Team building – it’s a necessity. No matter what industry or sector your organization inhabits, you need to ensure that the members of that organization have the tools necessary to work together successfully. Team building activities or exercises are the best way to inculcate those values in your members in a way that is informative and effective.

The benefits of high levels of teamwork are well-documented. Organization members who demonstrate strong teamwork skills are, by and large, more fulfilled in their positions, better motivated to work harder, and better equipped to communicate and collaborate. Providing individuals with strong teamwork skills, therefore, increases their productivity – a primary goal of any organization.

But teamwork skills, like any learned skill, can atrophy and degrade without practice. Teamwork skills need to be honed regularly in order for your organization’s members to remain at peak productivity; that’s why it’s important that team members revisit these skills periodically. It’s also why your organization needs to consider additional team building activities for not just this year but next year and every year after.

Teamwork Skills are Too Important to Allow to Degrade

Letting teamwork skills slide and degrade is simply not an effective strategy, to say the least. In a recent survey, 97 percent of employees and supervisors reported believing that disorganized, unaligned teams have a negative impact on the outcome of a project or a task. Quite obviously, we tend to agree; poor teamwork can be the death knell for many a project, as lack of communication and understanding between team members slows progress on project goals to a halt. That’s why ensuring that the individuals that make up any team – as well as their supervisors – are as well-versed in effective teamwork skills as possible.

This leads many organizations to invest in training in the form of team building activities for their members. These are activities are never a waste of time, as the lessons learned by organization members are internalized and incorporated in ways that support the overall productivity of that organization.

However, by the same token, having the members of your organization attend a single team building exercise just once during their tenure is not going to turn them into highly productive team members overnight. It often takes several applications for any new knowledge to stick; you can’t expect to become a piano virtuoso after a single lesson. Learning teamwork skills is no different.

The Earlier the Team Building, the Better

While the benefits of regular team building activities are obvious in keeping your organization’s teams firing on all cylinders, the timing of these team building exercises is also crucial. There’s never a bad time to hold a team building activity, but there are some times of year that are better than others – and leveraging your next team building activity to coincide with one of these times of year can maximize the impact of these activities.

Consider, as an example, how many individuals invest in themselves heavily just after the new year. Many people are at their most motivated at this point, making it an ideal time to organize team building activities; attending those activities in such a highly receptive state will likely result in the lessons of those exercises having a higher impact than they would at other times of the year.

Rely on the Experts

If it’s been some time since your organization has reviewed its team building activities, turn to the experts. Let us help get your members back on track by providing them the invaluable skills and knowledge needed to work together as a highly productive team.