Team Engagement vs. Team Building
Towards the end of the year, many organizations would be bringing their employees for an outing with the intention of building stronger working relationship through various outdoor sports or physical activities.
Although for some it has become a ritual that they look forward to, for those who does not see the value of spending more time away from family for an outing with colleagues (and bosses) that they already spend more than 1/3 of their days with, can be a dreadful event.
At Access Ideas Malaysia, we understand both sides as we too were once employees that had no control over what thoughts went into the planning of such an event.
So what we do now, is by first identifying the goal of the event. Is it going to be a "team building get away" or a "team engagement outing"?
What counts as a Team Building?
To make it easy to understand, team building is about 'building a team'. In building a team, the key word is "fit".
The focus of a team building program (event or activity) is to achieve "a full functional team with each members fitting into roles that makes for an effective task execution". Therefore, there should be a lot of opportunities for the "team members" (participants) to explore their own strengths and identify their weaknesses. There is also a need of opportunities for team members to interact with the intention of understanding each other - how one works, who has leadership, what is still lacking. The ideal outcome is for tolerance and compromise to kick in amongst the team members while having the awareness on the areas that is still lacking in the team.
Most commonly, activities in a team building session should have elements of personality profiling, pushing one out of their comfort zone, rotation of leadership, relying on one another to succeed, problem solving, and team brainstorming (not brainwashing!)
Trainers conducting team building, should be facilitative towards identifying and motivating individuals to form and work in a cohesive team, instead of as individuals. A cohesive team, in this particular scenario should be seen as staying together, working together, and achieving together.
How about Team Engagement?
Well, team engagement requires setting up a "common goal". If you want a team to be engaged, you need a "something" to be engaged to. This something, naturally should be, organization's vission, company goals, corporate values, new business direction, sales drive, targets like internal campaigns and such.
The activities should support this scenario of "a need to be engaged to achieve results". So more interaction between team members and inter-teams must happen with the end goal being the "why" is internalized by all the participants. Competition is not (and should not be) the motivating factor in the session - being competitive is a "yes', competing against each other is a "no". For this to happen, the trainers need to come out of the "team building mindset" and facilitate the session in a more creative and holistic manner. Although some team building games may still be relevant, the focus should be different - engagement over stretch. This is how we differentiate between the two.
To find out more about Access Ideas' ideology on "team development" and team related training programs, please contact us and we shall run a free preview to your organization's management team.
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