As the Paris 2024 Olympics and the incredible achievements of Team GB have played out over the past couple of weeks, the incredible team morale – and impact this has on team performance – has been evident. Whether the athletes compete alongside their teammates or individually with the backing of their wider team and support system, the relationships and mutual support has been instrumental in the team’s admirable conduct and successes. These inspirational shows of teamwork are causing many business leaders to reflect on their own team dynamics and consider how they can improve employee relationships and team building, and by extension, maximise business outcomes.
As a social species, strong relationships are incredibly important to our physical and mental health. Within the workplace, good relationships with management, colleagues, and those we manage, can make all the difference in how we feel and perform within the workplace. As such, happy, healthy and engaged employees are an essential ingredient for any successful business.
There’s a direct link between employee wellbeing and business performance, and the organisations providing the right employee benefits and wellbeing supports are more likely to turn a higher profit, according to research from WellHub. In its ‘Return on Wellbeing’ study, the employee wellbeing platform surveyed over 2,000 human resource professionals and C-level leaders across nine countries and found happy employees to be the most productive members of the workforce, with satisfied departments producing a 23% higher profit. Not only that, but happy employees are more productive, less likely to call in sick, and easier to retain.
Time to rethink team building
It’s evidently in a business’ best interests to invest in employee relationships and team morale, but for busy business and HR leaders, improving and nurturing these all-important dynamics can be challenging. Team building itself often carries a stigma, all too often associated with ‘forced fun’ and awkward encounters with co-workers – a perception perpetuated by countless team building TV sketches where the fallback ‘trust exercise’ goes terribly wrong! However, team building activities today can span a huge variety of different challenges and activities, from an Olympics-inspired GPS treasure hunt to firewalking. The key to getting employees to buy into team activities is to shape it around them, the business and its objectives. Striking the right tone and selecting the right activity is important in maximising participation and outcome, and there are several factors to consider within this.
First, consider who your employees are. It’s likely you’ll have a mixture of demographics, backgrounds and cultures to cater for, so finding something that will engage as many people as possible is key. Depending on what type of business or sector you operate in, you may wish to find an activity that aligns with employees’ natural passions and interests. For example, if your team works in engineering or back-end IT, they may enjoy something that challenges their logic and problem solving, like the life-size revival of the board game, ‘Mouse Trap’, which challenges participants to work against the clock to build a series of huge contraptions that, when assembled correctly, perform a mesmerising chain reaction.
You may also want to reflect your business ethos and values in your team activities. If CSR is particularly important to you, your employees and your customers, you could use the opportunity to simultaneously drive positive impacts for your business and its wider community, by undertaking a cooking class to produce meals for a homeless shelter, for example, or working in teams to build a bike for a children’s charity.
Your choice should also be driven by your objectives for your team, whether you simply want to bring everyone together for a bit of fun, or want to work specifically on communication, leadership skills or problem solving.
Forming genuine connections
While team building can be targeted to test or build upon specific skills, the overall impact they can have on employee relationships can be significant. These activities, away from the day-to-day demands and responsibilities of the job, help employees get to know one another better and form connections outside of the work context so they feel more invested in the individual behind the job function.
Team building activities can also be engineered to bring people together from different departments and seniorities that don’t normally work together. Not only does this expose them to different communication and leadership styles, but it can also help break down barriers and open up communication to boost collaboration back in the workplace – something that the Institute of Collaborative Working has found to lead to increased sales, customer satisfaction and product development.
In the same vein, these activities can help to unite multi-generational teams and help overcome the mutual resentment that can build between younger and more established colleagues as a result of differing expectations, communication styles and approaches to technology. The focus on a task or challenge entirely separate from the business encourages colleagues to converse and learn more about shared interests and passions outside of work, which can be a powerful foundation for a relationship.
Taking a leaf from Team GB’s book
While there’s no ‘magic bullet’ to improve employee relations and workplace morale, we can certainly learn a thing or two from Team GB and how they invest in and support one another to maximise performance and the overall team outcome. Employee relationships are an important part of the wellbeing puzzle – and one that HR and business leaders need to take seriously if they’re truly invested in their people and committed to achieving the wide-ranging business benefits that come with it.
Tina Benson
Tina is the founder and managing director of Team Tactics, one of the first dedicated team building and corporate events companies in the market with 30 years’ experience in the events industry in London and across the UK. Tina works with clients including Google TikTok, Sky and Unilever to provide fun and memorable team experiences to boost employee morale, relationships and business outcomes. In recent years, she has led the business’ charge to discover exciting and unique charity and CSR events that allow organisations to strengthen team relationships while driving a wider positive impact for local communities and deserving causes across the globe.
