Selecting the appropriate team building programme can be tremendously beneficial in improving your companys general communication skills and levels of morale. Employees can be transformed from a random collection of self-interested individuals into a mutually dependant team of workers taking responsibility for their own actions as they strive towards a common goal. Not only this, but they will have more fun doing so after they know each other better and have built up a greater level of respect and understanding. As we spend the majority of our time at work, meeting our colleagues outside office hours to learn more about them and what their particular skills and abilities are makes good sense. And office environments occasionally become staid and routine, so a well chosen team building exercise enables colleagues to see one another in a different light, with the knock on effect of their being able to get more out of each other at work.

However the benefits of conducting such exercises are only felt if the right sort of team building is chosen. As such, it is worthwhile taking some time to examine the kind of workforce you have and what its particular strengths and weaknesses are when deciding what sort of team building exercises are most beneficial. You could view team building simply as a means of enabling colleagues to get to know each other better or use it to strengthen an area of your business that is traditionally weaker than the others. Whos to say, you might even consider it the perfect means of reinforcing a new corporate message, facilitating the workforces adjustment to working under new management or encouraging a greater use of lateral thinking. Whatever the cause, its worthwhile defining your goals and the new skills and fresh perspectives you want people to come away with.

Now we come to the question of what kind of exercise is appropriate for your workforce, bearing in mind that it is important nobody is excluded from all the fun and games. Perhaps your office is only constituted of athletic young men who regularly go to the gym and are in excellent health, in which case your idea of a Royal Marines type expedition inside the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter with only a swimming costume and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits is a good one.

Or your staff are exclusively constituted of Oxbridge educated members of Mensa, in which case your notion of extended sessions of Countdown and University Challenge might just work. Most likely, though, your workforce is constituted of people of all sizes and skills and the last thing you want is to make anybody feel they have nothing to contribute. There are two ways of handling this. Either you set different segments of your workforce different team building exercises depending on their abilities, or you find an exercise that includes everybody.

The remainder of this article lists ideas for team building exercises for the athletic Arctic circle group, the academic group of Mensa members and exercises that can involve both groups and everybody in between.

1. Athletic Arctic Circle Group

No doubt these young men and women are eager to leave their desk jobs and get out into the fresh air for some exercise, so thats exactly what well do with them. A weekend in the country should be just the ticket, where they will be able to stretch their legs and impress colleagues with their hand/eye coordination, survival skills, sporting ability, grace under pressure and general sense of fair play. Exercises facilitating this include canoeing, windsurfing, yachting, rock climbing, scrambling, archery, clay pigeon shooting and camping.

To add a degree of competitiveness and bring people closer together it is worth dividing the participants into teams and setting a challenge where a level of cooperation is necessary to be victorious. Ultimately brains win over brawn, so you want to include a degree of strategy and planning that involves the appropriate use of limited resources, a tight control of time and necessitates individual members of the team pulling their weight equally.

2. Mensa Members Group

This group expects to be intellectually challenged, and the trickier and more elusive the challenge the better. A good exercise would be to make them create a coherent story from a set of images which have been distributed randomly. Each member has a picture but is not allowed to show it, necessitating their use of the powers of description and suggestion. Good levels of communication and the ability to understand things from another persons point of view are necessary in order to recreate the story's sequence.

A similar exercise involves a scenario where a family restaurant has been inherited, but the business is very disorganised, with recipes written on torn bits of paper. Because the restaurant is due to relaunch with a grand opening that night, it is necessary to sort through the bits of paper to determine the ingredients and instructions for each recipe. Once again, good communication and management are essential to achieve a successful result. Your employees may be clever, but are they as good at listening to one another as they are at presenting their views?

3. All Inclusive Team Exercises

Such games need to encourage genuine involvement from the entire group, not just participation from an enthusiastic few, so a broad range of skills are required to complete the task. Objectives include the development of team building skills such as successful time management, planning, negotiation, job delegation, problem solving and communication.

Obvious candidates for inclusive team building exercises include murder mystery weekends, straightforward orienteering adventures and river crossing and problem solving challenges that can involve every member of the team. One final factor about team building to keep in mind is that the full benefit of the exercises will only be felt so long as there is some sort of assessment carried out at the end of the day to determine how each member of the team has done.

This article should have given you a clearer idea of the things to look out for and consider when choosing your team building exercise. Now the only thing remaining for me to do is wish you the best of luck with your creation of a more unified workforce better able to communicate with each other and get along. In this regard, its amazing what a game of something as simple as musical chairs or charades can achieve. After all, it aint what you do, its the way that you do it.