What are the best team building activities for work?

Teams form through challenges. A group of people that work along side each other through a difficult task come out the other side knowing far more about their teammates and themselves. You can see this at every level of sports, within business and anywhere else that teaming exists.

Old school teaming events were often designed around creating a challenge...

• People untangling complex knots without letting go of a shared rope

• Complex work simulations through role playing

• Create words using just the bodies of your team members

• Movie scene re-enactment

• etc.
  

The effectiveness of any of these events and others can be debated in plenty of other blog posts, but the reason for their creation is widely accepted. When a group of people are pushed to their limits physically and mentally they learn better how to rely on others and teaming results.

With 2020's move to primarily virtual activities. We are all on a search for effective virtual team building activities. In order to find the best approach we have to match some key characteristics:

• Challenging... Individual and Mutual Accountability

• Shared Leadership

• Common Goals / Collective Work Products

• Measurable Performance

At Competition Dojo, we recognize that team building when we can be physically together will always be a simpler approach, but the world has changed and we also need to recognize what we can do virtually to fill the void. With that in mind, let's explore how the Competition Dojo approach fits with each of these characteristics.

Challenging... Individual and Mutual Accountability

We have created an approach that brings activities to teams of all types (friends, corporate, etc). Our events are designed to be Challenging. They are performed as individuals, but each team members' results impact the team's score. Each team member is accountable to the others on their team. In events where a particular individual may struggle, their team members can provide support, instruction and encouragement to practice and learn. The month available for each event's performance allows a great chance of improvement. While it's true that a teammate may not go from worst to best by practicing for a few weeks, but odds are they can improve their performance dramatically by putting in the effort. Each team member will be accountable to their team to do their best.

Shared Leadership

We intentionally work to make our events varied in the type of capabilities they require. The goal is to constantly bring events that challenge different people on any team. With each event, we expect a different team member to step into the leadership role, providing coaching and guidance on how to get better. The best teams, will organize sessions where they can help each other. The worst teams will hope that a few key team members can carry the rest. As we watch the results month to month our goal is to see results for individuals moving up and down based on the type of event. A team will be better equipped to level out those dips if they can share the leadership as new skills are required.

Common Goals / Collective Work Products

One of the best features of Competition Dojo is the ability to compare results through a number of different lenses. A team could have a goal to be the best team in their organization/corporation, to be better than a specific team, or to be the best team overall. At the same time individuals can be driven by those same goals from an individual perspective. It is the work they do as individuals that will be combined with their team to create the team's results and achieve the team's goals.

Measurable Performance

When we measure results at Competition Dojo we use a basic rank for an individual event as shown below...

As you can see, the competitors with Nicknames IHasFeet and Torreshat Grangwalker are tied with the #1 ranking for the event Soccer Ball Juggling. This also places them in the 99th percentile for the event.

When we look at rankings over multiple events we average each competitors percentile rank. Using this approach, competitors who started competing when the total number of competitors was low aren't negatively impacted as our number of competitors grows or shrinks.

Our leaderboards provide a full set of filters to let teams and individuals view where they rank in a number of different ways. At the heart, Competition Dojo is about competition and if you don't have measurable, comparable results, you don't have competition.

In addition to the characteristics outlined above, there are is an additional consideration that we feel make this a fun and effective approach to team building. Unlike many of the recommended virtual activities that you can found online, Competition Dojo goes far beyond a 30 minute web conference call. Each month is about multiple events that will challenge a team to perform and they can practice, learn and perform asynchronously. Teams can work together on their own time. Individuals can challenge themselves and guide others throughout the month expanding the impact of the team building outside of a set calendar event.

We recommend that our corporate subscribers announce the month's events in a common call where one of the corporate leaders gives their performance online. Why? Seeing their leaders vulnerabilities in trying to perform at an event where they might not succeed is a great way to break down vulnerabilities and bring real humanness to a corporate setting. This is not a requirement of our approach, but it is highly recommended and a tremendous amount of fun.