As the way we approach business changes in an ever-evolving world, so too does the way in which businesses look at training and team development. With an increased focus on results, outcomes, and performance objectives, there has been a significant shift in the focus and outcomes management now wish to achieve from their team-building experience. This, in turn, has led to a different style of team-building experience being sought to build unity, enhance collaboration, and strengthen a “one team” attitude amongst many organisations – a new trend in Team Building!

Competitive Team Building Events

Over the last 10 or more years, Team Building has long been focused on competitive events pitching team against team in winner-takes-all style events. Competitive team-building events are hugely popular with traditional activities such as The Amazing Race, Survivor, Build a Bike, and Win it in a Minute pioneering the team-building industry. These events have been participated in by thousands of employees all throughout the world providing a unique and engaging team development experience for a range of organisations from small-medium size business through to large multinationals.

Competitive team building events provide benefits that improve team bonding and positively develop team culture as they empower staff to learn and appreciate the differences amongst their team members in an environment outside of the “four walls” of the workplace – all valuable benefits in developing a winning team culture. So why the demand for a new collaborative style team building experience?

Why is there a current trend for Collaborative style Team Building Events?

In a strong, high-performing team environment, high standards and team success are everyone’s responsibility regardless of role, position, or otherwise. Great teams have a collective will and take the initiative to perform tasks that positively contribute to the overall success of the team – often referred to as the “we vs. me” approach.

In essence, the success of a team is reliant on the sum of all parts working collaboratively together to achieve or reach a common outcome or goal. Working collaboratively with a single goal or purpose enables the team to deliver sustained and ongoing success. This is pertinent to the majority of everyday workplaces where different offices, departments, sub-teams, or staff for example, all contribute to the overall success of the business by playing their role on the team. Strengthening the relationship and collaboration between these various groups within a business (or team) can have a substantial impact on the performance, success, and workplace culture of the company as a whole.

An organisation or a specific team, which has a clear view of the “bigger picture” will understand the importance that each member contributes to the overall success in reaching their goals or achieving their objectives. With this in mind, collaboration has not only become a core business value for many organisations but also a key strategic direction to improve performance and workplace culture.

What better way to positively transmit and reinforce this message of unity and working together as one to your team than through an engaging, innovative, and motivating collaborative style team event? As such the demand for new and exciting collaborative team-building experiences is creating a new trend in team events.

What is a Collaborative style Team Building Event?

Collaborative style events are the opposite of competitive where the entire group is given one common goal to work on together rather than competing directly against each other for individual success or reward. Even if participants are placed in subgroups, everyone collaborates and plays their role in order to achieve the team’s ultimate objective – thus replicating many everyday workplace environments.

Collaborative events are fun and allow for all-round involvement by participants. In the end, these activities deliver a superb combination of learning, camaraderie, fun, and corporate messaging. Collaborative team building events produce positive teamwork behaviors for improved performance, day in, and day out, and highlight what can be really achieved when the group focuses their efforts, resources, and mindset together towards a common goal or shared objective.

What benefits will be achieved through a Collaborative style Team Building Event?

A great collaborative team-building event will have the following elements:

• One single, common goal that all team members and/or teams have to work towards
• A genuine probability or possibility that the group will achieve this goal if they communicate and work together successfully
• Just like in the workplace, participants have to exert some level of overall co-ordination and role delegation, as well as share a single vision of what constitutes success in order to achieve the common goal
• Individuals and/or teams don’t do the same thing. As a feature of the workplace, different multiple functions also characterize a collaborative team activity making the learning relevant.

Collaborative team-building events encourage networking, communication, role delegation, and ownership, and also build team trust and cohesiveness with the team relying on each other to perform their respective roles to achieve success.

What Collaborative style Team Building Events are available for your team?

Team Up Events provides an extensive and proven range of collaborative-style team events to suit specific objectives and requirements. Some of our most popular collaborative team events can be seen below:

The Big Picture – Has your team got the big picture approach: In the Big Picture, teams will collaborate and communicate to create an enormous interconnected multi-canvas artwork reflecting your team’s goals & values and hence revealing the “Big Picture”

Beat the Box – escape your boundaries: Teams combine their various skills to develop creative solutions to crack a code. To beat the box they must enter the code into an electronic combination lock and unlock the box before the time elapses in this collaborative escape game!

Feed the Need – fresh food for hungry kids: It’s ‘Back to School’ for your team as they arrive at school to prepare, serve, and enjoy a meal with hungry school kids?

Chain Reaction – the simple yet cascading effect of working together: In Chain Reaction teams create a series of simple table top machines that when joined together with those from other teams become an elaborate chain reaction.

Bridging the Divide – design it, build it, bridge the divide: An exciting collaborative construction project with teams working in unison to design and construct an impressive bridge.

“We are now seeing an increase in the demand from clients for collaborative style events to convey business specific messages and goals. While traditional competitive team building events will always have their place, and charity based events remain popular, there is undoubtedly a shift occurring in our industry where businesses are looking for greater benefit from their team experiences than just “an afternoon out of the office”. At Team Up Events we are committed to evolving with this trend and as such have significantly increased our range of exclusive collaborative events and facilitated debriefs to meet this growing demand”

Stu Robertson, Managing Director, Team Up Events

Team Up Events – NZ Team Building Specialists

Does your team require assistance in developing their cohesiveness and motivation to work together collaboratively for better business performance and workplace culture?

Team Up Events delivers customized team experiences that Challenge and Inspire staff to work together to Achieve their goals – throughout New Zealand.

As the NZ partner to the Catalyst Global Team Building network, we have exclusive access to an extensive range of innovative, leading-edge team experiences that are internationally proven around the word.

For more information about Team Up Events or our range of innovative team events contact one of our offices today on 0800 TEAM UP.