Team building is a term that often fills employees with fear and dread. Memories of sitting in circles and giving out your name and one interesting fact about yourself, is something we will have all been through at some point in our careers.

However, these days, team building is a lot more interactive than it used to be. Now, businesses invest in days or even weekends away, where their employees can have fun and do something a little more unusual.

Companies like teamtactics.co.uk, offer unique events and days out specifically for team building. These types of activities have proven to have a greater impact when it comes to improving employee relationships and boosting the morale of your team. If team building is something you've avoided, here's a few reasons why you should have another think about investing in team building activities.

Creating positive working relationships

These types of ‘hands on' activities can help when trying to encourage your team to ‘bond' and form more positive working relationships. When faced with a challenge like building a raft, taking part in sports or working out clues on a treasure hunt, a competitive edge comes into play.

This added competition can bring people together in their desire to win and beat out the other teams. It creates a friendly rivalry and you'll find that your teams come back to the office with a new respect and admiration for one another.  

Improving communication

With any team building activity, the key to making it all run smoothly is communication. Communication is essential when it comes to the teams coming together to complete a goal or task, and interactive activities can help to force teams to improve and increase their communication skills.

These types of team building activity days can help fix any communication issues you may be having within your team. Whether the issue is establishing hierarchy and improving the communication between management and the team or just between the team themselves.

Establishing strengths and weaknesses

Different activities require different skills and by putting your team in situations where they have to use a multitude of different skills for different activities, you'll be able to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of each person.

Once you've established the strengths and weaknesses of each person, you can then choose whether you play on their strengths, or improve their weaknesses. This will give you a better idea of where to invest when it comes to training and what skills your team may be lacking.

Team building is not just to build the relationships of your team, even though that is often one of the positive outcomes of team building. Investing in more interactive and ‘fun' team building activities can dramatically help to improve the communication between employees and management and help you identify any needs for further training.

Team building is no longer a stuffy, formal meeting held in your company's board room, it's been taken externally and proved to be a lot more effective. By taking your team out of their normal office environment, you're much more likely to increase morale and boost productivity overall.