Let’s face it, you have some very valuable staff on your team. Individuals who can fix a broken irrigation system, expertly spot issues with playground structures, and create amazing-looking sports fields.
But even the best technicians can struggle when the team isn’t working well together. Just like your mowers and power tools, a maintenance team needs all its parts functioning in sync to work its best. And sometimes the team needs a little maintenance.
In this article, explore why you want your team operating at its best and how teambuilding can play a role. Also, get some starting points for engaging teambuilding activities that will help strengthen your maintenance team.
The Hidden Costs of a Struggling Team
Poor teamwork isn’t just an inability to function as a team–it has an overarching effect on your operations and agency.
Here are some examples:
Project Delays & Missed Tasks
Poor communication means missed details. With all that a park maintenance team has to juggle, not having all the necessary information in the right place could mean missed deadlines or tasks.
Increased Safety Incidents
Many safety incidents occur due to a communication breakdown. Your team can be exposed to unnecessary risk or danger if things like proper safety procedures aren’t communicated, a repair work order gets missed, or staff don’t know how to safely operate equipment.
Effective teams make sure safety essentials are understood and watch out for each other throughout the day.
Rework Needed
When a team is not working well together, they may assume others understand what needs to be done. Staff may not check in to be sure each person understands the specifics of a task. As a result, work may get done incorrectly, wasting time, money, and resources to fix the mistakes.
Lower Morale
Everyone wants to go to work at a place where they feel valued and respected. Teams that don’t work and communicate well together can make individuals dread going to their jobs. Plus, it’s easier for staff to get burned out when they’re not getting the support needed from their team.
Higher Turnover
Lower morale and lack of efficiency can create a toxic work environment that makes it hard to retain staff. Frequent turnover only makes the situation worse, as your maintenance team deals with staff shortages and finding qualified, reliable help.
What is Teambuilding?
Teambuilding is an evolving and ongoing process that allows teams to develop the skills and relationships to successfully complete their work. From a short morning team huddle to elaborate challenge activities, the goal is to strengthen the bonds of a group of coworkers.
Consider teambuilding as maintenance for your staff. It’s the kind of maintenance that you'd rather do preventively than reactively. Just like reactive repairs, if you’re seeking out teambuilding activities when there are already major issues, you missed an excellent opportunity to catch minor issues before they have disastrous effects.
Working teambuilding into your routines allows staff to consistently reinforce and strengthen their relationships. Effective teambuilding can unite staff and focus them on common goals, leading to better productivity.
What Teambuilding Can Address for Maintenance Teams
Developing a teambuilding program sets the foundation for your team's culture. Your team’s foundation is continually strengthened by better trust, communication, and focus.
Every parks maintenance team is different. Every team will take away something different from a carefully planned teambuilding program. Before starting to use teambuilding activities, assess the strengths and needs of your team.
Here are a few examples of how teambuilding can help:
- Increasing staff engagement and motivation
- Developing more effective communication strategies
- Encouraging collaboration for problem solving
- Clarifying work objectives and goals
- Cultivating trust and mutual respect
- Evolving operating policies and procedures
Example Teambuilding Activities for Maintenance Teams
Ultimately, you want to find and develop activities that are appropriate for your team and address the skills you want to cultivate. Here are some teambuilding activity ideas to serve as a starting point.
Skills Challenge Relay
Create stations with different maintenance tasks like measuring and cutting materials, basic electrical connections, assembling plumbing fixtures, etc. Have teams rotate through the stations. The catch: Only one person on the team can do the work. For example, the newest person on each team. The others on the team guide with verbal instructions.
This activity helps develop clear communication, active listening, understanding different learning styles, and reinforces maintenance skills.
After the activity, discuss how it felt to give and receive instructions. Use insights to help improve training for new staff and ongoing skills development.
“Under Pressure”
Set up some realistic scenarios that your team might face, like broken equipment, setting up for an event, etc. Give each team limited resources to develop action plans. For example, they may have a tight deadline, a lack of staff, or limited materials.
This activity helps develop collaborative problem-solving, stress management, and finding creative solutions.
After the activity, discuss how the team positively addressed the challenges they faced and what struggles they had finding solutions.
Knowledge Exchange Workshops
Highlight what each of your staff does best by holding a knowledge exchange workshop. Instead of it feeling like more of a traditional training session, set up the activity so that it is more hands-on and collaborative. For example, have staff nominate other staff to do a specific training.
This activity helps develop skills like mentoring, knowledge sharing, recognizing expertise, and building mutual respect.
Discuss what was good about the workshop and how individuals felt sharing their expertise and learning from others.
Conflict Reactions
Develop better strategies to handle conflicts. In a small group activity, maybe over free lunch, reflect on past conflicts. Acknowledge that it’s normal for teams to disagree, but the responses to conflicts can make a huge difference on how work gets done and teams get along.
Collectively create guidelines and procedures to use for similar conflicts in the future.
This activity helps to develop better communication, collaboration, problem-solving skills, and understanding of different viewpoints.
Discuss how the team felt while talking about previous conflicts and how they feel about approaching conflicts in the future.
Personality Awareness
Conflicts often arise when personalities clash. Understanding the different personalities in the team can help create mutual respect and understanding. Invite each person in the group to take a personality test, like the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. After taking it, allow them to learn more about their personality, what motivates them, what frustrates them, etc.
Then hold a meeting to discuss the different personality types on the team, why some personalities clash, how some personalities can see common ground, etc. You can do this while keeping each person’s personality type confidential or shared by choice.
This activity helps develop self-awareness and an understanding of how different people interact and react to the world.
Discuss what insights were gained from learning about different personalities and how they can use this knowledge in the future.
Tips for Implemententing Teambuilding
The groans will resonate through the shop if, on a random Tuesday afternoon, you announce to everyone you’re doing a “trust fall” to improve morale.
Plus, one teambuilding activity you found on the internet won’t solve every problem for your maintenance team. Just like your fleet and equipment need routine maintenance, so does your team.
Here are some tips to help make it a success:
- Start Small, Then Build: Culture shifts don’t happen overnight. Focused activities and meetings that affirm your department’s expectations are a good place to start.
- Find Activities that Apply: Most maintenance teams prefer to be hands-on rather than just discussing things. Try to frame activities around actual maintenance situations for more engagement.
- Address Resistance: It’s gonna happen. Have a plan for when it does. Acknowledge concerns and complaints and frame activities so that staff understand the benefits of teambuilding for themselves and the team. For example, “Remember last month when [something happened] and it threw everyone’s schedules off? If we communicated better, that wouldn’t have happened. Let’s troubleshoot some ways to do it.”
- Measure Results: Another thing that will cut out resistance is by measuring results and showing the improvements created by a stronger team.
- Keep at it: Teambuilding isn’t fix-it-and-forget-it. It should be routine maintenance for your team that can include monthly problem-solving sessions, quarterly skills exchanges, and annual team challenges.
The Takeaway
Teambuilding activities can be a great tool to galvanize your parks maintenance team and strengthen the professional bonds of your staff. A teambuilding program can be catered to meet the needs of your staff and help them develop new skills that will help them work more effectively.
Carefully chosen activities and exercises engage your staff and encourage collaboration, communication, and trust. Teambuilding should be an ongoing process for it to work best.