What is Team Bonding and Why is it Important?
While team building activities are designed to teach your team new skills, team bonding is all about having fun together and strengthening interpersonal relationships. The primary objective is fun, with little to no emphasis on skill development.
Team bonding activities are simpler than team building activities, with no clearly defined objective. The activities can be one-off events to rebalance the team after a recent departure, or they can be recurring activities, designed to keep the team chemistry alive.
Team building is not only an investment in the happiness of your employees but also an investment in your business as a whole. Employee engagement and employee happiness are two pieces of the same puzzle.
Employee happiness and employee engagement is a two-way street, the two frequently intersect, which is why team building and team bonding are equally important.
Why is it important to have happy employees?
Happy employees are integral to the success of your business. Author Shawn Achor went as far as to write a book about the topic, entitled The Happiness Advantage.
Referring to employees, Achor wrote “Happy employees have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, and receive higher performance rating and higher pay.”
When employees are happy, they’re more engaged, more productive, and take less time off. Furthermore, happy employees are considerably more likely to stick around.
Retaining members of your workforce not only keeps down recruitment costs but also has tremendous benefits for your company culture. Long-term employees help to spread the company ethos which boosts morale and helps onboard new members.
Team bonding activities are also great for reducing stress. Lighthearted activities enable your team to blow off some steam and improve their relationship with the office environment. When employees have a positive association with their workplace, they’ll look forward to coming into work and they’ll feel happier as a result.
This has great knock-on effects on employee creativity as employees who feel comfortable at work are more confident when suggesting new ideas.
(Reference: https://www.surfoffice.com/blog/teambuilding-vs-teambonding)
