Integration of employees does not mean just gathering a group of people in one place and leaving them to fend for themselves. It is a whole set of psychological tools aimed at bringing employees closer together and teaching them how to work together. One of these tools is an integration game that helps to build appropriate relationships that help to achieve common goals more effectively.
The basic benefits of regularly organized team-building games include: strengthening cooperation, improving communication, building trust between employees, helping to create an appropriate organizational culture, increasing job satisfaction, improving the company's image and increasing the company's productivity and efficiency. It is therefore not surprising that more and more companies implement them into their activities.
What should an effective integration game look like?
Integration at work is crucial for building a sense of belonging to a group and developing cooperation between team members. An integration game helps strengthen communication in the company, build trust between colleagues and develop soft skills. Through a series of challenges, tasks and puzzles, it naturally motivates cooperation, allows you to take a break from everyday duties and spend time pleasantly, which significantly affects the participants' mood and morale.
The integration game is essential to breaking the ice, improving cooperation and overcoming communication barriers. It includes deliberately organized challenges, which are an important element of human resource management. Its task is to cement the group, and by obtaining knowledge about individual team members, it is possible to better delegate tasks and achieve common goals more effectively.
An important part of building an effective team is a temporary change of environment, which causes a break from everyday life. An integration trip helps workaholics forget about work and responsibilities for a while, and quarreling colleagues forget about the conflict.
Building a team is much cheaper than replacing employees, which is why more and more companies decide to invest in the so-called teambuilding. It is important that during team-building games, the team is accompanied by an experienced psychologist who will draw appropriate conclusions to support the effectiveness of the team and individual employees. An integration game is not a game that evokes emotions. It is working with these emotions, using tools that we associate with fun and something pleasant. An interesting idea is, for example, integration workshops in the mountainswhich additionally give the opportunity to commune with the beauty of nature.
Integration game - examples of traditional games
One of the games supporting the integration of team members is storytelling. The fun is that all people, in turn, add their one sentence to the previous ones. So that it all adds up to a meaningful story. Beforehand, we can determine the theme of the story or the point that the participants must reach.
The popular "truth or dare" is also an effective integration game. It involves selected people deciding whether they would rather answer a question asked by the previous player or take up the challenge of completing a given task. In order for the game to bring appropriate results, the rules must be established in advance and what questions and challenges should be avoided.
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An integration game that helps group members get to know each other much better and feel more comfortable in each other's company is the "truth, lie, truth" game. It consists in the fact that a randomly selected player presents three facts about himself, one of which is made up. The task of the group is to point out the lie.
The most popular integration game, organized especially during trips, is treasure hunting. We divide the team into several subgroups. Then we assign them a specific list of tasks, challenges and tips that allow them to move on to the next stages and ultimately discover the location of the treasure. You can organize the game yourself or use private escape rooms, where the goal is not to discover the treasure, but to escape from the room within a certain time.
Integration game - examples of online games
Team building games cannot always take place, e.g. due to restrictions related to the pandemic. For the same reason, remote work is becoming more and more popular. And although it has undoubted advantages, both from the point of view of the employee and the employer, it has one basic disadvantage. If handled incorrectly, it has a destructive impact on building interpersonal relationships. To avoid this, all you need is an appropriate integration game using online tools.
One of the most popular games that can be carried out on video chat or using survey forms is a test of knowledge about individual members of the group. A few days before the date of the fun, the organizer sends players a list of questions. Based on the answers sent back, the organizer selects several facts, and the task of the participants is to assign a given fact to a specific person. The one who manages to collect the most correct ones wins matches.
An interesting integration game, tailored to the digital reality in which we operate, is the so-called “emoticon puns.” Players divided into groups try to guess, for example, the titles of movies and TV series, using only emoticons.