Spending time together

As the pace of change increases, there is an ongoing challenge to ensure that organisations and their employees are keeping up with the pack.

As a method of taking stock and re-energising staff, over the last fifteen years, two and three day strategy meetings at off site locations have become very popular.

Many senior executives believe very strongly in the benefits of taking teams away, doing some team building, and taking a long hard look at where the organisation or division or group is heading. An extended meeting over a few days, can enable a group to sense rapidly changing market conditions. It also allows a group to look at issues such as:

• How you can enhance your organisation's "peripheral vision" to avoid being blindsided;
• Alternative ways of more actively involving customers in the development of new designs and offers;
• How you can match or move ahead of other forward-thinking organisations that seem to be ahead of the game;
• How your organisation can best embrace the benefits of rapidly changing communications; and
• Assessing your organisation’s readiness for responding to emerging global markets and governance issues affecting the business.

Areas covered in extended off site meetings are largely determined by the specific needs of the organisation involved, and may range from developing a corporate quality mission statement, to establishing practical methods for empowering employees.

Having extra time together as a team, allows management to work at a strategic level within the organisation to assist individuals, supervisory teams and functional groups. Management can help them all to increase awareness about their own operating methods and behaviours. Such activity allows people to look at and challenge existing cultures and practices to make improvements and implement change.

Where implemented effectively, the group activities and structure of a team-building program spread over a number of sessions, can bond a team while improving communication and teamwork. There is now almost an unlimited variety of team building activities, ideas, games, learning experiences, icebreakers and energisers designed with organisational input, for achieving objectives and making programs successful and memorable.

Such meetings can also include creative team building events that give staff an opportunity to relate with each other in a non-work environment.

There is now a huge range of extraordinary team building challenges that require people to explore creative solutions and practice and improve working as a team - normally in a fun spirited atmosphere.

These activities can do wonders for:

• Breaking down barriers;
• Encouraging communication;
• Starting the group problem solving and teamwork process; and
• Providing real solutions to teamwork obstacles and operational issues.

Although corporate organisations have adopted many of these sort of activities quite recently, in fact, team building games and training have been played for centuries. For example, the game of chess was created in the 4th Century for teaching strategy to military and political leaders.

A major benefit of formal team building activities is learning to tap into the brain's right hemisphere, which is often underutilised in the workplace. This is the cerebral real estate that hosts imagination, creativity and intuition. Long thought to be useful only to artists, writers and musicians, we now understand that right-brain thinking also plays a vital role in the business world. After all, where would any successful enterprise be without innovative thinkers and original thinking?