Deciding How Often To Hold Team Building Activities

Team building activities are easily one of the most fruitful investments any company can make if it is pulled off properly. Team building activities help create trust and lasting bonds between officemates, helping break down the walls of communication and make it easier for people sharing the same office, and even multiple departments, to collaborate.

But, of course, too much of a good thing can be bad, and some companies can invest in team building activities too much.

With that said, just how often should you have a team building activity, like going to the beach, or an escape room, or a weekend trip out of town?

It all comes down to context and objective

There’s never really a set amount of months or weeks in between team building activities. You can do it weekly, daily, monthly, or quarterly, or annually. It all depends on your purpose and objective.

Also, each team or workplace is different. What works for one company might not work for another, so it’s important to take note of that as well.

For example, if your team are struggling in a specific area and you want to improve on that, a consistent team building schedule might be necessary. But, for companies or small businesses, in particular, with tight-knit crews, too much team building activities can be a waste as the office is already as productive as it can be.

A few good reasons to hold a team building activity is:

  • When you’re welcome a new member of the office or a two.
  • When you’re trying to get two departments or groups to work together or collaborate more closely, or when the company is downsizing and are planning to merge two departments.
  • When you’re working on a specific issue, like improving a certain aspect of the team, or migrating to a different system.

Regardless of what kind of team building activity you choose and how often you want it spaced out to be, it’s important that you know, as a company, what you’re trying to accomplish with what you’re doing.

Once you have established a clear objective for your activity, it will be easier to schedule and plan.

As you plan out your team building activities, don’t forget to listen to your employees. Ask for their feedback. Encourage them to air out their concerns and not to be afraid to suggest ideas, like, for example, scheduling a trip to the latest escape room in Singapore, or going to that newly opened restaurant right across the city.

The key to planning and scheduling team building activities is to constantly innovate and not settle until you find what’s best for your workplace by way of experimentation and feedback.

By doing this, you should be able to space out team building activities just enough that your employees get excited about them, but not too often that they have a tendency to take it for granted or see it as a hindrance to their work and schedule as opposed to something to look forward to.

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