How to Steer Your Company Through Hard Times - Don't Neglect Team Building

All businesses need team building and not just in the good times. When times get hard, one of the instincts of any business is to pull in its horns and to cut spending. The first thing to go is usually the company 'jolly'; the corporate entertainment event. Then the next thing is to stop sending employees on team building. Why? Where is the wisdom in that?

Teams lie at the heart of corporate success. Whether these be management teams, sales teams, the team in the office, you will find them in the most profitable and successful organisations. But these teams don't just function well internally, they connect with each other - I have seen many companies in which the different departments hardly speak to each other! And when they do, it is usually through the managers. So without these sorts of events, how can you ensure that your workforce is contented, connected and devoted to the company? Then you wonder why the business starts to fail.

It is possible to save money on both and yet lose neither. Choosing the right corporate energisers can be both entertainment and training. Team building by stealth.

But what is stealth team building? Essentially, it is team building without ramming it down people's throats. Pick the right type of team building activity and the right provider and team building is corporate entertainment. The events should motivate and challenge the delegates, using the skills the need to function effectively as a team - communication, encouraging each other, lateral thinking ... Do this enough and it becomes second nature. The teams for the event should be randomly picked so that employees get to interact with people from other departments, management etc. There should be some worthwhile reward for the victorious team.

That is why something like a themed training day is ideal.

A couple of popular ideas are the medieval event and spy training events. In the medieval event, your employees can experience life in a medieval court, battling with a heavy boar to get it to the kitchen, building a trebuchet and using it to bombard a castle, learning to use a longbow, learning to joust using the quintain and rings and battling another 'knight' in a person on person joust as a grand finale. The spy training days are an altogether more contemporary team building event. Depending on the organiser, your teams will be involved in safe cracking, bomb disposal, setting mines, getting through a minefield, handling and transporting hazardous radioactive waste, identifying spies captured on CCTV, evasive driving, drive in shooting, escape and evasion ... in other words, a great variety of challenging adventure games.

So before you abandon all hope of team building or corporate entertainment days to motivate your staff, think laterally yourself and choose something that can do both. Your business might then continue to thrive even in the hard times.