Whether you wish to reward your employees for a job well done or you merely wish to surprise your hard-work team members and show your appreciation, organizing a corporate team-building event is a great idea. Organizing a corporate team-building event signalizes that you look after your employees and wish to encourage collaboration between co-workers and peers, build trust, resolve any potential conflict, and enhance teamwork. Besides these reasons, there are plenty of other advantages to hosting team building, but also there could be a few things you ought to look at.
No matter the reason for organizing a corporate team event, the truth is that planning can be hard and demanding work. From time scheduling, organizing various activities, getting all the media gear ready, selecting food and drinks, and finally hosting the entire event. Due to an abundance of tasks, people can easily get engaged and end up making indeliberate mistakes. Hence, here are the top five mistakes to avoid to plan out a smooth and eligible corporate team-building event.
1. Not complying with set goals and objectives
Every team building or team bonding event ought to have a clear purpose. Depending on your aim, your task is to write down all the goals you aim to achieve with this corporate event. If you want to build strong work teams and host a corporate event to do so, you cannot start an event without a defined goal beforehand. Therefore, knowing exactly what you want to achieve with your corporate event, whether it’s only fun, communicating the company’s changes, or rewarding and appraising progress, you need to have clear goals you want to achieve before you start planning everything. Unless you are able to establish a clear even goal or fail to deliver them, you may risk leading the corporate event in the wrong direction and end up with a complete failure.
2. Not partnering with renowned event organizers
Planning an effective team bonding event takes time and diligence, and most people wish to focus on organizing corporate-related amenities rather than worrying about other event obligations. If your sole purpose for the corporate team bonding event is to upscale morale, bond peers, uplift the spirit, and reward good work, but you don’t know or wish to handle other event practicalities, then you had better hire a professional event management team. By partnering up with expert event planners you would get an experienced team with high-quality gear ready to set up your program and put your wishes into action. From design, audio, and video to venue liaisons and content creators, not having pro event organizers by your side to help you out would be a grandiose mistake.
3. Having unrealistic and over-ambitious demands
The second you set your mind to organize a corporate event where you would bond with your team members and enhance their communication, but very often get carried away and set even more goals. Setting an additional and hard-to-achieve goal for the team-building event you cannot expect the event to run smoothly. What’s more, being over-ambitious with your team bonding event, you should note that it could lead to failure. Having too many or just unrealistic goals and over-ambitious demands would cause a reverse effect on the entire team and you will have everything but not a satisfactory event. For that matter, it is advisable not to overwork your team, and settle for a maximum of three items on the agenda to deliver and leave all other things to be sorted out for some other future corporate event. If you were to keep your event simple and straightforward, the chances are that you would plan a fantastic event everybody would talk about for a year.
4. Failing to delegate and separate people and tasks
Planning a big corporate team event is no plain sailing especially if your main objective is team bonding. As the focus is on the team rather than the job, you need to include them in the event-organizing process to generate better relationships between peers. Sometimes this can have its pros and cons. Very often you may end up favoring one team over another and that is another mistake to avoid. Showing you have keener preferences towards one site is a big no-no in the corporate world as well as separating one team from another. Try to delegate tasks and obligations neatly and equally to all team members. Also, try not to have preferences or at least to show them as that would automatically cause people to take sides. Delegate tasks with care and reason to avoid friction between colleagues and try to give adequate feedback that would reinvent your business and let people know you’re not in favor of some person more than others.
5. Not having enough time to sort everything out
What most people fail to understand is that planning any corporate team-building event takes taking incentives and ensuring that all things are met according to your previously determined goal. In order to make that happen, you need plenty of time. Time is of the essence when planning a team bonding event because there could be an abundance of things to be done and you shouldn’t let everything be done in the very last moment. Unless you give yourself sufficient time to plan your corporate team-building event, you may risk ruining the entire concept of your event. Start planning in time, hire people from other partner companies to handle event logistics and designs, get professional food and drink caters to handle catering, find agencies that specialize in team-building games, and include some of your peers to help out or resolve some issues that could have come up along the planning stage.
To get the most out of your corporate team building or team bonding event and to enhance participation, you need to be optimistic and encouraging. Hosting any formal corporate event must be taken seriously and a big part of getting things right includes avoiding the above-mentioned mistakes. By paying attention to avoid these mistakes you would be on the right track of organizing a magnificent event.
