Ensuring your team members have the skills needed to meet the ever-changing demands of your organization and customers is essential to your company’s success and creates opportunities for future growth and scalability.

As organizations look to reskill and upskill their workforce, understanding where their current staff is lacking or what their future customers expect is the first step.

Team member development can happen in a variety of ways from mentorship and coaching to classes and while in-person learning is currently rare to non-existent fortunately more and more opportunities for virtual and augmented training are emerging.

Team member development used to consist of mostly training classes on hard skills like excel or word.  Fortunately, organizations have evolved beyond training classes recognizing that team member development encompasses a gambit of soft skills, which an accelerated remote workforce has revealed an even greater need for.

Regardless the type of skill or if it is reskill or upskill, they are all part of learning and development, helping companies gain and retain top talent while improving productivity and increasing bottom line.

Let’s face it, It’s a win-win for everyone!

Teamwork and team building are an increasingly important part of the corporate culture.

The objectives of team building boosts team member engagement, establishes solidarity by creating a shared memory, breaks down barriers, enhances social relations and connects remote teams and workers.  When team building exercises are designed around development or team training, they tend to fall flat and feel more like just another day in the office.

Wikipedia defines team building as:

“a collective term for various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within teams, often involving collaborative tasks. It is distinct from team training, which is designed by a combine of business managers, learning and development/OD (Internal or external) and an HR Business Partner (if the role exists) to improve the efficiency, rather than interpersonal relations.”

What are you hoping to achieve outside of the basic objectives; relieving tension, rewarding achievement, problem solving, goal setting, fostering interpersonal relations or simply to just have fun?

Answering that question will help determine if your team building session is a volunteer project, picnic, destination outing, scavenger hunt, structured indoor activity (game, discussion topics, cooperative assignments, group brainstorming) or virtual activity.