Working in hospitality is a unique challenge that requires a strong work ethic and endless determination. Dealing with last minute challenges and difficult customers can make hospitality work incredibly difficult, but learning to lean on your coworkers for support can help.
Having a good working relationship with your coworkers is essential for success in the hospitality sector. It requires communication, trust and an ability to work together to solve problems. These qualities are not inherent to teams and must be nurtured through different methods. Team building exercises are some of the best ways to develop better working relationships between those working in hospitality.
Why is team building important for hospitality?
When hospitality staff work well together, there is a kind of synergy that takes over. They are able to anticipate each other’s actions and understand the challenges they are all facing together.
Through empathy, they can support each other and achieve better results for their customers as a result. In turn, this will lead to happier and more productive workers who are more likely to be engaged with their work and less likely to feel burnt out at the end of a long shift.
Team building activities for hospitality workers
Hospitality attracts a diverse group of workers, and they might not stick around for long. With such a high turnover, it can create divisions between those workers who have been there for a while and the temp workers that are only there to meet seasonal demand.
This is one reason that regular team building can be so effective. It’s easy for workers to make snap judgments about colleagues, but it is only when they are put into a team building situation that they will learn to find common ground. This can help individuals to work together more effectively.
If you’re looking for effective team building activities for hospitality workers, try these:
Set the table challenge
You can be confident hospitality workers will know how to set the table, but what happens if one of them is blindfolded? With this challenge, one person wears a blindfold and is guided through finding the objects and placing them in the correct place on the table. It takes excellent communication skills to be able to articulate what the person needs to do. The person blindfolded also needs to be able to listen. This is a fun and engaging game that everyone will be able to get involved with.
Charity bike ride
Your team building exercise doesn’t have to take place in the workplace. Planning an active challenge like a charity bike ride is a great way to bring workers together behind a common goal. They can train individually or as a group and then will complete the challenge as a team. This is the important part; it’s not about winning as an individual but making sure that you can all pass the finish line together. This is what makes it a team building exercise, as they will have to work together and display considerable empathy.
Egg drop
This team building challenge will test workers and their ability to compromise and work together towards a common goal. The challenge is to make a container that will hold an egg securely and allow it to be dropped from a height. They can have access to materials that are found around a kitchen, like tin foil, greaseproof paper, rubber gloves and string.
They will have to choose the strongest idea and work together to make it a reality. This is often where teams fall down, as they will argue about which is the best idea and then some of the workers will drag their feet on the chosen idea. The best workers will be able to put their own preferences aside and get behind the team’s idea for the greater good.
Escape room
If you want to improve collaboration and problem solving, split your workers into teams and have them tackle an escape room challenge. Escape rooms are fun and engaging. They are also incredibly social, so it’s a great way to introduce new team members to the group.
An escape room will challenge the group to work together and solve a range of puzzles. These puzzles are rarely about intelligence and more about abstract thinking, so they are suitable for all workers, even if English isn’t their first language. They will have to work together to solve the puzzles before their time runs out.
Final thoughts on team building for hospitality
The best way to introduce team building for hospitality workers is to make it a regular thing and to vary the challenges. This will enable everyone to have a chance to shine and will avoid it becoming something that some workers love and some workers dread. Regular feedback from your teams will also allow you to shape the team building in a way that remains productive.
