Many employees dread meetings because these types of events are often quite boring. Employees are often not encouraged to participate, and there is no real opportunity for teambuilding and growth. While meetings cannot be all fun and games, business should include team building activities in their meeting agenda. These activities will help keep employees motivated, alert, and inspired. However, the teambuilding activities chosen should not make employees feel patronized. These activities should be designed to help employees learn and aid in their overall development. Employees that acts as a team can be more productive and more profitable.

One way to motivate employees to fully participate in and cooperate with teambuilding incentives is to have them design the teambuilding activities. Employees usually design activities that will help develop their own potential as well as the potential of their co-workers. They will choose activities in which they are interested or that relate to their hobbies or other special interests. By allowing employees to have some input into teambuilding incentives, businesses can expect to have majority participation in these types of events. When employees are allowed to work together to design teambuilding incentives they will inherently come together as a team. This is the ultimate goal of teambuilding incentives.

Your client has hired you to plan an incentive trip for her top salesperson. She tells you, “So-and-so loves to ski and goes to Colorado all the time, so let’s do that.”

What?

If the salesperson goes to Colorado all the time, booking a trip for him there is certainly not an incentive reward. Why bother? He could book that trip himself. That it’s paid for by his employer doesn’t make it an incentive to do better.

Instead, see if you can find out the employee’s other interests or dream vacations, something he may never have done otherwise. Maybe he would like to take his wife on a zipline tour in Costa Rica or try skiing on water instead of snow–in Australia. You will need to talk to your client and convince her that a reward is a unique gift. Otherwise it’s like buying a beer for a brew master. Read the rest of this entry »