No one alone can deliver organisational change.
You need a team who work together, collaborate, accomplish and celebrate desired change.
There is no denying the fact that you’ll be more effective in achieving change objectives by helping your team members to embrace change, adopt to transitions and adjust to new roles and positions.
This article outlines 10 practical change management team building activities that can help you pulling your change team together.
Let’s dig deeper and learn what are those activities and how to perform these.
What are change management team building activities?
Change management team building activities are exercises, games and simulations that are designed to help groups of people work together to achieve change objectives. They activities aim to engage team members in change process and boost team morale during tough process of change implementation.
By working through these activities together, team members can learn to cooperate better and to build trust within the team. As a result, team building activities can have a positive impact on change team performance.
Why team building activities are important in change management?
Team building activities are important for mainly three reasons:
a) Team building activities can help to improve communication within a team.
It is no secret that effective communication is important for change management. Team building activities can be a great way to help team members learn to communicate more effectively with one another.
By working together to complete a task or solve a problem, team members can learn to listen to and understand different points of view. As team members learn to communicate more effectively with one another, they will be better equipped to handle challenges and achieve success as a team.
b) Team building activities can help to build trust among team members.
Team building activities can be a great way to build trust among team members. By spending time together working on team-building activities, team members can get to know each other better and learn to trust each other.
Trust is essential for any change management team to function effectively, and team building activities can help to build that trust.
In addition, team building activities can also help team members to better understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and to learn to work together more efficiently.
c) Team building activities can help to foster a sense of camaraderie among team members.
Good team building activities can help to foster a sense of camaraderie among team members and promote communication and collaboration. By engaging in activities that require team work, team members can learn to trust and support one another.
Additionally, team building activities can help team members to get to know one another on a personal level, which can help to build strong relationships.
Strong relationships are essential for effective team work, as they promote open communication and understanding. As such, team building activities can play an important role in promoting a healthy and productive team environment.
10 Best Change Management Team Building Activities
Now let’s look at 10 most powerful and impactful team building activities that are helpful in change management:
1. The Switch Places
The switch places exercise is a simple but powerful change management activity. This exercise helps team members to understand each other’s point of view and different perspective. The hidden lesson of this exercise is to manage resistance of change by knowing and understanding perspectives of others.
This change management activity motivates your team members to step outside of their comfort zones and consider alternative viewpoints.
How to do this activity:
- Create a circle of chairs and put an object in the centre.
- Once the employees are seated, ask them to look at the object and explain that object
- Ask them to stand up and switch seats after a while.
- Invite them again to explain the object from their changed position
2. The Four P’s
Make four sections with the phrases Project, Purpose, Details, and People on a large piece of paper or a board.
Ask the participants to fill out each column reflecting who change will impact on these four Ps.
This activity helps your team become change-ready. By preparing for potential problems in the future, this activity help you to reflect and generate ideas to overcome potential change-related obstacles.
3. Fishbowl Discussion
The purpose of this activity is to learn how to discuss an idea within a group where people have different point of views.
How to do this activity:
- Arrange eight chairs in a circle around a table.
- Keep two chairs free. The other participants will watch and take notes while standing around the table as spectators.
- For discussion, the facilitator briefly presents a discussion point
- The discussion only starts with the six inner participants.
- Give participants 10 minutes to have discussion on that specific point.
A fishbowl discussion seeks to involve a variety of stakeholders to develop inclusive decision-making procedures by opening up a clear channel of communication.
4. Force-Field Analysis
One particular change you want to see or investigate should be written on a huge poster or board. Label the left column “driving forces” and the right column “restraining forces” on your board by drawing a line along the centre. Consider what motivating factors will advance the transformation and what inhibiting factors will work against it.
Write a rating of 0 to 5 next to each force to indicate whether or not it will have a beneficial or detrimental effect on the change. Think of ways to strengthen the group’s identified driving factors and weaken its restraining ones.
This exercise’s major goal is to balance these forces such that your driving forces are more potent than your restraining forces.
You and your staff can develop the most effective plan to bring about the change if you and they are aware of the factors that both support and oppose your idea.
5. Can-do Company
Create teams of five to six people from your organization. Ask everyone to come up with a creative business idea. Every group member ought to have a responsibility, such as a strategist, designer, or marketer.
Give the new teams 10 more minutes to plan their strategies in light of their experience and knowledge. The best idea is chosen by a vote after each group has presented its suggestion.
Employees are frequently unable to comprehend top-level management’s viewpoint or the rationale for implementing a change. This activity help team members to understand point of view of each others.
Through this activity, it is shown how flexibility plays a key role in process transformation and how crucial teamwork is.
6. Cross Your Arms
Instruct the participants to cross their arms wherever they feel most at ease. Once they are relaxed, ask them to fold their arms the opposite way.
Ask them what they feel as long as they maintain their arms crossed.
The major goal of this activity is to make them realise that transition can first be uneasy and difficult and how change does not always feel uncomfortable. But if change is sustained for a certain time it becomes natural and comfortable.
7. The Ups and Downs of Change
Make a list of eight to ten words, such as transition, transformation, overhaul, process, adoption of technology etc that are associated with change.
Ask the respondents to go forward if they have a positive opinion of the first word and backward if they have a negative.
Following a discussion about the participants’ selections, repeat the exercise with each word in your list. End with a candid discussion on how to approach terms associated with the change in a more positive manner.
This technique enables you to identify which participants could be by nature more resistant to change and also assists in motivating them to view change as good.
8. Index cards
Make groups of three to five persons and give them 25 index cards and a roll of tape. Assign the groups five minutes to build the tallest structure they can with the resources at their disposal.
Ask the team with the tallest tower to destroy it, then measure which team had the tallest tower. Give each team an additional 25 index cards, and instruct them to construct a new tower in five minutes, this time without using tape.
Recalculate the updated tower measurements. By this, participants discover how supportive teams and innovative collaboration can help people overcome obstacles brought on by change.
9. Pattern Identification
This is a three-minute writing exercise for participants. Ask participants to write few lines about something and then after sometime ask them to keep writing their responses with their other hand.
Ask participants to reflect on their answers and their experience writing with a hand other than their dominant one once the three minutes are over.
Throughout this activity, participants can share their beliefs about how they think they deal with change and then observe their actual support networks. This aids in their comprehension of possible coping mechanisms for change.
10. Bounce Back
Ask your team members to make a pair of two. Ask each pair a ball and ask them to bounce it back and forth.
After a few minutes, ask each of pair how do they feel that whether ball would bounce back or not.
As the ball bounce back, organizations will rebound from the challenges of every change project.
This activity help team members understand and embrace change. People and organisations do rebound and recover after every shock and disruption created by change. Change is painful in the start but its becomes natural after sometime.
Final Words
Change management team building activities are helpful to make your team able to better adapt to change. These activities are good learning tools because these activities offer some hidden lessons of change management. Its good to include these activities in regular training programs for employees or in special team building or team retreat events .
