I recently spoke with Tom Seymour, Sales Director at Durham County Cricket Club who believes that you can build teamwork in your workplace through sports — especially cricket. He tells us why he thinks this is.
Every manager and business owner aims to have a motivated and productive team behind them. A survey from ESI International found that over 65% of project professionals believed their company’s performance would improve if its teams worked more collaboratively. To achieve this, it is essential that everyone is able to get along with one another, as serious breakdowns in communication can lead to lost productivity. Team-building exercises can be an excellent way of giving your employees the chance to bond in an informal, low-pressure environment. If done well, this can have a lasting impact on workplace productivity.
Team-building exercises don’t have the best reputation with workers — research from global software giant Citrix shows that 31% of employees dislike them. This is because many traditional team-building exercises feel trite and often patronising. Sport, on the other hand, is one of the few activities that is almost universally enjoyed by a workforce, and one of the team-building exercises recommended by Entrepreneur as being effective. Many adults are taken back to their childhood while playing sports, and it often brings out the best in them, making it an organic team-building activity which has no need for scripted exercises.
However, it’s important to choose a sport that everyone can get involved in, as the more senior and less active members of your staff may not feel comfortable joining in with anything intense. Cricket coaching is a perfect fit for team-building, as it’s a game that almost everyone knows and will be able to join in with. It can be played at a leisurely pace and include everyone, which will create an informal setting that will give your employees the time to chat and get to know one another, which they may not find in the office. This can be particularly beneficial for large workforces, as it can give people a chance to get to know colleagues who they may only have had contact with through email.
Taking your employees out of the office and giving them chance to work together in a more relaxed setting can go a long way to helping mend any fractured relationships in the workplace. As their work life is the biggest source of stress in most people’s lives, it’s no wonder tensions can sometimes flare between colleagues. However, taking these same people outside of the often high-pressure environment of the office and getting them working together in a more light-hearted way can go a long way to help release any tension there may be between them.
A successful day of activities that strengthen the bonds between your team can have a long-lasting positive impact on workplace productivity, as a group of colleagues on good terms with each other is significantly more productive than one full of in-fighting and arguing. Giving your employees a break from the office by getting them outside playing sports can also have a big short-term impact on their job satisfaction levels, which will naturally spill over in to their productivity.
As detailed in our Wellbing whitepaper, encouraging your workforce to lead a more active lifestyle outside of the office can lead to several benefits. Healthy and active employees have less absenteeism, are more productive, happy, and engaged, and bring the teambuilding skills they’ve learned in competitive sports to the workplace. Team sports coaching can open the door for your employees to take on a sport in their own time, which will lead to long-term benefits which far outweigh the initial time you invest on the team-building exercise.
A day of team cricket coaching will help improve workplace relations in your office, as well as increase the job satisfaction and productivity levels throughout the company. Engaging in team-building activities such as this should be done multiple times throughout the year to help strengthen relations in your workforce.
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