Tag: team building

Welcome Cards Make You Feel At Home

Greeting Cards are probably the most welcome mail we get. We get holiday cards, birthday cards, easter, mother’s day, etc. The one thing they have in common is they make us feel good. Sending and receiving cards benefits the sender as well as the receiver.

Let’s go the extra mile to make new employees feel great about working at our company. Sending or giving them welcome cards will calm their first day jitters. An employee will be instantly happy to be in a company that thinks enough of them to make them feel welcome. Nobody wants to be just a number.

Do you belong to a club or organization? A great way to encourage a new member is to send them a Welcome card. Especially when the group divides into a circle of friends in the organization, will the inductee feel more comfortable with a card in hand. We all need encouragement when we are the newbies.

Putting ourselves in other people’s shoes will certainly give us a better grasp of how the newest people feel. Let’s get on the Welcome train wherever we are. A warm greeting in a card and a smile is the best feeling. Welcome aboard!

Team Building in the Workplace

Team building in the workplace needs to be a part of every company’s list of important items that should be implemented. The goal in each company is to be productive and to generate revenue. While it is important to have a great product and/or service, it is also important to have happy and content employees. Team building activities help to boost morale. They also improve communication and productivity. It can be a great motivator.

Team_Building

Team building activities for work can be simple or a bit more involved. Here are just a few suggestions:

1. Plan a field trip. One company I worked for planned a trip to the local bowling alley. It was a great way to get to know each other without the pressure of work and deadlines. Lots of fun and laughs.

2. Work together for a good cause. Facilitate a volunteer outing. A Spring clean-up of a park, for instance. Ask your employees for suggestions.

3. Have a baking contest. The employees could show off their baking skills, while the non bakers could be the tasting judges.

4. Brain teasers and riddles that require team participation.

5. Problem solving activities, such as a puzzle that would require team effort to complete.

These are just a few. There are many online resources that can provide many more ideas. Check it out and have fun!

Team Building Activities For Work

Sitting at the desk working on the computer for many hours can be tedious. With this in mind, several members in my company and I were discussing possible ways to alleviate this tension and came up with the idea of a Suggestion Box we would set up for the staff, requesting ideas on activities we could pursue to help us relax mentally and physically. To our surprise, we received an abundance of responses, some ideas that I will not mention here!, including several that we seriously considered.

Work_Yoga

One of these suggestions came from our co-worker, Betty, who has been practicing yoga for over a year. Betty found that yoga has helped her to relax and has found it very rewarding both mentally and physically. She has offered to share her knowledge of yoga and its benefits with us as a team building activity. After presenting this to the staff they proved to be very enthusiastic and showed great interest in this suggestion. We all decided to move ahead with the planning of this team building activity.

Next on the agenda was scheduling. After much discussion, we decided to divide our lunch hour into two parts; 30 minutes practicing yoga under Betty’s supervision, and 30 minutes enjoying a “healthy” lunch. Our Human Resources department offered us one of the Conference Rooms for this practice and we were ready to move ahead. As beginners we focused on the fundamentals, learned to follow the rhythm of our breath, and develop a sense of body awareness; understand alignment and avoid injury; learned to strengthen and stretch, and much, much more. This was a wonderful team building activity for all who participated and we have grown from a group of twenty to fifty. I have since become a yoga advocate and workout routinely at home.