Every team and company would love a strong team relationship in their team and company. This is because great team bonding can creates great results. But sometimes it's hard to create one without having to spend so much money in sending the teams to courses and paying trainers to build the bridge. However, I discovered a great and simple teambuilding technique. All you need is a room and a round table. Yes, only round table, not square, rectangular pentagon or heart shape table. Force all the team members to use the round table as their work station (ask them to bring all their stuff including laptops) and make them work there for at least 1 month. After few weeks you will realize that the team will bond together and the walls between them is longer there.
I noticed this new idea when my office has to be evacuated as we are renovating it. So we have to move to our subsidary company for time being. We are given a meeting room with round table as our work place. Imagine 6-7 of us using the round table for few weeks. First few days, everybody was not comfortable and complain about the chairs, the smell of the room and even the view. Slowly after that I realized we started to talk a lot while doing our work. We discussed everything under the sky including the origin of drag queen, building our own country, celebrities gossip and even our own personal lives. Without we realized it, we started to have lunch together, buy food and share it and even have our own private joke. I noticed that a colleague that used to have lunch alone started to join us, two colleagues that weren't talking due to conflict (but only talk about works) started to have casual conversation and other teams started to motivate another team. We even have our official drink, which is Toastbox's Teh C (Starbucks & Coffee Bean are forgotten now).
You know what the effect of this changes, productivity has improved. People are no longer going home before 6.30pm and staying late doing work is not longer a burden. Everyone is having a good time while doing work. I no longer feel drag to stay at the office after 6pm when works was crazy. We even reminded each other about solat time.
This is the result of round table. It has no edges or borders to show whose area is it. We share the same space and after a while, we learn how to respect each other and also enjoy the works. So give it a try and see if it is working for your team. But unfortunately this method only work for team below 10. If more than that, it won't be easy to place everyone in a table and a room.
