Balancing fun and function can help to meaningfully tap into the power of play in team building.
Team building is used to foster morale, collaboration, communication, and overall workplace performance. While fun and engaging activities can energise and build camaraderie, it’s crucial to ensure that these experiences have meaningful links to workplace behaviour and outcomes. Play, when designed with depth and pragmatism, can be a legitimately powerful tool for professional development. However, to justify the time and expense, organisations must strike a balance between entertainment and actionable workplace insights. If it’s just another ‘jolly’, with no discernible workplace impacts, then organisations are far less likely to undertake the more valuable interventions when required.
The Role of Play in Team Building
Play is an instinctive and effective way to bring people together, breaking down barriers and encouraging open communication. It can alleviate workplace stress, improve morale, and foster creativity. Well-designed business games and experiential team-building activities allow participants to step out of their usual roles and explore new ways of thinking and working together.
However, not all team-building activities are created equal. Simply having fun without linking the experience to workplace behaviour can make these activities feel like a distraction rather than an investment. To maximise their impact, team-building exercises should be structured to reflect real workplace dynamics, providing practical takeaways that can be applied in everyday work scenarios. Design is crucial, and hastily crafted team experiences that are heavy on themes and bells and whistle, but light on outcomes may do more harm than good.
Designing Effective Play in Business Games and Team Building
Well-crafted business games and simulations provide a safe environment to experiment with different approaches to problem-solving, leadership, and collaboration. The most effective team-building activities share the following characteristics:
Clear Learning Objectives: Activities should be designed with fun, and specific workplace outcomes in mind, such as improving communication, enhancing decision-making, or boosting leadership skills.
Relevance to Real-World Scenarios: Games should mirror workplace challenges so that insights gained during the experience can be directly applied to professional settings even though elements of pure play exist within the format.
Debrief and Reflection: A structured debrief session helps participants connect their experience to workplace behaviour, reinforcing key lessons and promoting continuous improvement. These don’t have to be lengthy boring affairs, we often use short, sharp yet highly effective after activity reviews.
The Belbin Model: A Framework for Effective Team Building that Adds Lasting Impact to Play
One useful approach to designing impactful team-building activities is the Belbin Model. Developed by Dr. Meredith Belbin, this model identifies nine distinct team roles that individuals tend to adopt, including Plant (creative thinker), Coordinator (calm chairperson), Implementer (practical organiser), and others.
Understanding how these roles manifest in teams, and hot to best employ them, helps teams recognise individual strengths and weaknesses in real time, allowing for better collaboration and more effective team performance.
By incorporating the Belbin Model into well-designed play and team-building, organisations can achieve several key benefits:
Enhanced Self-Awareness: Employees gain insights into their own preferred working styles and how they interact with others.
Stronger Team Dynamics: Teams learn to appreciate diverse skill sets and find ways to optimise collaboration.
Improved Workplace Performance: When employees understand how their roles contribute to team success, they can make better decisions and improve productivity back at work having seen them come to life with some smart play.
Justifying the Investments
Organisations often question whether investing in team-building activities is worth the cost.
The key to demonstrating value lies in making clear connections between these activities and measurable workplace improvements. By integrating frameworks like the Belbin Model into good design processes and by ensuring that exercises align with business goals, companies can build stronger, more cohesive teams that drive real results as a result of these experiences.
While fun and play are vital ingredients in most team building, it must be paired with some depth and focused pragmatism. Thoughtfully designed experiences that align with workplace objectives not only justify the time and resources spent but also create lasting improvements in team dynamics, performance, and overall workplace culture.
To find out more about how we design meaningful play for lasting impact contact us:
T – 1300 731 381 E – Admin@SabreHQ.com
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