The best way to reinforce and encourage your team’s success is to recognise and celebrate it with team bonding activities. It allows each team member to realise their worth within the organisation, and shows that the organisation as a whole is aware of their contributions and feels appreciated for their individual and collective accomplishments. Team building shouldn’t cease once your efforts start bearing fruits. With the proper incentives and a winning culture, you can nurture and extend the positive energy that naturally comes with doing a job well.
We’ve put together 6 ideas for team bonding activities that recognise and celebrate individual and team accomplishments within your organisation that will motivate them to keep doing it again and again! You might want to do all of them or select a combination. It’s a good idea to give recognition in a number of ways, especially if their deeds have significantly increased the value of your organisation, increased efficiency or helped you to get through a difficult period.
These ideas do not include formal monetary incentive structures such as bonuses or fringe benefit schemes.
1. Awards and Gifts
Presenting an award or certificate of appreciation to celebrate team or individual accomplishments gives members a permanent artifact representing their achievements. This raises their profile as a professional, armed with physical evidence of being appreciated for what they have contributed to your organisation. Whether the award takes the form of a certificate with fancy printing, a nice plaque or a trophy, giving an award represents an outstanding achievement that is highly valued. If you hand out too many, too often, you run the risk of diluting the value of the award.
If you have multiple teams with the same KPIs, a team could be awarded a temporary trophy to share the glory of beating the other teams. The leading team would then try to keep the trophy by outperforming the other teams. This is a great way to motivate multiple sales teams, for example.
Awards are a nice act of symbolism to celebrate and award success, but there can also be a lot of value in gift-giving as a material reward as well. Less of a formal gesture than a certificate or trophy, giving team members gift cards, vouchers or more personalised gifts are a great way to treat your rising stars for going that extra mile.
There are a lot of ways that you can use awards and gifts to great positive effect on team morale and motivation, but make sure your award or gifting system is based on positive incentives.
2. Present an Accomplishment Timeline
An accomplishment timeline showing the journey to success is a great way to reinforce the continued success of your team. Step them through each significant event that lead to the position your organisation is in now and specific efforts that helped along the way. Doing this puts the team’s efforts and accomplishments into a perspective outside of their own silo or compartmentalisation to appreciate the wider effects. If a project your team has been working on has positive impacts on the wider community, give the team tangible statistics to back them up. You can use an accomplishment timeline to celebrate the heroes of your organisation past and present, highlighting the important accomplishments and their professional growth over time. This team bonding activity is a good one to add as part of an award presentation!
3. Announce it by Email
It sounds simple and uninspired, but sending a team-wide or organisation-wide email to thank the team or individual team members for their contributions and recognise their efforts and skills. Taking the time to write out a thoughtful email to express your gratitude for a job well done and to keep up the good work goes a long way to offset any past not-so-positive feedback that team members have previously received (hopefully not in an organisation-wide email!) Managers naturally want to put their time into making sure mistakes are corrected, but the positive reinforcement that comes from a team, or organisation-wide acknowledgement of great work will keep morale and productivity high. The gesture is simple yet can be highly effective!
4. Start an “Achievements” Chat Channel
Similar to the email announcement, if you use Slack or a similar business chat platform, creating a specific channel to commend achievements can also increase morale and make team members feel appreciated. Resist the temptation to overdo it and water down the positive effects.
5. Take them Out to a Nice Pub or Restaurant
Celebrating successes with the team by shouting to them a nice restaurant meal and some drinks is always a crowd pleaser. If you are treating them to a meal, make it something that is upscale or better than what they are usually accustomed to making the occasion special. Pre-booking a private section of the venue allows you more control of the event for giving speeches, holding an award ceremony, or games and quizzes. A private venue also lets you and the team express the unique culture of your organisation in your own way without being self-conscious about onlookers and interlopers.
A pub or restaurant outing can make a pleasant setting for celebrating organisational milestones, and a healthy drinks tab is always appreciated!
6. Take Them on the Ultimate Urban Quest Challenge in Melbourne’s CBD
A really fun way to celebrate and build on team success is to bring them to the Melbourne CBD to participate in an outdoor Urban Quest challenge. Your group splits into teams that have to solve puzzles and riddles and find clues along the way. The game is played through a special interactive phone app that sends them racing around Melbourne’s famous landmarks. Going with this option keeps the focus on practical team bonding activities yet also brings them outdoors for a unique and exciting experience. By creating a common goal to achieve in a shorter time than the competing teams, the value of cooperation is reinforced in your employees and colleagues.
If you are planning an outdoor Urban Quest in the CBD to celebrate the team, we can customise the riddles, clues and goals to relate to your recent achievements and the personalities of the participants. Whatever tweaks or themes you’d like to include can be discussed and custom quoted for the occasion.
If an outdoor setting is not what you’re looking for, we can plan an event within a large venue, or there is a purely online team building activities version of the Urban Quest for remote workforces to enjoy.
The Urban Quest Melbourne CBD challenge takes around 1.5 hours to complete, so it can easily fit in with any other plans for the day or evening. We can also provide a debriefing presentation on team member performance from the event such as levels of engagement, contribution and leadership.
Extend the High Morale That Achievement Brings
Your team may appear to be working at peak performance right now if you are reading this. Merit and achievement are indeed their own rewards, creating a sense of purpose and belonging. Our corporate activities in Melbourne focused on team building can gain financial rewards for employees and certainly count for something as well. That is a baseline level of motivation to be expected from your hardworking team members. In addition to that, showing recognition for accomplishments both individually and collectively can be a simple pat on the back and an encouraging speech to something more extravagant to celebrate the impressive milestones that your company has reached.
Why not harness that adrenaline generated by your success by taking the team on Urban Quest team bonding activities as a celebration event that further nurtures their camaraderie and collaboration? A high-energy, team-oriented event that engages both the body and the brain is the perfect activity to build on success and propel it even further!
Get in touch with Urban Quest to help your team of remarkable individuals to the next level!
