The purpose of team building is to encourage construction team members to express their views and avoid taking offense when others disagree. Team-building activities promote cooperation and help lift overall morale. While working together toward a common set of tasks or goals, a construction team can learn how to communicate and work effectively together.

Competition

Sometimes the best way to encourage your employees to work as a team is to instill team spirit in them through friendly competition. Since construction groups are often comprised of members with different skill sets, learning how to utilize each team member based on their own skills can be crucial to reach the team’s maximum efficiency. For a little friendly competition, break your crew into two teams and assign both the same amount of work to get done. The teams may do blocking, siding, painting or even framing. The goal is for the teams to organize themselves, delegate a leader and get the project finished as quickly as possible. Fun is the name of the game, so employees shouldn’t take themselves too seriously during this exercise meant to provide positive reinforcement.

Assembly Line

The goal in any business is to ensure that teams work as efficiently as possible. Sometimes this is requires less micromanagement and more employee communication. For any team, you want less friction and more compromise between employees when interacting in the field. That might require some well-defined employee expectations. Organize your crew in to teams with a simple, well-defined set of tasks to complete. These tasks can be separate tasks or a larger one comprised of separate activities, like constructing a wall, which requires cutting, measuring, nailing and more. Each team must decide amongst themselves how best to delegate smaller tasks to see the larger one to completion. After the task is complete, each member will also have to rate his or her experience working within the team, so the task is not only about finishing first but also meeting the needs of each team member.

Raising a Tire

For this activity, separate your crew into teams of three or four. Each team is given a length of rope, a tire, a tool belt, a hammer, a few nails and some duct tape. The goal is to raise the tire from the ground to the second floor. The problem is, the teams aren’t given enough rope to just tie around the tire and lift. They’ll have to work together to raise the tire high enough and construct an apparatus strong enough to hoist the tire to a team member above.