MOTIVATE ENGAGE encourage Team Building Ideas to Motivate, Engage, and Encourage
How to Use this ebook Baudville 52 Ways to a Positive Culture ebook PAGE 1 Keep your team feeling motivated, engaged, and encouraged with the 15 ideas in this ebook! Maintaining high team morale will create a work environment that attracts and retains top talent, achieves goals, and strives for excellence. This ebook is the collection of some of our favorite team building ideas from our customers and our personal experiences. The ideas in this ebook are organized into three sections: 1. Team building ideas to motivate 2. Team building ideas to engage 3. Team building ideas to encourage Regardless of how you choose to use this ebook, we hope the ideas will serve as a starting point to your own creative and unique team building ideas. Share your stories, tips, and ideas on the Baudville Facebook page and get ideas from other successful teams, too! Cheers! ABOUT BAUDVILLE People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society. Vince Lombardi Baudville, the place for daily recognition, continues to be the leading innovator in day-to-day recognition solutions. Baudville s day-to-day recognition solutions appeal to today s increasingly diverse workforce with contemporary designs and relevant messaging, motivating and engaging workplaces world-wide. Baudville has been declared one of the best companies to work for in its area and strives to create the ultimate work experience for its employees. For more tips and ideas to create a positive culture, visit the Baudville Recognition Resource Center on Baudville.com.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 2 Team Building Ideas to Motivate Keeping a team motivated and focused is a constant challenge for leaders. When your team is motivated, they ll produce better results and have better attitudes at work.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 3 1. Recognize Short Term Goals Set short term goals for your team, keep employees updated on their progress, and celebrate success. Short term goals should be measured every month or quarter. Keep employees updated on the progress of their goals by sending regular emails, creating a dashboard on your intranet, or giving update reports in regular team meetings. The frequent communication about the goal reminds employees of what s at stake and keeps the goal front of mind. Also, determine your reward ahead of time for meeting and exceeding the goal. It doesn t have to be expensive: pizza lunch or a week of casual days. When employees know what they can earn, they ll be more motivated to work together.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 4 2. Friendly Competition Keep your team motivated with a little friendly competition. We ve hosted corn hole/bean bag tossing tournaments in the hallways at Baudville. The tournament doesn t take a lot of time out of the work day, and everyone enjoys the competition and camaraderie. We recommend following the instructions of the Minute to Win It games, which you can do with only a few supplies from your local grocery store. Have employees compete during lunch or on their breaks, and keep a tally of who gets the best scores. At the end of the day, award a small prize to the top winners. To make the fun last, have a different game every week for a month. Track the points and crown a champion after all the games have been played.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 5 3. Volunteer Together A great way to build camaraderie and trust among your team is to take them outside of your office and engage them in community service. This is also a great opportunity for individuals to build relationships with teammates they don t commonly interact with. For our 25th anniversary, Baudville sponsored a Habitat for Humanity house in Grand Rapids. All employees were given the opportunity to volunteer for a day and work on the house. It gave employees from across the company a chance to engage in a different environment and get to know each other better. You can learn more about our experience volunteering as a team in our Recognition Resource Center.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 6 4. Create Team Awards Motivate your team toward common goals by creating team awards. Include the entire team in the nomination process by asking them to nominate their peers. You can host your awards quarterly or annually depending on your award criteria. Have fun with it! Make your award ceremony something employees look forward to by dressing up, having refreshments, and putting together a video about the team and the winners. Employees will be excited for the awards and motivated to earn the honors.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 7 5. Give Time Off for Team Behaviors To build a closer team, communicate that you ll be recognizing individuals who out of their way to help out their teammate and demonstrate teamwork. Be clear about what this may look like in your organization, whether it s working in a different area to help a co-worker or covering a shift for someone with a sick child. When you see team members demonstrating those behaviors, write a note on a token card, package a Token of Appreciation inside it, and present it to the individual. Allow individuals to redeem their tokens for 15 minutes off and try to honor the time off as immediately as business demands will permit. 15 extra minutes in the morning (or at lunch, or in the evening) is a great way to motivate your team to work together!
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 8 Team Building Ideas to Engage Employee engagement is key to a successful team and a successful organization. An engaged team will be more dedicated to the organization, more willing to go above and beyond, and more likely to be innovative.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 9 1. One-on-One Time One of the easiest and most effective ways to engage your team is to spend quality time with them. Schedule regular one-on-one meetings with your team members and spend time discussing their current projects, challenges, and new ideas. For a special treat, take them to lunch. You can do this with individuals on your team or small groups. Take advantage of the time outside the office to get to know your team more personally. Or simply make an effort to visit every desk over the course of the week to talk with your teammates and get an update on their life and work. To help you remember details about your teammates, use our Tell Us About You Form. You can record employee recognition preferences, hobbies, favorite foods, and more. It s a great resource for future recognition moments.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 10 2. Implement a Suggestion System Employees who feel their opinions are valued demonstrate greater employee engagement than those that don t. Implement a suggestion system for your team as an outlet for individual ideas, proposals, and suggestions. A basic suggestion system is easy to implement and use. Simply place the box in a central location, like a break room or filing cabinet, and communicate with employees what it is and why it is there. Employees can write down their idea and add it to the box for review. Ask a small group of members of your team to regularly review the ideas and give feedback to you.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 11 3. Give Exposure Keep your team engaged with the organization by giving them exposure to different parts of the company. Arrange for teammates to shadow each other or individuals from different departments. Invite a teammate to a meeting they haven t been to before. The increased exposure to the organization will make them feel like a bigger part of the team and give them a greater understanding of its systems and processes.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 12 4. Brainstorm in Team Meetings Add an item to your team meeting agendas for open discussion. Allow teammates to use this time to share new opportunities, ideas, and discuss possible solutions to challenges. During this time, sit back and let the team work out their ideas themselves. This will be a great opportunity for team members who tend to be quieter to voice their thoughts and opinions and engage more with the team.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 13 5. Office Walk Around Catch your team doing something right early in the day by walking around the office and looking for reasons to recognize. At the beginning of your day before checking email or reviewing your to-do list, take a few minutes to walk around your team s area. Look for valuable behaviors to recognize, and engage your teammates in conversation about something they ve done well lately. It could be something as simple as bringing a great attitude to work first thing in the morning or receiving positive feedback from a customer.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 14 Team Building Ideas to Encourage Recognition is an important part of a team building strategy. By empowering teammates to recognize one another, they feel more committed to the team and their teammates.
team a Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 15 1. shout out! Peer-to-Peer Recognition An easy and effective way to introduce recognition to your team is through a peer-to-peer recognition system. Shout Outs is a customer favorite because it s easy to use and popular with teams. Simply set up the display in a common location. When you want to recognize a teammate, tear off a note, write your praise, and post it on a bulletin board. Your teammate will see the note on the bulletin board along with the rest of the team! Giving public recognition is incredibly effective at reinforcing desired behaviors.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 16 2. Provide Recognition Tools for Everyone You can create a recognition station in addition to a peer-to-peer recognition program. Use an empty desk or workstation and stock it with small tokens of praise, recognition tools, and other fun stuff. You can use our Kits and Caboodle as one of the resources. Print out several copies of our Print and Posts and have them in a folder for teammates to use. Link to epraise on our website from your intranet and encourage teammates to send one another free ecards to say thank you. There are lots of small, low cost items you can add to your recognition station, and providing a variety of tools enables individuals to express their appreciation in creative and meaningful ways.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 17 3. Traveling Trophy Encourage your team to have fun with recognition by introducing a traveling trophy. A traveling trophy can be anything an actual trophy, a stuffed animal, a framed photo of your CEO that gets passed from person to person. Start the traveling trophy yourself in a team meeting by sharing the kinds of behaviors the trophy will honor, whether it s helping out a teammate or putting in extra effort. Announce the winner and share a specific example of how she earned the trophy. Next week, she repeats the process and passes the trophy on to the next person.
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 18 4. Host a Celebration When your team hits a major milestone in a project or exceeds their goal, throw a celebration for them! Honor the accomplishment with snacks and a social time for the team. Sometimes your team needs a pick-me-up between goals, too. Celebrate recognition holidays together. You can get ideas for recognition events on our Recognition Event Calendar. For example, National Doughnut Day was the first Friday in June, but don t let that stop you from celebrating next week! Or celebrate the first day of summer with a summer picnic. Provide the burgers and hot dogs, and ask your team to contribute to a potluck. Enjoy the beautiful weather, good food, and good company!
Baudville Team Building Ideas ebook PAGE 19 5. Go Off Site. Getting out of the office is a treat for well, everyone! Get your team out of the building for some team activities that will strengthen their trust and their relationships. Go to a park and have your team work together on a scavenger hunt. Let them know that if they complete it in a certain amount of time, they can leave work early for the day or earn free lunch the following week. Arrange to visit a ropes course and build trust as your team works its way through obstacles and challenges together. Getting out of the office helps everyone relax and creates a more conducive environment for relationship building. Plus, it s a great way to reward your team for meeting a goal, working diligently on a project, or landing a new client.