Fulfilling relationships within the workplace stem from fostering meaningful connections with your colleagues. Team building is a way to connect employees socially, encourage collaboration, and create an empowering and amiable work environment that boosts morale.

Team building activities for work create a better, more empowered and vibrant corporate community.  Studies show that team building activities enable a sense of self development – increasing happiness and productivity in workers.

When employees feel connected to one another, and form both personal and professional bonds, they feel better apt to fulfill tasks with intention. Research done by the Society for Human Resource Management notes relationships with co-workers as the top condition for employee satisfaction and engagement.

This article will discuss the various reasons why connections and relationships in the workplace matter, and how they can help create cohesiveness in the office – whether in person, virtual, or hybrid.  

We’ll delve into some key benefits that building connections can bring:

  • Promote overall happiness and employee productivity
  • Create a collaborative community and enhances problem solving skills
  • Encourage deeper engagement and promote loyalty
  • Decrease stress and fosters improved emotional health 

Promote overall happiness and employee productivity

Happy employees are better employees, and building meaningful relationships with colleagues is key. When co-workers can connect on trusting, supportive, and intuitive levels, their confidence in the workplace grows.

Making connections with others is a way to induce joy, and help employees gain a sense of belonging within the workplace community. Oxford studies conducted a survey on telesales employees to assess the correlation between their happiness at work and their levels of productivity. According to the results of the study, coworkers who felt satisfied in terms of their happiness at work, produced higher quality work and were more productive, converting more sales while also making more calls per hour and adhering to schedules. Good work connections are the basis for high functioning employees.

Team building activities are wonderful for encouraging connection between colleagues on a wide range of levels, including personal and professional. They allow peers to build a sense of self-worth and open up in ways they may never have on their own. This entails coordinating events both during and outside of work hours. For example, you can hold cooking classes, happy hours or craft workshops to bring colleagues closer together.

Happiness reflects a flourishing life and is a direct result of forming close knit ties and great connections. If colleagues grow more friendly with one another, the workplace is a happy environment to enter daily. Those connections made will enhance their work experience and heighten their desires to be productive.

Creates a collaborative community and enhances problem solving skills

It’s no secret that when people are more connected, they are more cohesive. Strong relationships allow co-workers to form special bonds, with those relations seeping into their work performances. When facing workplace conflicts, they’re more likely to be upfront and less likely to encounter uncomfortable interactions as the relationships they’ve built allow for a mutual understanding.

When it comes to having a fluid work community, strong connections are especially important between employees and their supervisors. Whether in the office or over the computer, connection encourages stronger collaboration and more effective problem-solving. Both in-person and virtual team building activities are ways to do just that.

Researchers found that strong relationships between employees and their supervisors facilitates better communication, which makes everybody feel part of a community. When employees engage in team building activities, they become more understanding about the diverse ecosystem of personalities, opinions, perspectives and backgrounds that exists in their workplace, and as a result, the work environment can function more frictionlessly. They can think creatively when challenges arise, and approach them as a unified unity to problem solve and preserve the sanctity of the community.

Encourage deeper engagement and promote loyalty

When people are more connected, they’re more likely to want to collaborate and attend to the tasks at hand. It’s pleasant to connect with peers while working towards the same or similar objectives, which is why team building is an essential asset to any workplace.

When teammates connect on different levels, they have a greater desire to work together and are comfortable interchanging ideas. Thus, employees learn efficient ways to engage with one another, and loyalty grows.  

Incorporating team building exercises within corporate culture forms connections amongst teams and supports positive engagement. Studies show that productive engagement leads to employee satisfaction, which ultimately leads to increased employee loyalty. When people feel more confident in their work, they are more willing to put forth effort and extend their devotion toward the workplace as an entity. And using team building activities to include informal conversation with supervisors can foster employee satisfaction, as they feel more at ease to interact. So, making effective connections leads to more meaningful involvement.

Decreases stress and fosters improved emotional health

Relationships are essential, and the connections people make determine happiness. When people don’t create significant relationships with colleagues, they’re more likely to feel awkward when having to interact with colleagues and will feel emotional pressures – especially when having to perform on the job. More purposeful conversation and meaningful pastimes helps reduce employees’ stress and anxiety.

Employee performance relies on connection and could be diminished by loneliness. Team building games are fun and lessen the day-to-day stress, while also cohesively creating relations between co-workers making it easier to work in tandem.

Leaders should be aware that with little to no connections, employees will suffer burnout. When people are isolated, they can feel demoralized and work becomes less tolerable for themselves and those around them. Research shows that loneliness amongst employees leads to poor performance both individually and as a team member. If workers both in-person and virtual engage in team building to enhance organizational connections, the workplace becomes more enjoyable and stress-free.

Team building activities could be considered vital because stronger social connections lead to longer, happier lives. Studies prove that loneliness and isolation coincide with increased mortality. It’s undoubtedly healthy for people to spend quality time relating with one another, particularly those that they work side-by-side daily.

And in remote work environments, building social connections is even more crucial.  Virtual team building activities help to break down any stressful barriers that make it difficult to communicate as a whole, and help better align the already isolated members of the organization. Using team building exercises to unite employees outside of the workload supports the health of the entire community.

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking to create a more happy, cohesive, and productive work community, finding opportunities that foster connections between colleagues is the way to go. Team building activities are wonderful ways to create deeper engagement and a stronger sense of community that contributes to an overall more functional workplace. When relationships are built amongst co-workers, their engagement, enthusiasm, and quality of production is enhanced. 

At CraftJam, we offer virtual, in-person and hybrid corporate team building workshops to accommodate any type of work environment. Our workshops and classes are designed to inspire employees to get in touch with their creativity in a fun and empowering atmosphere that helps them foster authentic emotional connections with one another that strengthen the whole community.