On this page you’ll find statistics and research proving that team building is crucial for any company’s success, and examples of team building’s benefits and how it supercharge your company.
Forbes: “Team Building Is The Best Investment You’ll Make”
Forbes thinks team building is the most important investment you can make for your team:
“Team building has a bad rap. In most companies when a supervisor says, ‘We’re going to do some team building!’ employees start re-running old episodes of The Office. It’s one thing to see it on TV, but getting a real-life taste of your manager mimicking Steve Carell’s insanely-awkward-try-hard leadership style just isn’t as funny.
Despite its reputation for being, well, lame, team building is the most important investment you can make for your people. It builds trust, mitigates conflict, encourages communication, and increases collaboration. Effective team building means more engaged employees, which is good for company culture and boosting the bottom line. It can also be adventurous and enjoyable if you do it with a little pizzazz.”
What Is Team Building?
Wikipedia defines team building as the following:
“Team building is a collective term for various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within teams, often involving collaborative tasks. It is distinct from team training, which is designed to improve efficiency rather than interpersonal relations.”
As Wikipedia implies, the main purpose of team building is to improve interpersonal relations among coworkers, both for their own personal wellbeing and for the productivity of their company. While Wikipedia defines team building as distinct from team training, where the main purpose is to improve employee efficiency, it’s important to note that team building can very much be responsible for improving the productivity of each member of its team.
Engagement Drives Profits
Officevibe wrote a great article called 10 Shocking Stats About Disengaged Employees which really hammers home the importance of employee engagement in the workplace. Since team building is one of the most beneficial ways to improve engagement, one could argue that team building can directly lead to profits, like this:
Team Building –> Engaged Employees –> Profits
In the aforementioned article, Jeff Fermin makes the point that engagement drives profits with this paragraph:
“There are 2.5x more revenues for companies with engaged employees vs their competitors with low engagement among their employees. So if you’re looking for a unique way to beat out your competitor; try making your office a funner place to be at. You don’t necessarily have to force making your company awesome, but just make a whole lot of small changes that will make it a better place to be at. Something like rearranging the desks or having an office party can be all the difference to enhancing your culture.”
Companies With Highly Engaged Employees Make Twice the Annual Revenue of Companies with Little Employee-Engagement
Fermin follows up the previous point with the staggering results of a study conducted by Kenexa Research Institute emphasizing the importance of employee engagement:
“We found in a study of 64 organizations, companies with highly engaged employees achieve twice the annual net income of organizations whose employees aren’t engaged. So I guess if you made it this far, you already kind of know that having engaged employees is very important for not only the people of your company, but it’s vital for growing as a company.”
Team Building Can Help You Attract Top Talent
Forbes recently wrote an article describing how mega companies like Uber, Facebook, and Salesforce are using team building to their advantage. One of the most insightful parts of the article came from a quote by team building expert Jenny Gottstein, who says the following:
Gottstein: “Interestingly, we’re seeing companies use their strong corporate culture as a bargaining chip to recruit the best and brightest talent. When applying for jobs, millennial employees are not only assessing their salary and benefits, but also whether or not they relate to the working environment, and enjoy rolling up their sleeves next to their peers. As a result of this culture shift, team-building is being used as a marketing and recruitment tool. Often we will produce games for prospective employees or interns of large companies as way to show off the perks of the company’s working environment.”
Team Building Improves Communication
The Harvard Business Review wrote an article for which they conducted a study that measured how successful teams interact on a daily basis. They concluded the following:
“We now know that 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members.”
As a result, team building is one of the best ways to facilitate communication among employees, which could directly affect the success of your team. Here’s a video from HBR emphasizing the importance of employee interaction.
Let’s Ask Statistics: Why Is Team Building Important?
Room To Escape has a great blog post detailing 12 statistics about team building, including these five enlightening statistics:
- 50% of the positive changes in communication patterns within the workplace can be accredited to social interaction outside of the workplace.
- Companies with engaged employees receive 2.5x more revenues than companies with low engagement levels.
- 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members.
- United States companies lose about $3 billion per year due to the effects of negative attitudes at work.
The Bottom Line – Team Building Has Massive Benefits
In short, team-building activities are a win/win for everybody. There are incredible benefits for your company, your team feels appreciated, they enjoy a refreshing experience outside of the workplace, they get more comfortable with each other, and their engagement levels rise which increases workplace efficiency and benefits your company’s bottom line.
If you are planning an event for your team then check out our list of team building activities in Boston.
The post The Many Benefits of Team Building and How It Can Supercharge Your Company appeared first on Team Building Boston.
