Team Building

Does an office work as a team or individuals under the same manager. Is there a difference? Is the office a quiet place where everyone is working on their own tasks, or do they talk, asking if anyone knows the quickest way to create a calculation in Excel or what the file name for the important document they were working on last week.

Some offices I visit are individuals, they may chat but the chat is about non work topics, yesterdays soap and the latest football scores. No one would dare admit they don't know how to do something. A team is more efficient then individuals doing their job on their own. A team would help each other out and when someone knows something that the others need, they share the knowledge.

How do you create a team? There are a lot of ways. It also depends on the company culture. Spending a large amount of money now could mean a more productive team later. There are so many ways to do team building. I was at a training conference and exhibition and the number of companies offering team building grew every year. Military style basic training, rope courses, camping, golfing, spa, trekking, acting, role playing, videos...the list went on. It really depends on the people, if you have a young at heart group who love action adventure, then rock climbing or rope course might be right for them. But if one person is not comfortable with the type of activity it could hinder team building.

There are other ways, I was shocked when I was doing what the company called floorwalking, which was really appointment desk side training that it brought the department together. I would be there for 2 or 3 days a month, I will use part of the finance team as an example. There were 5 women who worked in the same group of desks doing similar jobs. I taught each of them very similar topics, in fact I trained all of them how to create basic calculations within Microsoft Excel. Probably the same blurb to each of them. When you find a blurb that works you stick with it. Then I taught them each something different and I told them that they each knew something the other didn't.

The next month they were delighted to tell me that they had each told each other something about the software that the others did not know. I walked past there a few times and they had their fair share of non work related talk but most of the time they were talking about work, and giving each other tips and suggestions. Their manager, who was the finance director was extremely pleased and could not believe that they had pulled together and improved so quickly.

So when thinking about team building, think not just about what new fad is out there, but who the team is. What do they need to improve on, is it just becoming a team or might you be able to combine team building with other training?