Essential Team Building Activities

As the manager of the sales department for a large company, I'm responsible for the performances of all my employees. When sales are sluggish, I try to use different incentives to motivate everyone. For example, offering bonuses and prizes for top performers usually seems to work well. But I've noticed that these type of incentives improve productivity for only a short period of time and that they result in a cutthroat atmosphere around the office, which is not what I intended. I want my salesforce to work together, not as individuals. That's why I've decided to employ team building activities from now on.

The first thing I did was contact the human resources department to let them know of my desire to implement team building activities among my salesforce. The manager over there told me that they didn't have anyone on staff that had experience in teaching team building activities, so she recommended that I use outside consultants for the job. After getting the names of a few local firms, I started calling around to find out about their services.

I was very impressed by the variety of team building activities these consulting firms proposed for my salesforce. Although some of the team building activities seemed way too intense for our particular needs (I didn't think a weekend in the woods was called for yet), many sounded like they would be perfect for us. For example, one consultant I spoke to said his team building activities consisted of games and exercises that would be tailored for our situation. Best of all, he could teach us these team building activities over the course of a two-day workshop held right in our offices. That sounded pretty good, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to get approval from my boss for the budget expenditure.

So it was back to square one for me. I didn't give up, though, and started searching for low-cost or free team building activities online. I actually found a lot of websites that contained some excellent suggestions for introductory level team building activities. I decided to try a couple of these first. Then, if I could go back to my boss with proof that team building activities work, I would have a much better chance of getting approval for this kind of training in the future.

Towards that end, I've scheduled the first round of team building activities for next week. I'm taking my role in the process very seriously and am spending a lot of time on preparation so that I can be a competent facilitator. I'm very optimistic about the effects these team building activities will have on my salesforce.

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