Looking for creative ways to facilitate team bonding outside the office? Turn your team into a tourist troupe for a day and go experience your city! Keep reading Arden Coaching’s post to find out how a day of sightseeing can double as valuable team building time below.
From Sightseeing to Team Building: Creating Shared Memories
Developing meaningful relationships with your team members doesn’t happen overnight. It may not even happen over the course of several company-sponsored events that you all attend. While every team is different, one thing is true: Building team relationships takes both time and shared experiences. Becoming a tourist for a day helps your team add on one of these shared experiences to the timeline of your developing relationship. It stands as something that you’ll be able to reflect on, laugh about, and remember as a team.
From Sightseeing to Team Building: Getting Everyone on Equal Footing
The major breakthrough that loading up on a tour bus, duck boat, or Segway fleet helps your team accomplish? It puts everyone on equal footing. No one’s driving the tour bus per se; you’re all just passengers for the day. This group outing is far from a corporate meeting where everyone is in their presumed roles, meaning everybody gets to be their true selves beyond who they are at work. This factor is what sets the stage for team members to find common ground with one another outside of their day-to-day office interactions.
From Sightseeing to Team Building: Seeing How Other People Think
As you pass renowned buildings, local restaurants, landmarks, and shops, you’ll start to pick up on how your fellow team members think: who marvels at the architecture, who’s into cinema, who mentions their favorite sandwich from the deli on the corner. An advantage to the sightseeing setup is that tons of non-corporate conversation starters are all around you. Take advantage of these abundant ice breakers! You might find out you live in the same town as one of your coworkers or that you share a favorite restaurant or hobby with another. All of these little conversations and connections serve to strengthen relationships and work toward building the necessary trust that’s present in top-performing teams.
Need More Help with Team Building and Management?
As teams add new members and individual responsibilities change, getting everybody on the same page can be a challenge. If your team is falling behind or struggling to meet deadlines, holding an offsite facilitation could be what’s needed to jump-start productivity and get everyone back on track. Many offsites have a twofold benefit when it comes to team development and realignment: They help teams to break ground by getting out of the office to advance issues that need to be addressed and often provide downtime opportunities for teams to participate in bonding activities, building up the time and experiences shared. To learn more about how Arden Coaching’s approach to offsite facilitation promotes powerful conversations, change, and accountability, contact us today.
