Stepping up to the Challenge of Big Group Team Building

To be honest, I like facilitating team building for small groups better. I like seeing each participant eye-to-eye, facilitate deep conversations with them that lead to clear team rules of engagement and shared commitments. However, companies do need to get together and kick off some goals or implement some initiatives to align everyone. Often when this happens, we’re dealing with a hundred or more employees. The requirements of facilitating big group team building events are vastly different from those of small intact groups. I’d like to share my thoughts from my experience on planning and implementing a big team building event.

Results-orientation Vs Task-orientation

It’s important to have a conference with organizational principals to understand what their objectives and expectations are and design the program based on those expectations. Sometimes we hear companies choose the in-house team building facilitators of resorts who have packaged games they call team building activities because they are cheaper and more convenient. This is not limited to resort team building events. Other training companies also do this. They line up activities without really understanding what the company needs. One particular thing that team building facilitators need to do is educate the client about the opportunity team building offers in addressing current issues or aligning everyone in the team to its goals. Not all clients know this. Some think that by simply putting learning games together, they are already building their team. Teams are at different levels of development and face different barriers and will more certainly require different kinds of intervention.

Keeping the Team Building Event Active and Engaging

Often, big group team building coincides with company outings or company general assemblies. If it’s a company outing, it’s easy for people to lose interest of the team building session and just silently long for the free time when they can do what they want. It helps to design an event that ensures participants are actively participating and engaged in meaningful conversations. Through the years, ExeQserve has developed several games and other learning activities as means to surface team-working values that members need to embrace. Our facilitators have learned from experience to continually improve not just our designs but most importantly our facilitation to ensure participants’ engagement.

Facilitating Learning Conversations for a Big Group

One of the biggest challenges of big group facilitation is engaging everyone in conversations that lead improved teamwork. Lecture is terrible method for learning. It is even less effective if we’re dealing with a big group. The best way for participants to learn is through experiences provided by the learning games or activities and then reflecting and sharing ideas. Through conversations like this, they get to agree on rules of engagement that they can apply in the workplace.

Dealing with the Challenges of Outdoor Team Building

When you facilitate for a hundred or more people outdoors, you encounter the challenge of communicating in open air and a lot of source of distractions. It helps to have the necessary technology, so the lead facilitator can be heard and that instructions for learning activities are cascaded effectively to each participants. This was one of our past struggles as team building facilitators. Overtime, we’ve learned how to manage communication, provide activity guides that are easier for the participants to follow. I’m sure more challenges will present itself as we go along. Two things I’ve learned from experience is, well, first, learn from experience. The second is to anticipate what could go wrong and have a ready plan to address issues.

Ensuring Follow Through

Leadership is key to successful team building. When I say that, I mean the actual building of a team and not just a simple team building Event. One of the things we do is work with the organizational leaders by conducting pre-work meeting and then incorporate learning action planning to be used by the leaders to follow through on commitment after the event.