People often confuse teambuilding with simply taking a group out of the office. "A lot of people say, 'Let's just go out bowling and have a drink,' and think of that as teambuilding," says Bruce Honig, executive director of Honig IdeaGuides, a meeting and retreat facilitation company. "That's just assembling the team in an outside context."
Teambuilding focuses on unifying a group through activities that make them work together and strengthen their relationships. That requires matching an activity with the group's personality, and its particular challenges—not necessarily putting together the standard whitewater rafting or rock climbing trip.
2. Make It Regular
Real camaraderie requires more than an annual pool game. The e-business group at Metropolitan Life holds quarterly teambuilding activities, half of them smaller gatherings around the office, half of them more elaborate outside events. "It's definitely built into our schedule," says Eric Goldberg, one of the department's directors. "Our team has to work very closely together. A lot of collaboration is required." When Goldberg coordinated a two-day planning meeting for 40 of his coworkers in April, he included builtin activities like a bingo-inspired game called "Lingo," where everyone received cards with oft-used business words like "interface" and "status" they could cross off as coworkers said them at the meeting. And the cap-off was a collaborative cooking experience at Cooking by the Book, which runs culinary classes for groups in TriBeCa.
3. Get Them Guessing
Getting people actively involved in learning about each other, rather than just telling them facts, is a great way to connect people, according to Carrie Smith of teambuilding firm Barkley Kalpak. A favorite activity of hers—which recently brought together staffers from The New York Times—is the game "Two Truths and a Lie," in which everyone has to guess which of three potential facts is actually a lie (a good game for The Times, no?). Tracy Hook, from the special events department of the Whitney Museum of American Art, played a similar game at a recent teambuilding lunch, where people wrote down a random fact about themselves, put it in a hat, and everyone guessed matches.
4. Keep It Related
Part of the effectiveness of an out-of-the-office jaunt stems from working together in a different environment. But Colette Ellis, founder of InStep Consulting, suggests keeping a group's location at least loosely related to their jobs, so they keep the work-related purpose in mind. She recently took the technology department of a nonprofit to the Sony Wonder Technology Lab to check out some new products in their industry. "They could think about innovative ways to use technology and then bring some of these concepts back into the office," she says. "Even though there's lots of high-end stuff that they'd never use there, it makes them see how they can innovate in their jobs."
5. Teach Them About the Other Side
Employees don't often get the chance to learn about people in other departments—or their jobs—making it easier for them to misunderstand each other when they have to work together. Teambuilding activities that foster understanding between different groups can help. The Whitney's development department is working on that issue with an initiative called Leap Lunches where, Hook explains, "someone from another department comes in and speaks about their work." Her team also took a trip to the Whitney's storage facilities so they could learn about shipping and crating, and a crash course in art history.
—Eva Hagberg
Posted 06.27.05
This story originally appeared in the June/July 2005 issue of the BiZBash Event Style Reporter.
People often confuse teambuilding with simply taking a group out of the office. "A lot of people say, 'Let's just go out bowling and have a drink,' and think of that as teambuilding," says Bruce Honig, executive director of Honig IdeaGuides, a meeting and retreat facilitation company. "That's just assembling the team in an outside context."
Teambuilding focuses on unifying a group through activities that make them work together and strengthen their relationships. That requires matching an activity with the group's personality, and its particular challenges—not necessarily putting together the standard whitewater rafting or rock climbing trip.
2. Make It Regular
Real camaraderie requires more than an annual pool game. The e-business group at Metropolitan Life holds quarterly teambuilding activities, half of them smaller gatherings around the office, half of them more elaborate outside events. "It's definitely built into our schedule," says Eric Goldberg, one of the department's directors. "Our team has to work very closely together. A lot of collaboration is required." When Goldberg coordinated a two-day planning meeting for 40 of his coworkers in April, he included builtin activities like a bingo-inspired game called "Lingo," where everyone received cards with oft-used business words like "interface" and "status" they could cross off as coworkers said them at the meeting. And the cap-off was a collaborative cooking experience at Cooking by the Book, which runs culinary classes for groups in TriBeCa.
3. Get Them Guessing
Getting people actively involved in learning about each other, rather than just telling them facts, is a great way to connect people, according to Carrie Smith of teambuilding firm Barkley Kalpak. A favorite activity of hers—which recently brought together staffers from The New York Times—is the game "Two Truths and a Lie," in which everyone has to guess which of three potential facts is actually a lie (a good game for The Times, no?). Tracy Hook, from the special events department of the Whitney Museum of American Art, played a similar game at a recent teambuilding lunch, where people wrote down a random fact about themselves, put it in a hat, and everyone guessed matches.
4. Keep It Related
Part of the effectiveness of an out-of-the-office jaunt stems from working together in a different environment. But Colette Ellis, founder of InStep Consulting, suggests keeping a group's location at least loosely related to their jobs, so they keep the work-related purpose in mind. She recently took the technology department of a nonprofit to the Sony Wonder Technology Lab to check out some new products in their industry. "They could think about innovative ways to use technology and then bring some of these concepts back into the office," she says. "Even though there's lots of high-end stuff that they'd never use there, it makes them see how they can innovate in their jobs."
5. Teach Them About the Other Side
Employees don't often get the chance to learn about people in other departments—or their jobs—making it easier for them to misunderstand each other when they have to work together. Teambuilding activities that foster understanding between different groups can help. The Whitney's development department is working on that issue with an initiative called Leap Lunches where, Hook explains, "someone from another department comes in and speaks about their work." Her team also took a trip to the Whitney's storage facilities so they could learn about shipping and crating, and a crash course in art history.
—Eva Hagberg
Posted 06.27.05
This story originally appeared in the June/July 2005 issue of the BiZBash Event Style Reporter.
As part of its quarterly teambuilding activities, the e-business group at Metropolitan Life took a cooking class in April at Cooking by the Book, which runs culinary experiences for groups in TriBeCa.
