How Corporate Challenges Build Individual Skills And Confidence, And Make For Better Teams
The success of the modern business relies on its people. You don’t just want highly skilled and qualified people, but people who are willing to push their own boundaries, think creatively, have high spirits and be good team players.
One of the proven ways to develop these internal and intra-personal skills within staff is to take them out of the workplace and put them in safe, consequence-free environments with their teammates and then set them activities that challenge the same set of workplace skills. For a couple of examples of the popular activities that we run for our corporate clients at Be Challenged:
– Orchestrate!
In orchestrate, your team will be set the challenge of becoming a symphony in just two hours. Each participant chooses an instrument – strings, woodwind, brass or percussion, and then works in separate sections under the tutelage of an expert musician to learn the basics of the instrument. Then the whole group comes together to perform, as one, under a conductor. This is a demanding team building challenge that will pull people out of their comfort zones, but at the same time help them reach their full potential around communication skills, their sense of accountability to the success of the whole group, and their emotional resonance within their team.
While it’s unlikely that your staff will need musical instrument skills in their day-to-day work activities, the beauty of this corporate challenge is that it takes an activity that most recognise takes a lifetime to master (playing music), and demonstrates that an individual can learn the basics of this new skill within a few hours. Following the activity, your staff will return back to work more willing to throw themselves into the unfamiliar, confident that they’re equipped to learn the ropes – and fast – when necessary.
– Beat The Box
In this challenge, your staff are broken into groups, and each needs to collaborate to stop a countdown by cracking a special code. To crack the code, each team will need to get locked boxes open, which hold the tools they need to start deciphering the code. This game, in addition to being a lot of fun, requires deep logical thinking, problem solving skills, the ability to remain calm under time pressure, and the ability for a group of people to come together and leverage each person’s strengths and skills… just like a successful team in a corporate environment does.
Time pressure is something that we all experience in the hyper-fast modern work environment. Deadlines are often the most stressful part of a person’s job. By flipping the concept of a deadline around so that it’s something recreational and entertaining, Beat The Box is a corporate challenge that is a business simulation without ever feeling like one. It encourages people to remain calm throughout a tight deadline, while also keeping a cool head and looking for creative solutions to problems.
Breaking boundaries, learning skills
These events are fundamentally fun, and a good way to give a team – or the entire organisation – a break from the day-to-day. At the same time, in addition to challenging a person’s teamwork skills, these challenges have been designed specifically to enhance self-discovery. Participants will learn and develop new skills by pushing their boundaries in our corporate challenges, and will return to work with the willingness to challenge themselves further and further develop new skills. They will also develop stronger leadership and strategic thinking goals, and these events are often used by our partners for identifying the future leaders within the organisation.
We run these games and activities – and there are plenty more to choose between – across Australia, but it’s important to note that these activities are not just designed as team-building exercises. That is one benefit, but corporate challenges should do more than that, and each of our activities have been carefully developed to be a part of the learning and development sphere. Each activity is designed and managed by highly trained facilitators in occupational psychology, personality profiling and strategic management. And the service doesn’t end when the activity does. Building a healthy, efficient and productive team requires on-going work, and we provide plans for ongoing initiatives to foster and maintain a healthy company culture.
Corporate challenge activities can be organised for small groups (five people) through to entire organisations of 2,000 or so. Our activities can work equally as well for a newly formed team to help develop the capacity for teamwork quickly, as it can for established teams that need rejuvenation or some time away from work. As a global organisation, we are also constantly refreshing our programs to take into account new trends and innovations around the world, so our clients are able to regularly try new corporate challenge game and activities, and continue to develop the skills within their organisation, year after year.
