Team Building

Benefits

Fun Activities

Guidance

Your Ideas?

Building Blocks

Expert Advice

Important Considerations

Humanity at Work

It's crucial to recognize that, before anything else, the individuals that make up your team are PEOPLE. "Seeing colleagues as people", means recognizing that each person we interact with has their on aspirations, challenges, emotions, and experiences that shape their perspective and actions. This outward mindset perspectives will help foster:

More meaningful relationships
Effective communication
A greater capacity for collaboration

The Benefits of Team Building

BelVG

BetterUp

Fun Team Building Activities

Local Office Workshops: The NWS Leadership Academy currently offers local office workshops (i.e. Myers-Briggs). Check it out here.
Trivia Night with your Office
Count to 20: Have everyone sit in a circle. Anyone can start the count off or say a number at any time, the goal being to count from one to 20. However, if two people jump in at the same time to say a number, the count starts over. This game requires team members not only to be cognizant of the group dynamic, but to work together—with limited communication—to get to the end.
Host a Think Tank: similar premise to the Shark Tank; this stimulates brainstorming, knowledge sharing and innovation
Show and Tell: this can be a great way to get your team to brag a bit about their accomplishments, and to encourage them to stay updated on what everyone else is working on.
Go to an Escape Room
Diversity Luncheon
Start a Book Club
Food! This sacred nourishment has been bringing humans together for millennia — why not use it to build a positive culture in your workplace?

Personality Assessment: have everyone on your team fill out a personality test, then get together and discuss. What you decide to do with this is really up to you—the key is to have each employee understand their colleagues’ strengths, weaknesses, and ticks. Maybe you group similar personalities together and have them chat about how their traits come out in the workplace, or have them complete an assignment like designing their “ideal” office based on their personality type and sharing it with the group.
Attend a sporting event
Develop an office sports team
Zoom: this activity is based on the picture books “Zoom” and “Re-Zoom” by Istvan Banyai which consist of 30 sequential “pictures within pictures”. The team is tasked with putting together a story from a set of sequential images. Each person is given an image but is not permitted to show it to anyone else. Together, the team has to figure out the correct sequence. The activity focuses on effective communication and problem-solving skills.
Holiday Fun: Hosting a holiday party? Break up into groups and have a gingerbread house building contest. As an office, vote your favorite!

Building a Team Identity

To build a team identify, there has to be a sense of "team" to begin with which takes concerted effort to build. One of the key foundations to team building and then the resultant identify of that team will require psychological safety. So, reflect as a manager or as a staff member, do you feel you have that within the office? If yes, then move on towards building the team and it's identify by using the 4C's outlined below. To begin establishing a team identity you will need time, energy, and intention. Remember, it all starts with a conversation. If you want to establish a team identity, you have to give your team an opportunity to openly discuss the 4 C’s of a Team Identity: clarity, commitment, contribution, and concerns.

Clarity

Clarify the team’s mission and vision. If you do not have a team mission and vision, have your team collaborate and create them.
For specific projects, clarify the goals, timelines, etc. that the team needs to function.
Also, clarify each team member’s level of authority in relation to individual projects.

Commitment

Identify the commitment level of your team members.
Encourage commitment by showing your own. Tell your team why it (or the project) is important to you and to the team as a whole.
Have each team member answer these questions:
- Why is this team (or project) important to you?
- What do you hope to gain as a member of this team?

Contribution

Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your team.
Have your team members each answer these questions:
- What specific skills, knowledge, and/or expertise do you bring to this team (or project)?
- What do you think your role is on this team (or project)?

Rather than immediately delegating tasks, let your team suggest assignments based on their potential contributions.

Concerns

Make sure you give your team members an opportunity to voice their concerns, comments, and/or questions.
This is the time to ask the following questions:
- Do you have any concerns about working on the team, the current project, etc.?
- What could we, as a team, improve on?

Team Building Guide - Designing the Desired Culture

Help Your Team Design A Culture They Love (Activity)Most teams create plans for how they will produce business results, but rarely do they create plans for building the relationships and culture needed to produce those results. Whether the team is working remotely, hybrid, or back in the office, use this simple activity to design your team culture.

The first step is for leaders to block out one and a half to two hours to facilitate the conversation with their team. Leaders can call the session “Cultural Brainstorm” or “Working Together.” It is important to establish context for the meeting so people come prepared. Leaders can share this article along with the below message:

As we enter another challenging year, I want us to brainstorm and plan how to build and maintain a team culture that supports us at our best. I saw this activity in Forbes and thought it would be great for our next meeting. I know you are all busy, but I would love you to read the questions below and be thinking about them leading up to our meeting. I look forward to designing our year together.

Send people the following questions to reflect on before the meeting:

Personal Reflection Questions

How do you want to grow professionally in the year ahead? (What do you want to learn about? What skills do you want to develop or improve?)
How do you want to grow personally?
How can the team support you in accomplishing your goals?

Team Reflection Questions

For each Blueprint Focus Area, think about what we have done previously that you would like to do again or continue, and what new ideas you would like to try.

We Want to Hear From You!

Has your office done some fun and effective team building exercises lately?

If so, fill out this short form and we will populate the results below to give others some ideas!

Team Building Exercises That Made a Difference! (Responses)

Team Building Blocks

Establish Trust

For your team/office to become more productive, increase trust among team or staff members. The best place to start establishing trust is by getting to know your employees/peers, enhancing your own emotional intelligence, self-awareness and eliminating unconscious bias. When there is trust among employees, they can connect well and help each other with proper problem-solving and improve morale. Article: What's the Best Way to Build Trust at Work? Article: The Importance to Getting to Know Your Employees

Develop Great Teamwork

This does not occur overnight. It requires conscious effort from every individual on the team or in the office and the leader as well. To develop teamwork, a leader must provide clear objectives and goals to EVERYONE. When everything is put on the table for the staff, they will have a clearer picture of how team/office cohesion is crucial. and how their contribution is going to assist the team, office and/or agency in the long run.

Provide a Good Work Environment

Your team or offices ability to work depends on the fact that they are given the proper space to do so. Providing employees a working environment where they feel comfortable, that they belong and have access to the necessary resources and tools will increase their efficiency and effectiveness.

Communicate Well

A team or office that has strong communication skills is most likely to excel in what they do. And as a leader, it becomes their duty to develop a system where everyone can communicate well without any hiccups. Communicating effectively needs to be done on a routine basis so that everyone can share their views and opinions. Also, keep in mind that to communicate well with your team or office, choose the right words to encourage them. Avoid using judgmental phrases and maintain a friendly tone, so that team morale is high. This will help the effectiveness of the team/office as they will be more motivated towards their job.

Connect with Team Members

Getting to know each of your team members or staff individually is essential. Each employee has different traits, skills, and interests. Gaining knowledge of particular things will help you bond with them well. When you connect with your peers/employees, you will match their skillset and passion with the right task—further enhancing their productivity and elevating job satisfaction. This, in turn, reduces the risk factors of employees getting frustrated with their job and making workflow smoother within the office or on a team.

Encourage Contributions

A team and office is only capable when the employees can put forward their ideas in front of everyone. This is possible when a manager/leader starts contributing and collaborating with your staff. Once they set an example and make everyone comfortable with the idea, then others will follow you. Leaders should ask their staff to come up with innovative plans and ideas so that everyone can contribute as a unit. Organize a brainstorming session will allow collaborative sharing of opinions. When your team/office and yourself work collaboratively, problem-solving becomes more natural, and the team's effectiveness increases.

Practice Feedback

Teams can only excel in their work and become effective when they get the right feedback. Practicing feedback not only concentrates on improving every individual, but also focuses on developing a better office culture. Successful teams and offices work around a sound feedback system where they continuously get an update about their progress. A working feedback system provides teams continuous reports on where they need to work on the most and improve themselves — further increasing their work efficiency and productivity. Performance Review Section.

Team Building from the Experts

Weird, or just different?"There's a flip side to everything," the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.

The Secrets of Great TeamworkOver the years, as teams have grown more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic, collaboration has become more complex. But though teams face new challenges, their success still depends on a core set of fundamentals. As J. Richard Hackman, who began researching teams in the 1970s, discovered, what matters most isn’t the personalities or behavior of the team members; it’s whether a team has a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context. In their own research, Haas and Mortensen have found that teams need those three “enabling conditions” now more than ever. But their work also revealed that today’s teams are especially prone to two corrosive problems: “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information. Overcoming those pitfalls requires a new enabling condition: a shared mindset. This article details what team leaders should do to establish the four foundations for success. For instance, to promote a shared mindset, leaders should foster a common identity and common understanding among team members, with techniques such as “structured unstructured time.” The authors also describe how to evaluate a team’s effectiveness, providing an assessment leaders can take to see what’s working and where there’s room for improvement.

Teams That Work

The seven drivers of team effectiveness.

The revolutionary power of diverse thought"From populist demagogues, we will learn the indispensability of democracy," says novelist Elif Shafak. "From isolationists, we will learn the need for global solidarity. And from tribalists, we will learn the beauty of cosmopolitanism." A native of Turkey, Shafak has experienced firsthand the devastation that a loss of diversity can bring -- and she knows the revolutionary power of plurality in response to authoritarianism. In this passionate, personal talk, she reminds us that there are no binaries, in politics, emotions and our identities. "One should never, ever remain silent for fear of complexity," Shafak says.

The New Science of Building Great TeamsReprint: R1204C Why do some teams consistently deliver high performance while other, seemingly identical teams struggle? Led by Sandy Pentland, researchers at MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory set out to solve that puzzle. Hoping to decode the “It factor” that made groups click, they equipped teams from a broad variety of projects and industries (comprising 2,500 individuals in total) with wearable electronic sensors that collected data on their social behavior for weeks at a time. With remarkable consistency, the data showed that the most important predictor of a team’s success was its communication patterns. Those patterns were as significant as all other factors—intelligence, personality, talent—combined. In fact, the researchers could foretell which teams would outperform simply by looking at the data on their communication, without even meeting their members. In this article Pentland shares the secrets of his findings and shows how anyone can engineer a great team. He has identified three key communication dynamics that affect performance: energy, engagement, and exploration. Drawing from the data, he has precisely quantified the ideal team patterns for each. Even more significant, he has seen that when teams map their own communication behavior over time and then make adjustments that move it closer to the ideal, they can dramatically improve their performance.