Macaca Mulatta

With a financial crisis that has taken the worlds attention, the occurrence of jobs either being at risk or worse still are frequent. The thought process for remaining employees is fraught with uncertainty. This can leave managers in a tricky position. Having unmotivated staff is unproductive, and this may lead to diminishing profits. This is where effective team building can be invaluable.

Many managers will avoid team building days just due to the cost, but this should not be the case. The days of management consultants charging the earth for team building days should be a thing of the past. Team building challenges can be created without great expense to an organisation. All that is needed is a focus for the session, a few activities and a nominal amount of equipment. For example; a team activity to focus on communication, could be the sheep and shepherd.

The only equipment needed is blindfolds. The team create methods of communication without using words. Claps, whistles, stamping to name a few techniques. Mark an area out with which can be the sheep pen and then place the participants dotted around the room or area. At this point, it is the shepherds job to successfully communicate with the sheep so that whilst blindfolded they can navigate their way into the pen.

Simple ideas such as the sheep and shepherd if correctly facilitated can be answer to building successful motivated teams, which in turn brings larger profits, without that large bill that at present most companies could do without.