Written by Jordan Choo
If you own a business, you know how essential it is to keep your employees around. Having to continually hire new staff members due to others leaving ends up costing you time and money.
A new employee takes time to train before you can trust them to be on their own. That means you have less time you have to focus on your job. In addition, you end up spending more money paying a staff member who isn’t quite at the business standard. Factor in that some take longer to train than others, and you’re looking at an expensive (but hopefully worthwhile) investment.
One way to retain current employees is to encourage team-building exercises. Team-building is an excellent employee retention strategy that can boost the overall morale of the office.
Here are a few ways that team-building exercises can benefit your workplace:
Provide an Outside Prospective
Sometimes, when you’re around someone or something for an extended period of time, you develop blinders to any problems going on. The same can go for the workplace.
Having strong relationships among coworkers, management, and employees is key to a successful business. However, sometimes those relationships can make us blind to people causing issues for other staff members or being a negative factor for the business altogether.
Team-building exercises that bring in outside workers also bring in an outside perspective to identify issues that internal members may miss. They provide a fresh set of eyes that have no bias to the team and how they perform. These individuals can provide a report on what they notice and provide strategies to improve the workplace.
Open New Lines of Communication
Study after study shows that having an open and positive line of communication between employees and management is crucial to keeping your team happy and loyal. Poor communication can quickly cause stress amongst staff members, slow down productivity, and ultimately lead to employees quitting.
Team-building exercises encourage every team member to communicate with each other to achieve a set goal. If they cannot communicate, the exercise tends to fall apart.
Make Your Business Appealing
If you were looking for a new job and found out that the place you want to apply for has poor office morale, would you still want to work there? There is a good chance you wouldn’t.
If word got out that your staff members cannot work together, people are constantly quitting, and the productivity levels are low, prospective employees may be turned off. However, if you can show that you have strong office morale and that everyone enjoys working with each other, you soon become a more desirable place for future prospects.
Continued Education
Team-building exercises are also excellent learning tools. For starters, you get to see how each staff member works and shines in their own way. You learn new skills that some people have and how they can benefit the business.
You may also find that the team-building exercises teaches everyone new office skills they can utilize. It could be a new way to communicate with each other, a more efficient way to complete an everyday task, or how to keep everyone more relaxed in the office. There is always something to learn from team-building exercises.