What are the benefits of corporate training days for profit & productivity?

June 26, 2018

If you are looking for ways to boost staff morale, enhance productivity, and lower employee turnover, look no further than corporate team-building activities.

These exercises can provide a great company culture that will involve the business’s values and goals. To put it simply, if your company was a human, its culture would be its personality. The likes of Google and Twitter are currently leading the way in building happy, positive company cultures that help to attract — and keep — a high-performing workforce. But, how can these team-building activities benefit your staff and profits?

It’s surprising that, despite an average of 1,900 monthly searches in the UK for the term ‘team-building exercises’, some employers still haven’t implemented regular corporate days out into their calendar. In this article, Chill Factore explores the benefits of team-building exercises on company culture and how encouraging corporate excursions for your staff can help take your business to the next level.

Productivity

Engagement and communication between staff are essential to your team having high productivity levels. By having an engaged and productive team, your daily operations will be more efficient, which will have a positive effect on your profit margin. Team-building sessions are a great way for your employees to engage and communicate.

Research-based consulting company, Gallup, revealed that employees who are engaged are around 17% more productive and show a 41% reduction in absenteeism. What’s more, highly engaged companies are reported by Gallup to be approximately 21% more profitable than those that aren’t.

By encouraging team-building activities that involve building or creating something, you can increase originality and imagination, which can be transferred into the workplace. Plus, working together outside of the office will help highlight personal strengths and weaknesses among staff, which will give management a greater idea of the type of training and development courses that could improve performance.

Communication

Poor communication within your team could have a massive effect on the efficiency of your business and create a poor company culture with disconnected employees. Solving issues that affect your business can only be achieved with clear, concise and confident discussions between members of staff — which is where team-building exercises come in.

Some of the top corporate days out encourage interactivity and can include events such as taking skiing lessons or going on a treasure hunt. Chill Factore, the UK’s longest indoor real snow slope, even have a conference venue in Manchester, which could be used to regroup after a day on the slopes. Choosing a team-building exercise that is fun, original and challenging will help your staff engage with the task at hand and you’ll have a greater chance of everyone pulling together to get the job done — a process that will then be adopted in the office.

Taking your staff out of the usual office space and placing them in a brand-new environment with a collective goal can inspire communication, as everyone is in a neutral atmosphere where office politics are redundant. Help break down those barriers further by choosing an activity where teams must follow instructions and swap ideas to help bolster creative thinking in the workplace and help individuals learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

It’s key to remember, though, that no staff member is the same and each will react in different ways. Some find it easy to talk to others in a professional environment, while others don’t. Once those barriers of communication have been removed, your staff will feel more confident approaching each other for help and guidance on work-related matters, which will encourage a more open and fluid company culture.

Chance to bond

Chances are, when you start a new job, you will work with colleagues who aren’t like your normal social circle. Often, work friends will have different interests and personalities, so it’s crucial that you find something to bring them together. Holding a regular corporate day out could be the simplest plan.

Team-building exercises can help your workforce socialise with each other while building trust levels. Senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, Jim Dougherty, claims that: “Managers will never learn the truth about their company unless they have their employees’ trust.”

The level of trust your staff hold for each other, and indeed you, may improve if you choose a team-building activity that depends on teamwork, communication, and group planning. This increased sense of familiarity builds a greater personal connection, which means your staff will feel more comfortable discussing problems — and potential solutions. This will allow for more efficient problem-mapping processes to overcome issues that could be holding your company back without your knowledge.

Office morale

Corporate days can show that you care about your team’s morale. According to the Department of Economics and the University of Warwick, happy employees are up to 20% more productive than other workers. Since staff morale is intricately linked to happiness, you should implement initiatives, like team-building activities, companywide to ensure that your staff feel positive when they walk into work

The appeal of exciting corporate days out can help inject a sense of fun and light-heartedness into your company, which will give your staff something to look forward to. Many expert psychologists have conducted experiments showing that anticipation is a key stage of cheerfulness. According to Action for Happiness, an organisation that helps people take practical steps to create a happier society, feeling good about the future is important for our happiness and motivation. If you want to encourage your staff to be ambitious, perhaps it’s worth beginning by taking action and finding the time to book a fun, group activity that you think they’d enjoy.

Staff retention

Corporate activities that focus around team building could also improve your staff retention stats. Assuming that the advantages stated above come to fruition, your workplace will be a more productive, happy, sociable, communicative, and trusting place to spend a weekday. This positive company culture should decrease the number of staff choosing to resign and keep talent within your company.

A company culture that is assisted by positive initiatives, including team days out, can help lower the amount of people exiting your company, according to a study by Columbia University. The research showed that the chance of job turnover at a business with a positive company culture is only 13.9%, while the likelihood of a high job turnover rate in places with poor company cultures is 48.4%.

High turnover of staff means that your company is wasting resources by constantly training new staff. It also reduces the credibility and worth of your company to prospective employees. Consequently, you lose experience, money, time, and the best chance of attracting a wide network of new, quality talent.

Therefore, it’s wise to make sure you are using a small portion of company time on team-building corporate events in a bid to improve your employee turnover rate.

It’s clear that corporate days out are advantageous. If you want to boost profits, productivity and processes, search online for fun, team-building activities suitable for colleagues.

Sources:

http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/208487/right-culture-not-employee-happiness.aspx

https://tech.co/team-building-activities-productivity-2017-06

https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-company-culture-2062000