Corporate team building exercises, activities, and games

April 20th, 2010 @ admin // No Comments

Team work and team building

Team building exercises, activities, and games grow in popularity as versatile practical tools of team training and development.

A group of people put together does not automatically make a team. People need to at least get to know each other, to learn to get along and communicate, to develop interpersonal trust, to build the team spirit. They need to develop all the practical habits of functioning as an effective team in their every day activities. How to help them do that?

There is a number of team building approaches. On the one hand, each team member could take a formal course on how to work in a team in general. But this tends to be boring for many people, and will hardly build much cohesion within your specific team, will hardly bring any new practical habits in functioning of your team.

On the other hand, you could use full scale services of corporate team training professionals. But this may be overkill for your particular situation or may just not fit into your budget.

In this situation team building exercises and team building activities may work as a more flexible and better targeted option.

There is a wide range of opportunities for team building exercises and games for practically any budget. There are professional consultants who help companies select and organize such events. Examples of popular and fun activities and games include road rallies, sailing regattas, snowboarding, fly fishing, interactive seminars, and on and on. The activities can be as simple and affordable as karaoke or as sophisticated and demanding as an African safari. There are books that put together many such kinds of team building ideas.

One common feature of many corporate team building exercises and events is that they put people into new challenging and fun situations that require much interaction between the team members. And sometimes the challenges can be tuned to focus on developing one or another team quality.

In particular, the team building activities can focus on improving communication, learning to take advantage of individual differences, learning to cope with change, learning to be supportive and appreciative, learning to put together creative solutions to nonstandard problems, or something else that the company considers important for its specific team.

Team building exercises seem to work better for some teams than for others. Some companies believe in them, some don’t. There are also differences in opinions on the exact nature of the specific benefits of such events. Yet, they still stay as an irreplaceable tool in the today’s team building toolbox.

For more information or teambuilding packages contact us on info@freshaevents.com

Category : Featured / General

Twelve Cs for Team Building

April 15th, 2010 @ admin // No Comments

Team Building

Executives, managers and organization staff members universally explore ways to improve business results and profitability. Many view team-based, horizontal, organization structures as the best design for involving all employees in creating business success.

No matter what you call your team-based improvement effort: continuous improvement, total quality, lean manufacturing or self-directed work teams, you are striving to improve results for customers. Few organizations, however, are totally pleased with the results their team improvement efforts produce. If your team improvement efforts are not living up to your expectations, this self-diagnosing checklist may tell you why. Successful team building, that creates effective, focused work teams, requires attention to each of the following.

• Clear Expectations: Has executive leadership clearly communicated its expectations for the team’s performance and expected outcomes? Do team members understand why the team was created? Is the organization demonstrating constancy of purpose in supporting the team with resources of people, time and money? Does the work of the team receive sufficient emphasis as a priority in terms of the time, discussion, attention and interest directed its way by executive leaders?
• Context: Do team members understand why they are participating on the team? Do they understand how the strategy of using teams will help the organization attain its communicated business goals? Can team members define their team’s importance to the accomplishment of corporate goals? Does the team understand where its work fits in the total context of the organization’s goals, principles, vision and values?
• Commitment: Do team members want to participate on the team? Do team members feel the team mission is important? Are members committed to accomplishing the team mission and expected outcomes? Do team members perceive their service as valuable to the organization and to their own careers? Do team members anticipate recognition for their contributions? Do team members expect their skills to grow and develop on the team? Are team members excited and challenged by the team opportunity?
• Competence: Does the team feel that it has the appropriate people participating? (As an example, in a process improvement, is each step of the process represented on the team?) Does the team feel that its members have the knowledge, skill and capability to address the issues for which the team was formed? If not, does the team have access to the help it needs? Does the team feel it has the resources, strategies and support needed to accomplish its mission?
• Charter: Has the team taken its assigned area of responsibility and designed its own mission, vision and strategies to accomplish the mission. Has the team defined and communicated its goals; its anticipated outcomes and contributions; its timelines; and how it will measure both the outcomes of its work and the process the team followed to accomplish their task? Does the leadership team or other coordinating group support what the team has designed?
• Control: Does the team have enough freedom and empowerment to feel the ownership necessary to accomplish its charter? At the same time, do team members clearly understand their boundaries? How far may members go in pursuit of solutions? Are limitations (i.e. monetary and time resources) defined at the beginning of the project before the team experiences barriers and rework?Is the team’s reporting relationship and accountability understood by all members of the organization? Has the organization defined the team’s authority? To make recommendations? To implement its plan? Is there a defined review process so both the team and the organization are consistently aligned in direction and purpose? Do team members hold each other accountable for project timelines, commitments and results? Does the organization have a plan to increase opportunities for self-management among organization members?
• Collaboration: Does the team understand team and group process? Do members understand the stages of group development? Are team members working together effectively interpersonally? Do all team members understand the roles and responsibilities of team members? team leaders? team recorders? Can the team approach problem solving, process improvement, goal setting and measurement jointly? Do team members cooperate to accomplish the team charter? Has the team established group norms or rules of conduct in areas such as conflict resolution, consensus decision making and meeting management? Is the team using an appropriate strategy to accomplish its action plan?
• Communication: Are team members clear about the priority of their tasks? Is there an established method for the teams to give feedback and receive honest performance feedback? Does the organization provide important business information regularly? Do the teams understand the complete context for their existence? Do team members communicate clearly and honestly with each other? Do team members bring diverse opinions to the table? Are necessary conflicts raised and addressed?
• Creative Innovation: Is the organization really interested in change? Does it value creative thinking, unique solutions, and new ideas? Does it reward people who take reasonable risks to make improvements? Or does it reward the people who fit in and
• Consequences: Do team members feel responsible and accountable for team achievements? Are rewards and recognition supplied when teams are successful? Is reasonable risk respected and encouraged in the organization? Do team members fear reprisal? Do team members spend their time finger pointing rather than resolving problems? Is the organization designing reward systems that recognize both team and individual performance? Is the organization planning to share gains and increased profitability with team and individual contributors? Can contributors see their impact on increased organization success?
• Coordination: Are teams coordinated by a central leadership team that assists the groups to obtain what they need for success? Have priorities and resource allocation been planned across departments? Do teams understand the concept of the internal customer—the next process, anyone to whom they provide a product or a service? Are cross-functional and multi-department teams common and working together effectively? Is the organization developing a customer-focused process-focused orientation and moving away from traditional departmental thinking?
• Cultural Change: Does the organization recognize that the team-based, collaborative, empowering, enabling organizational culture of the future is different than the traditional, hierarchical organization it may currently be? Is the organization planning to or in the process of changing how it rewards, recognizes, appraises, hires, develops, plans with, motivates and manages the people it employs?Does the organization plan to use failures for learning and support reasonable risk? Does the organization recognize that the more it can change its climate to support teams, the more it will receive in pay back from the work of the teams?

Category : Featured / General

Emergency First Response (EFR) Courses

April 14th, 2010 @ admin // No Comments

Emergency First Response Course

Recent world events have proven that the ability to manage medical emergencies is critical when disaster strikes and emergency services are overwhelmed or nonexistent.

Now you can get prepared to save the lives of your family, friends, coworkers and neighbors by taking Emergency First Response CPR and first aid courses. We’ll give you the confidence to respond when emergencies arise.

Fresha Events is offering tailor made EFR courses to your company, organization or family. HELP save the lives of your family, friends and neighbors. There has never been a better time to get CPR and first aid training

Emergency First Response (EFR) Course

The Emergency First Response Primary Care (CPR) and Secondary Care (First Aid) courses make up a foundational offering in emergency care for the lay provider. These two courses teach people how to provide emergency care for someone in need. These courses are designed to make learning easy by providing a non-stressful environment in which participants can practice and apply the emergency care skills taught them. The courses are further designed to:

• Help participants remember appropriate emergency care procedures during times of need.
• Encourage participants to apply those procedures by assisting those needing emergency care.

The EFR Primary and Secondary course are divided into three segments:

1) Knowledge development
2) Skill development
3) Scenario practice.

Participants will be given a manual, Emergency First Response Participant Manual, and the course will take one full day (roughly 8 hours). Upon completion of the course participants will be administered an exam which they must complete and score at least 75% on. The skills taught in these courses are encouraged to be refreshed every 24 months. An Emergency First Response Refresher course is also available. Emergency First Response courses are based on internationally recognized medical guidelines and follow protocols from the consensus view of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR). These courses follow the same priorities of care used by professional emergency care providers. Educationally, the courses reflect a well researched instructional design for this type of training.

EFR courses can be conducted everywhere but with a minimum of 4 participants. Contact us for more information, rates and bookings on info@freshaevents.com

Category : Featured / General

What is Team Building?

April 10th, 2010 @ admin // No Comments

In the latter part of the 20th century, “Team Building” became recognized by many companies as an important factor in providing a quality service and remaining competitive. Yet as we stride into the 21st century, the term “team building” can still sometimes seem rather nebulous – people often know that they need it, but aren’t quite sure what it is. As a result, team building is used in all sorts of contexts, even when it is not appropriate.

Some people define a team as being “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. But this isn’t the right definition; it is a feature of good teams. ‘Whole > sum’ shows that they are working well together – but there are some teams whose collective performance falls short of what you might expect given the quality of individuals. The Apollo Syndrome is a good example of this – where highly intelligent people often perform worse than teams made of up ‘less-able’ members.

Some people define a team as being the people who report to the same boss. This can be misleading. In a well-designed organizational structure, people reporting to one boss do often form ‘teams’. But when designing organizational hierarchies there are often compromises made because of pay structures or the need to have traditional reporting lines.

Whilst a team is a group of people, a group is not necessarily a team. Rather, a team is a group of people working together towards a common goal. .

If a team is a group of people working towards a common goal, ‘team building’ is the process of enabling that group of people to reach their goal. It is therefore a management issue, and the most effective form of team building is that undertaken as a form of management consultancy, rather than as pure training (though there is a role for training within an overall program).

In its simplest terms, the stages involved in team building are:

• To clarify the collective goals
• To identify those inhibitors that prevent them from reaching their goals and remove them
• To put in place enablers that assist them
• To measure and monitor progress, to ensure the goals are achieved

Category : Featured / General