For many of us, team building days often serve an excuse for the team to cut loose, leave the office and get to know one another outside of the confines of the business’ normal hierarchy. While these are some of the most-loved aspects of team building, they are far from the only benefits.

At their best, team building events also leave participants and organisers with new information about the interactions of the team, ready to draw insights and take action to improve upon them in future. With virtual reality now extending beyond the realms of video games and into business, we explore the many benefits of virtual reality when used for team building.

 

The Goals of Team Building

Team building activities have been found by business schools and successful corporations to help in improving the interpersonal aspects of business.

Whether it’s helping your teams to improve their process of aligning around goals, improving the working relationships of team members, reducing ambiguity around team member’s job roles or finding new solutions to problems within the team, team building activities offer a range of benefits beyond the morale boost of an afternoon away from the desk.

But often, team building events are designed without any of the aforementioned goals in mind.

How can virtual reality be used to take better advantage of the benefits of team building, reach these goals and create more engaging team building exercises?

 

How VR Makes Team Building More Effective

Some companies’ approach to team building is to put all of the team members in one place, entertain them and supply alcohol for those that indulge. Typical options include ten pin bowling, crazy golf or more strenuous activities such as paintballing or raft making in rivers.

Though these activities entertain the team and are intended to help to foster bonding, they can be lacking in the way of any serious team building objective. As organisers of these events, we have the opportunity and responsibility to think ahead about our intended goals and ensure the activities we choose are tailored to achieve them. We have the chance to use the time more effectively to both offer light relief to the team and provide a genuinely meaningful learning experience that will leave the participants with new skills and a refreshed perspective on how best to approach the interpersonal aspects of work.

Virtual reality is already a commonly used tool for those looking to achieve these goals, and will only continue to grow as more people wake up to the benefits of being able to drop a team into any imaginable situation in the digital world.

As businesses like VRE continue to create purpose-made content for virtual reality, decision makers are becoming more aware of how these comparatively low cost events can be much more effective than traditional team building outings.

As well as the ability to place participants into any imaginable scenario, VR also offers benefits due to the tech-powered nature of the activity.

In virtual reality, you can watch remotely and learn more about how your team members really behave when faced with a challenge.

While this might all sound very serious for a team building event, participants are shielded from performance anxiety because in their mind, they’re simply playing a fun game with colleagues. Whether it’s a few rounds of VR Pictionary, a challenge to defuse a bomb or the team climbing Mount Everest, participants are left to approach the fun challenges how they see fit, while observations are made and collected behind-the-scenes.

Facebook recently introduced Facebook Spaces, a VR chat service that works with Oculus Rift, while companies like Bigscreen and Rumii are using virtual reality to bring people together regardless of their geographic location, for social and business use respectively. With the widespread adoption of virtual reality for a range of social and business uses, there’s never been a better time to try out VR as a team building tool.

 

Book Your VR Team Building Experience Today

Virtual Reality Experiences was founded by psychologists with extensive experience in learning and development, management and leadership programmes, assessment design and recruitment. Combined with our expertise in virtual reality, we’re able to help you use virtual reality to get much greater value from your team building efforts.

We will help you to define the goals of your team building event, can offer pre-existing or custom VR content to reach said goals and can help you to analyse captured data after the event has concluded.

As well as content and consultancy, VRE provides the latest equipment and enthusiastic staff who will strive to make your team building event a memorable and worthwhile success.

Contact us today to discuss your VR team building needs.