Panasonic - Future Leaders Programme[/caption] Unfortunately, times can get tough within a business; staff members can feel under pressure and be faced with challenging situations. However, as a manager, it’s your duty to lead your staff through difficult times. Here you can learn how to lead your team and give them a light at the end of the tunnel.
For more click here
Forget about sending a company Christmas card this year , forget the bowling and beer for the office party! Why not combine a team building event with an unusual festive marketing opportunity by creating your Company Christmas song! An office Christmas party idea with a difference.
A unique Christmas team-building event and whatever a team’s level of musical knowledge or experience, Song In A Day will provide the tools and facilitation to allow your team to create and record a song in only one day, walking away at the end of the event with a CD containing the song they made!
Why not also video the finished performance to maximise the the PR opportunity and also have a different and distinctive way of motivating your staff!
The day will include improvisation, role assignment, creativity resulting from group discussion, drumming, strumming, recording and much more!
Click here for more information on this unique team building, office Xmas party and PR opportunity
All companies and organisations need to get the best out of their staff. With the UK economy showing positive signs of recovery many companies are now looking at recruiting new staff, adding to existing teams or just thinking ahead as to how they can reward their staff for the effort put in over what have been difficult times for many
In view of this positive vibe if you book a team building event/programme with us then we’ll give you an iPad Mini free of charge! A great team building gift to you for booking with us. So if you had in mind booking something very soon then this may be the catalyst you need whether it be a fun event, a developmental team building course or just a Christmas party event then give us a call or send us an e-mail for more info on team building services!
I think everyone would agree that building successful teams is much easier when the individuals work in the same building or area. The more dispersed geographically the more difficult the task is. This is for a number of reasons:-
1. People feel isolated
2. There's a lack of team identity
3. A "them and us" attitude can develop
4. Communication is often slow
5. The chance for shared experiences is lacking
How do you combat these problems? You look at ways of building a one team ethos. Read this article for more ideas on building a one team ethos.
For more information on our approach to team building visit our website.
When done properly designed team building activities are a great way of increasing workplace Productivity, however certain criteria need to be met to insure maximun ROI
9 reasons why you don’t need to spend on team building:-
Can you honestly say hand on heart that you can say yes to all 9 points above in respect of your organisation? We all know that the first thing to be cut during any economic down turn is the training budget; we also know that this is the wrong thing to do! The current recession and the very real implications that this may have for your business means that it is now imperative that you maximise the productivity of your people resource. Team building and team development have never been more important
It is a fact that a group of truly motivated individuals working together as a team towards a common purpose will achieve far more than a disparate group of worried and uncertain individuals-This is where a well designed and focused team development and team building solution can make a real difference to bottom line performance.
We are not however suggesting a “nice to have” one off team building event where the delegates get to spend some quality time together!
It needs to a process in a stimulating environment which you and your teams really explore, identify and develop the team behaviours required for high performance. How do we do this?
Visit the team building page on the Call of the Wild website to find out more
Twitter - @callwildleader
by Tony Schwartz | 9:00 AM November 8, 2012
What would contribute most to your being both happier and more productive at work? How about feeling truly taken care of, appreciated, and trusted by your employer?
More than 100 studies have affirmed the connection between employee engagement and performance, but the Towers Watson 2012 Global Workforce Study — 32,000 employees across 30 countries — makes the most powerful, bottom line case yet for the connection between how we feel at work and how we perform.
This new study concludes that the traditional definition of engagement — the willingness to invest discretionary effort on the job — is no longer sufficient to fuel top performance in a world of relentlessly increasing demand. The problem is that "willing" doesn't guarantee "able."
What's required now is something called "sustainable engagement." The key factor, the study finds, is a work environment that more fully energizes employees by promoting their physical, emotional and social well-being. I'd add to that mental and spiritual well being — or more specifically, the added energy derived from the capacity for absorbed focus and a strong sense of purpose.
"Many employers are pursuing a variety of wellness efforts, typically focused on giving incentives or penalties to people who embrace healthy behaviors like exercise, good diet or effective management of a chronic illness," the report concludes. "These are important, but to sustain energy, employers have to go beyond these core programs and embrace the notion of workplace energy on a far broader plane."
When they do, the consequences are nothing short of staggering.
In a broader analysis of 50 global companies, Towers Watson found that companies with low engagement scores had an average operating margin just under 10 percent. Those with high traditional engagement had a slightly higher margin of 14 percent. Companies with the highest "sustainable engagement" scores had an average one-year operating margin of 27 percent.
Forty percent of employees with low engagement scores said they were likely to leave their employers over the next two years, compared to 24 percent of traditionally engaged employees, and just 18 percent of employees with the highest "sustainable engagement" scores.
So what is energy, exactly? In physics, it's simply the capacity to do work. In other words "energy" and "capacity" are essentially interchangeable. In simple terms, energy is the fuel in our tanks — what's required to bring our skill and talent to life. Without sufficient energy, skill is rendered irrelevant. You can't run on empty and that's increasingly what employees are being asked to do.
Feelings of overload and burnout are default emotions in today's organizations. Nor is this likely to change soon. Higher demand and fewer resources are the new normal. Effectively addressing the issue of capacity — energizing the workplace — depends on the willingness of individuals, leaders and organizations to each take responsibility for their roles.
For organizations, the challenge is to shift from their traditional focus on getting more out of people, to investing in meeting people's core needs so they're freed, fueled, and inspired to bring more of themselves to work, more sustainably.
Specifically, Towers Watson concludes that organizations must create policies and practices that make it possible for employees to better manage their workload, live more balanced lives and exercise greater autonomy around how, when, and where they get their work done. Policies focused on flexibility and working remotely contribute to a more energized workplace, we've found, and so does setting organization-wide boundaries around the length of meetings and the hours during which people are expected to respond to email.
For leaders, the key is to begin thinking of themselves as Chief Energy Officers. Energy is contagious, for better and for worse, and disproportionately so for leaders — by virtue of their influence. "The manager is at the heart of what we might think of as a personal employee ecosystem," the Towers Watson study concludes, "shaping individual experience ... day in and day out."
Among sustainably engaged employees, for example, 74 percent in the study believed senior leaders had a sincere interest in their well-being. Only 44 percent of traditionally engaged employees felt the same way, while only a miniscule 18 percent of disengaged employees felt their managers genuinely cared about their well-being. No single behavior more viscerally and reliably influences the quality of people's energy than feeling valued and appreciated by their supervisor.
For individual employees, the challenge is to take a measure of responsibility for their experience, and not allow themselves to default into victim mode. It's bracing to discover how two people can experience the same workplace, and even the same set of demands, in entirely different ways.
Employees willing to take more responsibility for how they manage and take care of themselves — regardless of the sort of organization and supervisor they work for — end up feeling better and performing better than those who see themselves as victims. The mantra we use is a variation on the Serenity Prayer: "Invest your energy in what you have the power to influence. Don't invest energy in what you can't influence, and have the wisdom to know the difference."
A workplace that really works? It begins with employers and employees truly valuing and investing in one another.
Here's a short article on the Call of the Wild website about mental toughness seeking to explain how we react when under pressure and how best to combat it. For more information on our approach to team building visit the website.
More blog posts by Tony Schwartz
There has been and ongoing debate as to whether it is possible to measure the quantitative effect of management development courses. The existing evidence is somewhat contradictory and therefore Call of the Wild, as with all our courses, sought to find out if such a measure can be made in order to provide reassurance for the client that they would get a real rather than perceived return on investment.
The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in work performance after completion of a typical three-day outdoor management development (OMD) session organised by “Call of the Wild”. This session involved participants working as members of a team in a variety of outdoor challenges, in order to develop skills that would prove valuable if they could be transferred back to the workplace environment.
Click here for more information on the team development research
Visit Call of the Wild Team and Personal Development website to learn more about our Leadership, Management Training, Team Development and Coaching solutions.
