Business
How corporate days our can boost profit and productivity
Businesses are always looking for ways to increase staff morale, reduce employee turnover and grow productivity. Could the answer lie in corporate team-building activities?
Team-building exercises are used by many businesses to strengthen their company culture. Company culture involves the environment, values and goals of a business and its staff. If your company was a human, it’d be its personality. Businesses like Google and Twitter lead the way in building happy, positive company cultures that attract and retain a high-performing workforce — but how do you use corporate team-building activities to engender a successful company culture that will benefit staff and profits?
Despite search volume for ‘team-building exercises’ reaching 1,900 monthly searches, some employers still do not offer corporate days out to team members. Find out the benefits of team-building exercises on company culture and how encouraging corporate excursions for your staff can help take your business to the next level.
Improving communication
A failure in communication can have huge implications for your business, not to mention creating an inhibited company culture with disconnected employees. Solving issues that affect your business can only be achieved with clear, concise and confident discussions between members of staff — which is where team-building exercises come in.
Whether it’s skiing lessons or treasure hunts, corporate days should promote interactivity between staff members. Choosing a team-building exercise that is fun, original and challenging will help your staff engage with the task at hand and you’ll have a greater chance of everyone pulling together to get the job done — a process that will then be adopted in the office.
These days should take place outside of the traditional workplace environment, to place everyone in a new situation free from office politics to work towards a collective goal. Help break down those barriers further by choosing an activity where teams must follow instructions and swap ideas to help bolster creative thinking in the workplace and help individuals learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Keep in mind that every staff member has different strengths and weaknesses. Some find it easy to talk to others in a professional environment, while others don’t. Once those barriers of communication have been removed, your staff will feel more confident approaching each other for help and guidance on work-related matters, which will encourage a more open and fluid company culture.
Boosting productivity
Through encouraging engagement and communication, corporate days can help improve the productivity of staff members. The more engaged and productive your staff are, the more efficient your daily operations will be, which both have a positive effect on your profit margin.
Consulting company Gallup has found that engaged employees are 17% more productive and 41% less likely to be absent. What’s more, highly engaged companies are reported by Gallup to be approximately 21% more profitable than those that aren’t.
Activities that promote building or creating trigger originality and imagination, skills which your team members can take back to the office. Plus, working together outside of the office will help highlight personal strengths and weaknesses among staff, which will give management a greater idea of the type of training and development courses that could improve performance.
Bettering office morale
Hosting a corporate day out shows staff members that you value their morale. According to the Department of Economics and the University of Warwick, happy employees are up to 20% more productive than other workers. Since staff morale is intricately linked to happiness, you should implement initiatives, like team-building activities, companywide to ensure that your staff feel positive when they walk into work.
Corporate days that are a fun and light-hearted break up the working week for staff members and gives them something to look forward to. Many expert psychologists have conducted experiments showing that anticipation is a key stage of cheerfulness. According to Action for Happiness, an organisation that helps people take practical steps to create a happier society, feeling good about the future is important for our happiness and motivation. If you want to encourage your staff to be ambitious, perhaps it’s worth beginning by taking action and finding the time to book a fun, group activity that you think they’d enjoy.
A bonding exercise
Work days out brings us together with people who we may not usually interact with, whether a result of different personalities or having no shared interests. Therefore, it’s critical that you find a way to bring your staff together — and holding a regular corporate day out could be the simplest plan.
Not only do team-building events help with socialization, they can also build trust — one factor that can have a hugely positive effect on your business. Senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, Jim Dougherty, claims that: “Managers will never learn the truth about their company unless they have their employees’ trust.”
An activity orientated around teamwork, communication and group planning will grow trust levels between staff members and towards you. This increased sense of familiarity builds a greater personal connection, which means your staff will feel more comfortable discussing problems — and potential solutions. This will allow for more efficient problem-mapping processes to overcome issues that could be holding your company back without your knowledge.
Retaining staff
The right team-building activity can support staff retention. Assuming that the advantages stated above come to fruition, your workplace will be a more productive, happy, sociable, communicative, and trusting place to spend a weekday. This positive company culture should decrease the number of staff choosing to resign and keep talent within your company.
Research from Colombia University supports this. The research showed that the chance of job turnover at a business with a positive company culture is only 13.9%, while the likelihood of a high job turnover rate in places with poor company cultures is 48.4%.
As well as facing the issue of replacing past employees, you may find that increased employee turnover impacts the reputation of your business and your ability to attract talent. Consequently, you lose experience, money, time, and the best chance of attracting a wide network of new, quality talent.
As we have established, corporate team-building days can be hugely beneficial. If you want to boost profits, productivity and processes; search online for fun, team-building activities suitable for colleagues.
Sources:
http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/208487/right-culture-not-employee-happiness.aspx
https://tech.co/team-building-activities-productivity-2017-06
https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-company-culture-2062000
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238640
https://www.gthankyou.com/blog/research-shows-happy-employees-are-more-productive-by-gthankyou
https://www.business2community.com/sales-management/boost-sales-team-morale-year-end-01973983
http://www.tgdaily.com/enterprise/9-benefits-of-team-building-activities-in-the-workplace
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100218125204.htm
http://www.actionforhappiness.org/10-keys-to-happier-living/have-goals-to-look-forward-to
