Team Away Day

Sometimes it Takes a Day Out to Really Benefit from Team Building!

A team away day is an event staged by a company in an effort to build a better work team. It can be done in-house, using the company's own resources, or through bringing in the necessary expertise to do it, or it can more usually be outsourced to a dedicated provider who will have everything that is required at their own premises.

When a group of workers who work together as a team come together in a more relaxed social setting, rather than the more austere and formal work setting, they tend to behave differently. Those who are normally controllers or supervisors lower their normal vigilance and behave with a much higher degree of flexibility, while those who are normally told what to do tend to behave less timidly and become more assertive.

This can often be the core value of a team away day. While they may learn new strategies for working together and new ways to adapt changing circumstances to everyone's best advantage, the things that are learned, often at a subliminal level, can sometimes have the greatest overall long-lasting impact.

Through the new found group interaction of a more relaxed and informal attitude, each individual member of the team starts to see the other team members in a new light. This is mainly because they are behaving in a more natural way, and not in the formal, stiff manner of a restrictive work place. When this happens an accurate evaluation of the real person becomes possible.

Team members start to pick up certain nuances that they hadn't noticed before. They start to learn how other team members think about certain things, and they start to learn how they naturally work in any given situation.

Often this doesn't happen so readily in the work place, and as a result it is not easily picked up on, but in the much more relaxed atmosphere of the company team away day there is considerably added scope for each member discovering the real person that they thought they already knew.

When team members discover some of the inner workings of their fellow team members' minds, in regard to the work they all do, they also learn to adapt to a much more natural way of group interaction. This results in a more tightly cohesive team that doesn't have to search for hidden meanings to everything. They instinctively know the answers and their work shows it too.

Team away days do of course need a structure and pattern. The facilitator of these events needs to understand the aims of the company and needs to design the away day around them to better obtain the desired results. However, it is often the underlying subliminal learning pattern of natural group interaction that provides the best results.