Trust exercises help create a thriving company culture where team members feel confident relying on and collaborating with one another to solve day-to-day problems. In other words, the more trust your team members have for each other, the stronger your team will be! Being part of a team that trusts each other is usually linked to higher levels of productivity, employee retention and general work satisfaction. Creating a culture of trust does not just happen overnight! Keep reading to learn how you can be more proactive in creating an environment where trust & connection are continuously nurtured.
Trust Building Practises
Eat Together
Fostering team bonding in the workplace does not have to be expensive, and the act of simply eating lunch with your colleagues can significantly boost productivity and morale. A study from Cornell University has found that food acts as a kind of social glue.
“Sharing meals favours the tendency to collaborate, thereby promoting teamwork. Eating together is a way to get to know others better and strengthen relationships between members of a group.”
– Kevin Kniffin (one of the study’s authors).
Just as families & friends eat together, colleagues regularly socialise over lunch & taking a break from work to enjoy a meal together can also improve overall wellness and employee engagement.
Provide Opportunities for Feedback & Recognise Success
Holding regular meetings with both the whole team as a group as well as one-on-one meetings between employees and managers is important for providing an opportunity for team members to collaborate, feel heard & see the bigger picture. Effective, open communication in these meetings will help promote honesty among employees. When your team is honest about their needs, mistakes, or issues, they create an environment where collaboration and problem-solving is welcomed. These meetings are also a great time to recognise any successes within the team. Acknowledging the hard work being done will help boost motivation and help the members of your team feel valued and supported.
Trust Team Building Activities
Team building exercises are highly effective in building trust and creating stronger connections between employees. Through specially designed team building activities, we can focus on trust building by promoting effective communication, problem solving and teamwork. See below for our top Trust Team Building Activities:
Survivor
The Pinnacle Team Events version of Survivor will see your team relying on one another to solve a series of giant lateral thinking, problem solving puzzles. Each task requires the whole team to work together, helping build trust & confidence in the abilities of your teammates. Unlike the TV show, no team members will be ‘voted out’. Instead, the performance of your team in each of the challenges will give you the opportunity to steal points from the other teams in the tribal council at the conclusion of the event.
Bridge to Unity
Teams work together in this construction style challenge to build a bridge, reinforcing the importance of working as one team & trust. Bridge to Unity can be hosted indoors or outdoors and is the perfect event for breaking down silos and fostering collaboration with everyone working tougher towards a common goal.
Risk vs Reward
In this challenge, teams will encounter a variety of challenges where they must calculate the risk they are prepared to take against the skills and experience of their team. A great activity for showcasing everyone’s different strengths & abilities, the goal is to be the team who has earned the most money within the allotted time.
Lego® Serious Play®
Lego® Serious Play® creates a safe, open and collaborative environment for members of your team to share their ideas, hopes and aspirations. Using Lego, members of your team will construct model representations of these ideas and express them using storytelling and metaphor. Perfect as a trust exercise, Lego® Serious Play® will have everyone engaged and collaborating to solve problems and improve decision making.
Escape Room
What activity could be a better trust building exercise than saving humankind from the end of the world? Teamwork is absolutely essential in our take on an Escape the Room challenge. Teams will have to effectively communicate, problem solve, work together and trust one another’s abilities in order to solve the clues and escape.
Engage the Trust Building Experts
It is quite common for teams to struggle to trust one another, especially with newly formed teams. This can create avoidable issues such as poor communication or friction between employees. These kind of issues can be even more prominent in remote teams where coworkers mainly communicate via email (see our Virtual Team Building Events if you want to build trust in your remote team).
This is why team trust exercises are so important, and one of the most effective ways to foster trust building in your team is by organising regular team building activities.
Pinnacle Team Events has a large range of Sydney team building activities for any occasion, contact us to chat in further detail about how we can help build trust in your team.