Teamwork makes things happen:
Great teams make things happen more than anything else in organisations. McGregor’s X-Y Theory explains why empowering teams get the best results. It’s more about attitude and behaviour towards staff than processes and tools.
Great teamwork is born from concentrating on the employees within that team rather than the task they are doing. By concentrating more on the employee and making sure that’s right, more often than not the task will just happen.
One of the best resources a company can have is a team of people working for each other. You know when a team is great because they decide, as one team, that they are going to do something because they know that they can make a difference, and they make this decision not because they have been told to, but because they want to.
Build a team:
Type in “team building exercises” into a search engine and you will see there are hundreds of events that companies can send their employees off to, and some of them are incredibly expensive. However, team building is about getting people working together, and this can be done relatively cheaply - this article will consider a quiz night as a means of building teams.
Why Choose a Quiz Night?
Choosing a quiz night for a team building event could be a good idea and here’s why.
It’s inexpensive. You can create your own quiz if you have the time and inclination, or you could buy a quiz pack for a couple of pounds online. You may wish to charge a fee for entering which could also cover costs of a few beers or pizza.
Secondly, it can be done any time with not much planning. A few hours after work should suffice, and you may be able to host it in the office canteen or down the local pub (you may even be able to convince the landlord to give the winners a free drink since you will generate him some more punters for the night!).
Most importantly though it will get people all pulling in the same direction - i.e. winning the quiz! They will need to reason with each other, give opinions, and with this will come talking and joking.
They can also be used in the wider organisation context. I’ve been to corporate quiz nights where there is a condition that you can only have two members of the same business function in your quiz team, therefore ensuring that people across the business meet each other and are almost forced (in a non-forceful way!) to interact and find out what they do.
Benefits:
The benefits can be far reaching - employees get to know one another and what they do making the business more transparent. It can help bring different business functions closer together and that can only help the organisation.
Once the people in the organisation start to get to know each other they are much more likely to want to help each other, and it’s at this point companies become great at what they do. The people in the business care and realise the impact of their work on others, and by wanting to minimise this impact they do the job better, and the whole organisation benefits.