Opinion: Marketing teams strive on team building exercises

By Pamela Adongo 

Are you a marketing lead or supervisor finding it difficult to pull its resources to accomplish desired results? In terms of interdepartmental and intercompany relationships? Is there cohesion in the team? Do you appear to be moving in distinct directions? Perhaps team-building exercises are necessary to groom and augment resource optimization.

According to Forbes, team building is your most important investment, an excellent start with fringe benefits. A good, well-functioning team is essential in any work space. However, effective teams don't happen overnight. It takes time, opportunities, and being deliberate to function efficiently. One of the ways to ensure that the team is gelling well is through team-building activities like retreats to help improve productivity, morale, increase motivation, and encourage creativity at work.

There are many cost effective team-building ideas. Some include undertaking a course together, playing games such as spelling bees, board games and other competitive games allowing team members to get toknow each other outside the office space. Faster team chemistry is made possible, and people express themselves more confidently and easily, improving internal communication, increasing the team's mental and physical wellbeing, and lowering isolation.

From my personal observations, team building is crucial to refocusing communication, grooming teamwork, organizational culture, values and above all inspire each employee to discover how their individual purpose fits into the overall business strategy. In my opinion, team building must not be ignored and should be done at least once a year.

As leaders, we should consider planning and doing team building activities only once or twice a year if resources allow. This is because of the “forbidden fruit syndrome”, let me explain, when an act is frequent you not only fade out on ideas, but it drains dry the motivation juices within team members making it trickier to look forward to it. The idea of team building should make the team excited, encourage them to plan how their work will be navigated while they are away and mentor organizational skills because the organizing committee comes from within allowing them to understand team dynamics and how to tackle them.

This comes at the height of the Marketing retreat that the Next Media Marketing team took to Kasese; part of the activities included a Red Cross entry-level training on saving a life, a game drive at Queen Elizabeth National Park, and a boat cruise on Kazinga Channel.

These are some activities that help foster a high-performance culture, great team cohesion, increased productivity and once existence as transformer at Next Media, Uganda's leading media house.

 

Pamela Adongo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Next Media and the General Manager of Next Com, a Next Media subsidiary specialized in digital marketing in Uganda. She holds an MBA with University of South Wales, a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences degree from Makerere University and a member of Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK (CIM). She has over 10 years of experience in media and marketing leadership.