Team Building In The Office: Is It Cringe, Or Is It Clutch?

Any leader worth their salt knows that having a strong and unified team is essential for long-term success in any endeavor. But when it comes to the workplace, things can get a little more complicated. How do we bring a band of strangers together in a work environment, when in all likelihood, they just want to be at home with their families or friends? This is a common problem that managers have to solve, and unfortunately, many of them don't know where to start. This is when we start to see cliche events like mandatory team-building luncheons or BBQs.

Any other time or place, a luncheon or BBQ would be a welcome event that most everyone looks forward to. So why is it that when people are mandated to go to these things for work, that it suddenly becomes a burden for them to attend? In most cases the co-workers don't really mind each others company and can get along just fine, so the disconnect has to be elsewhere. So how exactly do you find this disconnect, and more importantly, how do you address it?

One of the leading causes for discontent towards mandatory events is simply that it's mandatory in the first place. In most small businesses, the managers make the grave mistake of taking time away from the employees free time or "voluntary" hours of the day such as lunch or on a Friday afternoon and dictate that they must attend something whether they're interested in it or not. Although they have good intentions or are trying to find a way to form some sort of inter-workplace bond between the team of employees and improve the overall work environment, they're doing so in a counterproductive way. From the perspective of the employee who has been working diligently at their tasks during their regular mandatory work hours, they then have the small amount of free time such as lunch or the first hours off on a Friday afternoon essentially taken away from them. Being forced to attend a meeting with inherently has the environment and context of work during unpaid hours of the day will automatically cause a level of discontent towards the individual or group which is forcing the event to take place.

With all of these notable disagreeableness, or sheer lack of enthusiasm for attending mandatory social gatherings for work, you may be wondering if it's even a worthwhile effort to try and nurture this type of work environment in the first place. See, this is the catch 22 for workplaces. They're far more profitable with a well functioning team (obviously), but a well functioning team requires a certain amount of social synergy, and that's difficult to create. Normally you see great examples of social synergy in the form of groups of close friends or competitive teams in sports. Regardless of the environment or task at hand, a group of people who have a deeper level of comradery and non-verbal communicative relationships between one another are inherently better at accomplishing numerous tasks and voluntarily try to look out for each other's well being and the well being of each other's interests. All of these qualities translate extremely well in the work environment, and lead to higher levels of production with a mitigated level of workplace mishaps.

With all of the great benefits of having a strong team-mentality in the workplace, it's no wonder that almost every manager in existence makes great efforts to try and fabricate this type of social structure in their workplace. So why is it, that most managers fail at creating the ideal comradery-filled workplace? A short and simple answer to this issue, is that relationships such as these take time to build. Even more so, there are numerous would-be relationships that have risen or fallen along the way to the creation of a single successful person to person or group relationship. This tends to happen naturally over the course of a lifetime through years and years of social gatherings. Frankly, when a workplace tries to force all of the good parts of a relationship into a short condenses period of time, it feels forced, and people innately reject it on a subconscious level.

Not a single person alive likes or enjoys the feeling of being rushed into an intimate social relationship for the sake of profit for a company. Even much less so if this is coerced at inconvenient times of the day. But, as a business owner or someone in the managerial position for a company, you're not left with much of a choice when it comes to building your team's comradery. You're limited to what the company will allow and the small window of tolerance of your workers for making this happen.

So how can you get around this? Well, as you may have already guess, you should focus on getting it right the first few times and sowing the seeds of long-term strategic encounters between employees. Forcing their interactions will leave them bitter, and coercing their involvement for the sake of maintaining their job can make them resentful or even cringe at the idea of doing some sort of team building exercise. One thing you can do to better your chances at creating this work environment is to get training on how to foster such an environment. Alternatively, you can connect your team with a professional to take their opinions, unfettered by the presence of their manager and have these opinions on how to improve their workplace environment curated to actionable plans for you to take.

Budd Consolidated specializes not only in the more formal levels of business development, but even more so on the practical matters of a workplace. Booking a team consultation with Budd Consolidated can not only be used to improve the efficiency of key members for your team, but also to help you and your business foster the type of workplace environment that encourages and nurtures comradery amongst your employees. Click the button below to book your free discovery call today!

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