Over the past decade, mobile apps have become a big part of our everyday lives. The number of smartphone users is increasing by the day – there will soon be 2 billion of them. This trend isn'g going unnoticed by businesses and organizations, who're using apps to fuel operations as well as productivity and team building in their companies.
Mobile apps have the ability to cross the digital and physical worlds. They can turn the concept of team bonding into an engaging, up-to-date experience. Perhaps the biggest advantage mobile apps have is that they can make participants feel more comfortable while tracking work progress and providing data on the results.
Effectively, strengthening the bond between team members is always going to be a difficult task. While combining team building with modern technology is a relatively new concept, there a number of apps making it simple. Let's examine a few of them.
Let's Talk
In a startup that's just had one if its first rounds of hiring, the first few weeks with a new crop of employees can be difficult, as everyone is getting to know each other and finding out how to work with a range of different personalities every day.
Let's Talk is an app that provides questions to help get conversations started. It is designed to be a launching point for workers to get to know each other on a more personal level and get a feel for what kind of a person they are.
Let's Talk can be used during meetings or company outings to help bring your group closer together.
The Go Game
This team building game was designed in the heart of San Francisco and originally described as "a cell phone scavenger hunt on steroids."
The Classic Go Game is full of location-based puzzles which start at a venue of your choice and let the players explore an urbanized area in a different way. Typically, the outdoor zones cover an area of four to six blocks so the players are able to complete the game on foot.
As the game progresses from mission to mission, the players must work together and closely examine their surroundings for clues on how to get to the next step. Objectives are solved by taking photos and videos to meet creative challenges, and teams can go head to head in things like dance-offs and compliment battles. The game concludes with a ceremony where the photo and video submissions are compared and voted on.
The overarching goal here is to promote a workforce centered around encouraging creativity and teamwork where personalities get the chance to shine through.
Gelling: Akeakami Quest
Available for both iOS and Android, Akeakami Quest is a game that plunges players into a virtual world as they play the part of a tribe on the deserted island. All players must work as a single unit to restore the beauty of their island through a variety of quests. Each objective is designed to inspire commitment among team members and use their shared pool of knowledge to deliver tasks on time.
This game is great for any company to help build a solid team from the ground up, as open communication, trust, and respect are its central themes. The fact that the game completely separates employees from the realities of the work environment is a great way to get them out of their mindset and bring out ideas and qualities that might have never been realized otherwise.
Akeakami Quest encourages intellectual growth and problem solving while motivating team members to think collectively and take ownership for certain tasks. These core qualities transfer perfectly to the real world and can do wonders to increase productivity in the workplace.
Bonfyre
These days, employees tend to be more spread out as working remote becomes the norm. Regardless of where an employee completes their work, Bonfyre makes it simple to connect with everyone involved in your project or program.
The main objective this app aims to achieve is centralizing tasks and projects so teams can "sit around a bonfire" and share their thoughts and insights to aid production. This app can easily sync your contacts to keep everyone in the loop so they can interact, collaborate, and bond.
Bonfyre has lets you create trivia quizzes that you can use to convey company values and policies, or share organizational knowledge. You can also create pop surveys to gauge opinions from workers on the status quo and how it can be altered to work for everyone.
In addition to providing a great bank of content for company projects, Bonfyre includes an advanced analytics system to measure team engagement as well as sentiment, so you can catch issues early on and ensure there is minimal disruption.
Available on both iTunes and Google Play, Bonfyre is the perfect app to keep your entire workforce on the same page.
Parting Words
Dysfunctional groups can be detrimental to any organization. Team building is essential for growing a business, and high-impact learning, open communication, and problem solving are the ways to go about it. In the hustle and bustle of the business world, it is crucial to put employees in a work environment where they can feel comfortable in sharing their ideas effectively and demonstrate or enhance their skills. App technology is now helping us streamline this process and build teams that redefine agile working methods.
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Featured image: Sven on Flickr (used under CC license)