What I Learnt From Our Team Building Session.

During our visit at Camara Education.

Team building is the action or process of causing a group of people to work together effectively as a team, especially by means of activities and events designed to increase motivation and promote cooperation.

At Tunapanda Institute, we recently had our 2018 team building session in Mombasa over the Easter holiday.

From a personal level, there are some few things I learnt on why organizations should have team building sessions.

Team members are the foundation of any successful organization. It’s therefore, essential that your team is working effectively together. Below are some of the benefits I learnt that come with well planned team building sessions:

Improve your team’s weaknesses and build on their strengths — no matter how strong your team is, there are always certain elements you can improve. With a team building retreat you can specifically target areas for improvement, with a clear purpose, educational goals and specifically choosing certain team building activities that will develop these goals. For instance at Tunapanda our focus has always been on team unity and ensuring that all of us have a common sense of belonging by appreciating each other through our diversity.

During one of our activities at the Nyali Beach.

Be proactive — Sometimes it is challenging to foresee or spot potential challenges within the team during normal work conditions. These challenges might be in terms of relationships or communication. A team building retreat gives you the opportunity to shut the laptops and phones down and be completely proactive about the issues you’d like to work out. The retreat gave us a chance to get to know each other at individual levels. What are the aspirations, fears , concerns or what success looks like for our team members. Such things are rarely discussed in an 8 to 6pm work environment.

Bring your remote team together — At the beginning of the year, we came to an agreement as an organization that we will be able to allow some members to work part time or full time as along we responsibly adhere to the guideline we set as a team. For the past 4 months, some of our team members including our co-founder, Jay Larson has been working remotely. This past team building was very effective. Most of our team members had chance to meet Jay B, one of Tunapanda’s director from the US.

Investing in your team — Most team members don’t actually believe their organizations are working together as effectively as they could be. That’s generally because most organizations aren’t investing in the right type of training and resources that will develop their teams. Organizing retreats allows such organizations to really focus on valuable team building exercises. In our case we focused on empowering all our team members about the Blockchain technology. After the retreat, we have had numerous discussions and all members can confidently describe a thing or two about this latest wave of technology.

In our next publication we will talk about the challenges and the lessons learnt while organizing a team building retreat.