Making the Dream Team: Skills to Emphasize in Team Building

Team building isn’t just about running some fun team-building games for the office and hoping your employees start to like each other more. Good team-building games for the office should target specific skills for development in your team. With team building and employee engagement plans, you can turn skilled individuals into a winning team. 

Your Team-Building Skills Checklist

Communication

Communication is vital for any team. If information isn’t being relayed and understood, how can it be acted on? You want a team where the flow of knowledge is constant, clear, and concise. Thankfully, plenty of team-building games for the office emphasize communication. Think about activities like “blind drawing,” where team members have to communicate a visual idea verbally. 

It’s essential to focus on the specifics of communication too. Your team needs to be fully on point when it comes to giving feedback, preparing presentations, and (for managers) having difficult conversations. Online team-building games for remote employees and physical workers are great. You can use quizzes to quickly run through various potential answers to situations where communication is crucial and work through your employee’s thought processes for their responses. 

Collaboration

For many, this skill is a critical part of any team-building game for the office. You can have the best employees in the world, but that’s not going to help you much if they can’t work together. Team building is partially about the activities and training itself. However, it’s also about assembling the team and getting them comfortable with working together. 

Collaboration activities are a great way to increase employee engagement. If your team members are having fun with each other, they’re more likely to view each other as a team that they need to look out for, instead of merely coworkers. 

Creativity

After communication and collaboration, the third “C” of good teamwork is creativity. This is the kind of skill that’s developed best with in-person team building, but with some creativity of your own, it can work for remote workers as well. Encouraging creativity generally involves giving your teams a puzzle and then getting them to solve it in real-time. To really fire up the imagination, divide your teams up and have them compete against each other for prizes or rewards. 

Stress Management

If you’re a solo worker, an essential skill to learn is balancing your productivity and burnout. When working in a team environment, this process becomes much more complicated. No employee wants to feel like they’re “letting the team down.” 

This peer pressure to succeed can lead to unhealthy workplaces. Team-building games for the office should include quizzes or discussions about how to spot stress in other team members, how to deal with your own stress, and how to create a safe and harassment-free workplace environment. 

Leadership

While you’ll want to have a dedicated leadership training program, team-building games for the office can be a perfect way to spot and foster leadership potential among your team. If you’re tracking results on games, you can pay special attention to those who excel in situations where leadership is vital. You can also use employee feedback forms to get an idea of which team members your employees view as leadership figures in the making. 

Building the best team-building activities for the office can be difficult. Or, you can use 1Huddle. Our app is perfect for imparting the knowledge needed to build solid teams, brands, and workplace culture.