Are you like a kid in a lolly shop when it comes to choosing team training activities?
How do you decide which trainer will treat your team to more than a KitKat break from the daily chew?
What program will hit the sweet spot for what you want to achieve?
Maybe your choices in the past made you feel like an all-day sucker – the trainer promised a Wizz-Fizz experience but what you got was more like Sour Worms.
This time you want to make sure there’s a balance of learning and laughter, but it can feel like you’re negotiating a Rocky Road just to compare Toffee Apples with Chocolate Oranges.
Taking a swing at the program piñata can be hit and miss, even without the blindfold.
Here’s your Life Saver.
I’ve compiled a checklist to help you.
See, to be a Smartie about booking team communication training, here’s what you need to consider:
Does the program…
Engage participants with practical, hands-on, interactive learning?
Accommodate visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic learning styles?
Address your needs (yours and your team’s)?
Allow some customisation for your industry or interests?
Align with your organisational values and goals?
Have a validated evidence base?
Encourage fun and creativity?
Establish a trusting and safe setting for sharing and learning?
Cover verbal and non-verbal communication?
Connect self-awareness to awareness of others’ values, joys, needs, strengths, and stressors?
Celebrate diversity to promote unity?
Offer a common language to continue the conversation?
And does the facilitator…
Apply adult learning principles and neuroscience knowledge?
Have credible experience and credentials?
Understand what you want from the training?
Sound enthusiastic about sharing their passion for the program?
Offer online, in-person and hybrid delivery options to suit your team/s?
Ensure the training experience is enjoyable from enquiry to evaluation?
To make it even easier for you, True Colors does and I do.
Bella said, “What could be more fun than a training day?”
Cue the synchronised eye rolling and onslaught of leave requests for that date.
Training should be fun.
And the research shows that work is more productive when there’s a healthy dose of fun involved.
In Dr Bob Nelson’s book, Work Made Fun Gets Done, co-authored with Mario Tamayo, there’s a short answer to the question, “Is having fun at work important?”.
Yes.
The authors’ research found that 81 percent of employees at companies ranked as ‘great’ in Fortune’s annual “100 Best Places to Work For” list described their workplace as fun.
“Though fun at work is sometimes thought to be a distraction, research suggests that it has a positive impact on engagement, creativity, and purpose — increasing employee retention and reducing turnover.
“When we find tasks enjoyable, we’re more eager to dig in and complete them. When we make time for joy and laughter, we become resilient.”
Can fun boost productivity and learning?
The Social Market Foundation at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy conducted an experiment to find out if having fun at work is good for the bottom line.
Seven hundred randomly selected individuals were either shown comedy clips or given refreshments. They were then assigned tasks and had their productivity tracked.
For the people who watched the comedy clips, productivity increased by an average of 12 percent and, for some, as much as 20 percent.
A Loma Linda University study discovered that learning ability improved by 40 percent after participants laughed their way through a 20-minute video.
Does fun have to be funny?
Fun is subjective. It doesn’t have to involve laughter, jokes or slapstick shenanigans.
Fun can be anything that is not ‘hard work’.
It can be playing games, doing activities with people who share our interests, or just being with people who lift our mood.
It can be music and freedom to sing or dance along.
It can be solving a problem, competing for a prize, or being amongst colours, shapes and textures that stimulate our senses and make us feel good.
Just as playing with others and trying new things together helps children develop and practise communication skills, so does having fun at work, especially in training contexts.
Activities that involve listening, interpreting body language, and giving directions can be fun when you add props, challenges, role plays, and gamification.
Such elements can stretch us out of our comfort zones and into realms where we have to connect with our colleagues differently.
When we hear, see or do something we consider to be fun, we often repeat it to or with each other. We might tell others who were not part of the occasion about the fun they missed out on.
Why should training be fun?
Training for work is usually a group activity. Shared fun is memorable, and we associate the learning or new communication experience with the memory of the fun time.
The Queensland Brain Institute at The University of Queensland says we’re more likely to remember something we’ve learned when we have an emotional attachment to it.
Pleasure, amusement and enjoyment are emotional states associated with fun.
Educational experiences that trigger a positive emotional connection make the learning ‘sticky’.
If you’ve had bad training experiences in the past – and by that I mean boring, irrelevant, useless – then your first instinct when a training day is announced is probably to run and hide.
But what if YOU’RE Bella, the person who has to arrange some kind of training or team-building activity?
It’s a KPI, so not only do you have to pull a facilitator out of a hat, you have to magically make everyone else appear otherwise there’ll be no team benefit and no PD ROI.
Plus, it’s obvious something needs to happen to get the new team working together quickly and that requires trust – sooner, not later.
You don’t want to make that mistake again and spend more time on people problems than project work like last time.
Or that other mistake – assuming that because you don’t like giving up a day away from the desk to do training no one else does either.
Even if they do all turn up, some won’t come with an open mind because they’ve already convinced themselves it’ll just be a big waste of time.
Does it feel like your thinking cap is about to explode?
That’s not fun.
If you want more clarity about whether a team training and team building activity is going to help you achieve your objective…
And whether it will be ‘fun’ enough as well as sufficiently educational to keep everyone engaged…
There’s always at least one. Maybe it’s you. Maybe you wish it were you.
When I play the Song Colours Game 🎵 in a True Colors team-building workshop, the trivia titans are in their element.
Things can get pr-et-ty competitive!
Have you ever thought about just how many songs there are with a colour in the title or chorus? 🤔
I only ask about 10 of them in the Song Colours Game because the workshop is jam-packed with lots of other fun learning activities to get through.
But my playlist has another 18.
Why music trivia in a team-building workshop?
According to Lois Svard, a Professor Emerita of Music at Bucknell University who knows a lot about the nexus of neuroscience and music, there’s an evolutionary basis.
Archaeological evidence across the planet has revealed music to be an expression of group bonding in early societies.
“There is a shared experience in experiencing music together and it makes people more likely to cooperate with each other,” said Svard.
Cornell University researchers Kevin Kniffin, Jubo Yan, Brian Wansink and William Schulze have tested the effect of different types of music on the cooperative behaviour of individuals working as a team. They concluded that happy music provokes people to make decisions that contribute to the good of the team more often.
Music is emotive. It’s evocative. We associate it with experiences and our memory attaches connotations for future reference.
Same for colours. We remember good/bad, happy/sad feelings when we see certain colours again, which influences our responses to them and therefore our behaviour.
Remembering and re-associating colours in different ways stimulates our brain synapses to seek out new connections, keeping our cognitive abilities sharp.
Just like music does.
So, I put them together for people who are already in team-building learning mode, already primed for strengthening team bonds and benefits.
What’s your favourite ‘colour song’?
Mine’s Petula Clark’s “Colour My World” (of course!) 🎨
You know that uncomfortable feeling in your gut when you’re unable to progress something that needs to be done?
And the longer you leave it, the pressure just gets worse and more worrying?
Maybe you’re procrastinating, or someone else is and you can’t go further until they make their next move[ment].
Maybe there are other reasons for the project delay, like …
… there’s so much going on you’ve lost sight of the goal. … the task you’ve been assigned never really made sense to begin with. … you don’t have what you need or know who to ask to get it. … you can’t make a decision because you have too many options and no useful criteria for considering them all.
That’s constipaction.
Action that’s stuck, compacting, getting harder to shift and causing more discomfort as time passes; meanwhile, what’s stuck doesn’t.
Writer’s block is a kind of constipaction.
What you need or want to say is not moving freely from your brain to the blank page or screen in front of you.
It’s there, you know it, you feel it, but it won’t materialise, and with every tick-tick you hear towards your deadline, the discomfort intensifies.
It can turn into a completely different type of writer’s cramp.
Google writer’s block and you’ll find all kinds of common causes and strategies to overcome it.
Like when you have a project delay, a service is backlogged, or a task is churning in circles instead of flowing in the right direction?
The signs and symptoms of constipaction are easily recognised:
Forgotten files flattened to the bottom of in-trays.
Emails amassing in overwhelmed in-boxes.
Missed calls and messages marked unread.
Vexed faces in video conferences.
Milestones becoming millstones.
Deadlines disregarded.
Budgets blown out.
The major cause and culprit?
Crappy communication.
Not expressing expectations clearly and consistently.
Misinterpreting responses because there’s no shared meaning.
Words and actions that don’t appear to go together.
Too much or not enough or poorly presented information.
A Project Management Institute report revealed that ineffective communication is the main reason for project failure one-third of the time. It also has the biggest negative impact on project success more than half the time.
Pointing fingers, digging toes in, slinging salvos, shifting the goalposts, huffing, puffing, putting out spot fires…these typical counteractions rarely budge the boulder.
When the lights won’t switch on, do you call a plumber?
Nope, you contact the sparky to come and fix the problem. You get the best person to do it, so you can get on with what you do best. That’s the productive solution.
Constipaction can be relieved by engaging your team members in doing the parts of the project that are best suited to their strengths, motivations, and personality profiles.
In True Colors-speak (the communication code that every team can learn), this is how constipaction (a-k-a project delay) is avoided:
Get your Greens to design the workings and the work-arounds. They’re excellent innovators.
Begin your Blues on the people tasks, ensuring everyone has what they need to get on board and keep going.
Organise your Oranges to start on immediate actions, scouting the territory ahead to navigate any potential obstacles.
Give your Golds the jobs that track the timeline, tick the boxes, and tie up loose ends.
“Looks like useful advice, Leanne, but what if you don’t know who’s what colour in your crew?”
To figure out why your team’s output is causing more strain than gain, and to be rid of that gutful of blame-game, let’s get you a dose of True Colorstraining – stat!
It’s an evidence-based ‘treatment’ for understanding what makes people think, behave and react as they do, which has been transforming team performance worldwide since 1978.
Learn more about how True Colors can help your people work better together here so you can stop project delays sooner.
The Queensland Government’s Business Basics grants program, opening at 9 am on 4 May, supports small businesses who want to increase core skills and adopt best practice.
What are the core skills that underpin work success?
Spending a tight training budget on non-technical skills can be a difficult decision for smaller enterprises. The Business Basics grants program now makes it a whole lot easier and enticing.
I’ve checked out the application form and here’s how I can help you to apply pronto – if you want to strengthen your business with people who can communicate effectively with clients and each other.
To get started:
Download the application guidelinesand practice application formso you can see what info you need and you can draft your responses before uploading them to the SmartyGrants site – that way you can stick to the word limits.
Developing leaders to manage teams and represent the company confidently with personalised, one-to-one communication coaching plans.
Boosting credibility and outcomes from presentations that resonate with your target audiences by training your people on how to pitch their ideas effectively – in person and on paper.
Value
You could describe how these grant-funded activities will “enhance the core skills in your business and make it more competitive” with words like this:
Clear communication speeds up interactions along the supply and value chains, improving productivity, service delivery and customer satisfaction.
A team that understands each other’s motivations drains less of their manager’s time and energy with issues arising from communication breakdown.
Effective communication saves time and therefore money because there’s less need to respond to detail gaps, rewrite for clarity, or redo work because the brief was misunderstood.
Smarter writing styles reduce reading effort and the time between understanding and action.
Outcomes
When you’re describing the expected outcomes, you can mention:
Improved productivity with no time lost to unhappy employees taking time off for stress-related illnesses.
Reduced recruitment costs because staff turnover is no longer a worry – you’re not regularly replacing people who leave because they are unhappy or stressed about their needs not being met, which affects their motivation to give the company their best.
Greater confidence in projects being completed on time and within budget because communication has not broken down – a Project Management Institute report revealed that ineffective communication is the main reason for project failure one-third of the time. It also has the biggest negative impact on project success more than half the time.
Higher likelihood of securing investment for business growth, winning tenders, and improving proposal success rate from more proficient and confident pitching and presenting capability.
Action
Funding like the Business Basics grants program is snapped up quickly – especially when there’s no co-contribution required.
So, let’s talk about what want in your Presence Communications training proposal. Tell me in your email when is the best time to call: leanne@presencecommunications.com.au
