I am happy to announce the project that our team three developed to propose a retreat team-building event for the company’s employees. Team building is a collective practice that promotes a positive, effective, and productive working environment. Individuals learn how to develop healthy habits associated with collaboration-based approaches, including understanding, cross-cultural communication, and trust. Since companies are involved in various projects, their ability to bring together diverse individuals to work uniformly and achieve commendable results is necessary.
The retreat will take place in the hotel. It will include twenty workers of all experience levels, including newcomers and seniors of the company. The retreat will take a full day and will be based on five team-building exercises suitable for all workers. The day will start with an exercise called a team-scavenger hunt, which will target recently hired people who will receive support and an opportunity to be heard and engage in group quizzes.
The first exercise can be considered an ice-breaker and will be followed by breakfast. Once the employees feel comfortable, the jeopardy game will release all possible tension and set a fun mood. The second exercise before lunch will be a problem-solving session. Employees will be divided into five teams and will play five rounds of random issue resolution situations (five minutes each). The expected outcome of this exercise is to put participants into an environment where they have to work as a team and make creative decisions outside of their workplace. One of the benefits of such retreats is to place a group of people in an entirely new environment and allow them to interact outside their usual and establish boundaries. It also removes daily stressors that may interfere with effective communication or performance, allowing employees to focus on their tasks more effectively for the retreat duration.
After an intense problem-solving session, participants will have lunch, where everybody can relax and discuss the exercises so far. Hiring a professional that would facilitate the team-building event is crucial to the retreat’s success as a facilitator would ensure smooth communication and flow of exercises. The fourth exercise would require everybody to move to another location, an escape room. Working together in a trapped room can show upper management how quickly people can adjust and figure out a solution to a situation. The final team-building exercise is company show & tell, where all employees will have to show or tell something important about them. As participants will learn about each other from their side, dinner will be served.
To provide you with an understanding of the financial aspects involved in the retreat team-building event, we have conducted a cost analysis. According to the day’s plan, five main expenses need to be covered by the company. These include the price for the full day of hotel event hall rent, which varies from $70 to $160 per hour. The cost of breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all participants can be calculated from the average price of one meal, which is $18. Most team-building exercises are free; however, the company needs to hire a facilitator who charges $300 per day for better flow and outcome. Finally, the expenses will include the cost of an escape room ticket, which varies from $25 to $30 for a person, and transportation to and from the facility.
Please, consider the retreat an investment into the company’s efficiency and productivity as 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members (Pentland et al, 2015). The proposed scenario of the team-building event has a minimal amount of expenses, compared to retreats that last for several days. Yet, companies are willing to pay for such events because, as indicated by Marburger et al, (2019), the quality improvement in the teams has a long-term effect on the company’s operations, and consequently, the company gains more from it. The research by Qasem & Qusef (2019) states that team-building also has a positive effect on talent retention and job satisfaction, which saves costs for the organization in the long term.
You are more than welcome to do the cost-effectiveness of a team-building retreat yourself. The data strategy from this includes monitoring academic databases such as ResearchGate or Google Scholar by using keywords and phrases such as team building cost-effectiveness, the cost-effectiveness of team retreats, benefits of teams building, and effects of team building retreats. The scholarly articles within five years will provide you with more insight into the subject.
References
Marburger, B., Pictured, N., Santore, K., Rosoff, P. C., Buck, D., & Haines, J. (2019). The Quality Improvement Team. Our Senior Nurse Leaders, 297(1), 13.
Pentland, A. “S., & Woolley A., & Malone T. W. (2015). The new science of Building Great Teams. Harvard Business Review. Web.
Qasem, G. A., & Qusef, A. (2019). Team Building Activities for Virtual Teams in Jordanian Companies: Vision and Survey. In 2019 International Conference of Computer Science and Renewable Energies (ICCSRE) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.