The right team building and training program can be the key to creating efficient and effective communication skills among your employees and leadership, an integral skill for the success of any organization.
If you’re like most people, your day is probably filled with communication in some form or another – from email to meetings, phone calls, Slack, and video conferencing. In fact, data from Harvard Business Review found that, at many companies, people spend approximately 80% of their time in meetings, on the phone, and responding to emails, and that the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% in the last two decades.
Yet communication seemingly still poses challenges for organizations of all sizes. The Cost of Poor Communications, a Holmes Report article from David Grossman, reported that a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 or more employees cited an average loss of $62.4 million each year because of inadequate communication to and between employees.
So, while not all organizations suffer from poor communication, focusing on proactively improving communication can help increase productivity, efficiency, and employee satisfaction. Here are five team building, training and development, and coaching and consulting solutions for communication at work.
- Domino Effect Challenge – With a Domino Effect Challenge, your group will break into teams to design and build sections of a Goldberg-esque chain reaction machine using common, everyday items. Once each team has completed their own portion, the entire group will come together to assemble and set in motion the full chain reaction. For the machine to be fully functional, strong communication must be exercised – both by the individual team members working together to create their portions, but also between each and every team as they work collaboratively to assemble it all.
- Clear Communication – This training and development program helps your team to work more efficiently and effectively by developing enhanced verbal and written communication skills. It also dives deep into the non-verbal communication signals that may not always be intuitive and provides insight into how to communicate more during conflicts and decision-making.
- Charity Bike Buildathon – In addition to being a fun and engaging philanthropic team building activity, Charity Bike Buildathon is also a great way to help build communication amongst colleagues. In this activity, your group will break out into teams to build and decorate bicycles that they will donate to kids in need. But in order to do so, they will also be going through a business simulation which requires them to communicate effectively to determine how best to spend their “budget” and work collaboratively with their teammates to properly assemble their bikes.
- Team Pursuit – With Team Pursuit, a social trivia-style team building activity, colleagues will need to work together to earn points by tackling a wide array of mental, physical, and skill-based challenges. Whichever team has collected the most points before time expires will be crowned the winners. But there’s a catch: each challenge has its own points value, with harder challenges being worth more points and easier challenges being worth fewer. This means that team members will have to communicate, strategize, and decide together how best to approach this activity – by tackling a higher volume of easier challenges or going for a lower volume of tougher ones.
- CI: The Crime Investigators – There’s only one way for your team to successfully solve a mysterious and deadly crime: by putting their heads together to gather evidence, solve clues, and piece together exactly what took place before time runs out. With CI: The Crime Investigators, colleagues will have to communicate effectively in order to delegate roles and make sense of the abundance of complex and challenging clues if they want to figure out what happened and identify the culprit.
- Cross-Boundary Communication - The name says it all with this training and development program. With Cross-Boundary Communication, you can help your team build better communication strategies and learn skills designed to improve their ability to communicate effectively. This program focuses on active listening, providing clear and honest feedback, and learning questioning techniques.
- Corporate Escape Rooms – When your group finds themselves trapped in a room together, they’ll have to rely on each other to figure out how to escape. With one of our two Corporate Escape Rooms, the only way out will be to work together, communicate clearly and quickly, uncover hidden clues, and collaborate to tackle challenging brain teasers.
- Leadership Team Cohesion Consulting - In order to be successful, leadership teams need to be able act as a cohesive group working for the good of the entire organization rather than as a divided group of individuals. But in order to work cohesively, they need to be able to communicate effectively. This coaching and consulting solution focuses on helping leadership teams to work in unison towards their goals in order to drive the success of the organization.
Whether you’re looking to take your company’s communication skills from ineffective to strong or from strong to outstanding, doing so will provide big benefits to both your employees and your organization. With the right communication team building activities, you can help create happier and more productive employees in a fun, light-hearted, and engaging setting.
Learn More About Team Building Activities for Communication at Work
For more information about how you can increase collaboration and productivity with team building activities for communication at work, just reach out to our Employee Engagement Consultants.
