How To Turn Professional Office Training Into Team Building

A company is only as good as the people that work for it. The employees carry the work, they are the lifeblood of any enterprise. As such, they need to work as one, they need to function as a team. By nurturing this kind of mentality, you strengthen the bond between your people, you create a sense of community within your business. This all leads to a much more pleasant work atmosphere and greater productivity.

Another thing you need, besides unity, is to regularly train your people. You need to focus them, to constantly help them improve their skills and their talents. Not only will they appreciate this, reciprocating with their loyalty, they will also have greater efficiency. With all this being said, it’s up to you to combine it. You can use professional office training, and turn it into opportunities where you can build teams. We advise you decide which skill or trait you want to develop in your people and then brainstorm which team building activities would develop this as well.

Team Work

Developing teamwork is pretty clear. You want your people to act and work as one, to move towards a goal together, clearly. There are two things you can do. First, simply get them involved in team-based activities. Anything form paintball tournaments, laser tag, to football and basketball matches will teach your staff how to work with each other in a fun and loose environment. If you can, having one department play against another will create some healthy competition.

The next thing you can do is to hand out tests that will show exactly what role each person is supposed to have. In fact, career experts actually hand out tests that help them understand exactly what personality types people working at a company have. For example, the Myer-Briggs test can show that a person is an INTJ (a strategic thinker, introverted, thoughtful, thorough), or an ENFJ (an extroverted and charismatic individual, perfect for leadership roles).

Creativity

Creativity is perhaps the most underrated skill in an office setting to teach. People think it’s all about things that are not tied directly to an office setting. Painting, arts and crafts, that’s what people believe creativity is good for. And while this isn’t far from the truth, there is much below the surface. What all these activities (and creativity itself) actually represent is learning how to create out-of-the-box solutions, how to notice doors that other people wouldn’t really notice.

Now, creativity is also quite difficult to develop. The best way, however, is to simply get your people to do creative activities. This will slowly transfer onto the development of this character trait itself and will be really fun (which will, in turn, greatly influence team building). Hiring the services of a professional training company, like Total Vet Training Resources, can also help you out with this endeavor.

So you can, for example, pay for art classes, writing courses, drama projects…

Problem-solving

You want your people to handle problems, to solve them as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Developing problem-solving is a pretty clear choice here. If you want your people to work on this skill, while still facilitating a fun bonding experience, then you should send them to an escape room. There, they can work on solving a series of puzzles within a limited timeframe. Escape rooms are a great opportunity to also see how people handle stress and how quickly they think on their feet.

Another thing you can do is to simply get them to learn something new. Taking a language class is obviously useful. With many polyglots on call, you can communicate with clients from all over the world. Having a multicultural staff will impress investors and potential business partners. It will also make certain aspects of your work much easier. Furthermore, learning a second or third language has the added benefit of increasing an individual’s problem-solving skills, as well as their cognitive abilities.

Critical thinking

When faced with an issue or a problem, you should aim at getting your people to look at it from different points of view. Furthermore, a healthy degree of skepticism will help save your company from less than moral clients and partners. Fraud and malevolence run rampant in the business world, and it’s up to the entire company to keep an eye out. Furthermore, there are always new options, ideas, and “opportunities” in a business that you may want to invest in. Critical thinking is crucial to understand and figure out whether this “best new thing” is actually viable. Developing this skill can save you from a bad investment. It turns your employees into valuable advisors.

Now, you can develop this through hosting debates and discussions around the office. You can also create simulations of certain situations where critical thinking would be useful. You can even let your employees set up these simulations, in order to get insight into how they think and act.

Office training meshes and overlaps with team building. Both are needed to develop a fully functioning and successful business. So, add activities that build up your employees’ critical thinking skills, as a way to protect yourselves from bad deals. Bolster their creativity and problem solving, so you’ll face difficult tasks more easily. Build up and train teamwork, nurture it, and you will have a workplace you actually want to go to, while still maintaining efficiency.