Welcome to week four, the end of our journey in examining why team building events are MISSION CRITICAL to include in your meetings, conferences and trainings. Today we look at the issue of motivation. According to our buds over at Webster, motivation is all about providing incentive, inducement or reason to act or to accomplish. Let me just be clear, if you create and design a meeting and it doesn’t motivate then QUIT YOUR JOB! Seriously.
Meetings MUST motivate the participants toward a new behavior, a new mindset a new, a change in direction. If not, everyone involved is wasting their time. Still not kidding. If you are meeting and the intent is for everyone there to stay the same, it is a terrible use of resources, time and money. Your organization, we’re assuming, wants to grow, to develop, to sell more widgets, to cure a disease, to improve the lives of your customers. In order to do this you need an objective of how to get from A to B. Once you accomplish that, you create a plan and goal of how to get to C. And so on. This requires your employees, your leaders, your stakeholders to do something at least a little differently than they are now. Or at least do the same thing at an increased rate. This my friends, is change. Change can be a new way of thinking or adding additional information to the mix or tweaking a process. Connecting dots that were not connected before. Learning a new technology. All of it – change.
It’s fundamentally why we meet. To generate and create change. So suddenly motivation is a critical component to your meeting. And of course, as you might guess, team building is one of the ways we can motivate our participants.
Team Building Events Create Motivational Short Cut
When you harness the energy of the group during team building events, it is remarkable the increase in energy in the individual. Generating and capitalizing this increase in energy by putting a bunch of people in the same room with a task is hard to explain but it is palpable to the participants. It is creativity it is innovation captured and focused in a playful setting that can lead to a renewed excitement for your organization’s brand, product and future growth. Employees who experience this type of camaraderie in action will report being more excited about their job, their employer and their team. They are more productive and creative. They are 87% LESS likely to leave the company. Companies with more engaged employees have higher profits and more highly engaged customers.
Include a give-back component to your team building events and these statistics are likely to get even better as employees who are part of an organization that cares about the community and is involved in charitable giving report even higher levels of engagement and loyalty. Now you can go to your boss and have even more ammunition to let them know you are adding to the bottom line value of the company with the meetings you plan.
As we’ve discovered over the past few weeks in this series, networking, learning and motivation are three key outcomes meeting planners want out of their meetings and all three are natural results of team building. Team building then becomes a critical feature of the agenda rather than a “nice to have” element.
We’d love your thoughts, feedback on these posts and would love to hear the results as you increase team building components in your meetings and conferences. And of course, we’d love to work with you to design your meeting to meet these very real participant needs. Give us a call at 855-TEAM-BLD or fill out the form on this page.
Happy meeting!