Improving teamwork has never been easier than in December! Here’s some of our top tips on how to use it to your advantage:
Utilising The Christmas Party
One of the best opportunities to improve your team’s ability to work together is an out-of-work event. Having fun together and talking about things other than work significantly help people get to know one another more – improving teamwork. Knowing your teammates better helps understand what they mean when they aren’t quite making themselves clear, understand their point of view, and know what their strengths are.
Simply having a Christmas party should help, but there are some ways to engineer it for improving teamwork. To begin with it can include team based games. You can modify teamwork challenges to be Christmas themed, or modify some common Christmas games to be more team based. Some natural choices would be quizzes & charades.
Advent Calendar Activities
You can make a quick, easy advent calendar (or download one) with an activity for each work day aimed at improving teamwork. The calendar itself doesn’t need to be fancy, you can just keep it in a spreadsheet saved on your computer and announce it each day. The activities should be quick and simple. Some ideas could be having a cuppa together as a team, quickly sharing each other’s favourite TV show / sport / food, or discussing a group answer to a trivia question.
Secret Santa
Secret Santa is actually a great way of getting to know one another. The searching for the gift forces people to get to know their colleague, as does people creating wish lists to help them out. One of the best ways it improves teamwork is by opening the gifts together, you get to know more about every member of your team. Even more so if you then try to guess who got you your gift. It betrays the rules a bit but the organiser could engineer people to get the colleagues they need more help getting to know. If the gift receiver doesn’t know who it’s from; it’s still Secret Santa. Encouraging the team to get each other Christmas cards is also a good idea to help build relationships.
Improving Teamwork By Decorating Together
You might have limited options to do this if you are working away over Christmas, but even if you have to take the decorations down only a day later, it’s still worth working together to decorate your serviced accommodation or office. Working together to put up decorations that require multiple people and agreeing where to put each decoration can be as valuable as a team building exercise.
Want more advice for building teamwork? Check out our article about Improving Teamwork While Working Away.