Leading across culture – The Asian work style
Every country has a specific style of leadership that they follow in order to be global leaders. Taking into account how culture, personality and behaviour incorporates into their work style.
Asian companies have become a prime example for foreign businesses to understand how they are growing internationally. Particularly, the focus tends to be mainly on individuals leading across cultures and creating a change in the work culture altogether.
What makes Asian businesses a roaring success?
One of the most well-known companies in Asia, Samsung, provides diverse programmes like arts, music and history for the top management mainly to make them more aware of what is really happening in the world. This allows them to hone their skills and knowledge which they can then utilize in their respective roles and innovative strategies.
The companies in Asia Pacific have a very contrasting attitude overall when it comes to doing business across borders. They tend to spend time learning and visiting their peers which has quite a strong effect on the way they manage their own employees as-well. According to a survey conducted by Hay Group, Asian organisations are open to fresh ideas and believe in trusting their employees with the work that they are required to do.
Having said that, some may argue that their leadership style may not be suitable while leading across culture. A survey was conducted that showed that the top five firms in Asia prefer a dictatorial leadership style, which can either work or be potentially damaging to the company.
In spite of standing out amongst other global companies in their way of communication, Asian companies shine in the way they treat their employees. As a result, there is a striking growth and success in these top firms. The hunger for innovative ideas and best possible implementations seen in Asian businesses show a distinctive management style that has proven to be quite effective. Although the dominating leadership style found in Asian organisations may seem negative and unapproachable, their overall performance and creativity is something that intrigues the Western countries.
Cooperation and understanding between co-workers is one of the key factors in a company’s success. Customising team building activities according to your objectives and goals will surely maximise your benefits. One of the top corporate team building companies in Singapore, Jambar Team Building, has a wide range of innovative indoor and outdoor programs that will cater to your needs. By incorporating positive reinforcement into your colleagues, you will notice a change in behaviour and motivation.
A leadership style may defer amongst cultures, however, the perfect mix can create a strong and innovative team. Team building activities for work are a great way to increase collaboration and improve productivity. Having different people with different perspectives can bring out a great deal of out-of-the-box ideas and creativity alongside encouraging growth.
Team building activities allow teams to bond and spend time together, share fun filled moments and work towards a common goal that will make them work more efficiently. In Singapore’s hectic work-life, it is essential to take some time off with your colleagues and Jambar Team Building in Singapore is the perfect fit. Their vision is to allow companies to have an open and honest relationship with communication alongside building a positive team that helps each other in working towards one goal, which in my opinion, is a recipe for success.
5 Keys to building a Great Company Culture
When hiring millennials, it’s essential to have a great company culture. Despite being stereotyped as job-hoppers, millennials value loyalty. Millennials are often very loyal employees and in turn, expect commitment from their employers. Following are five keys in building a great culture for your company that will ensure your employees feel valued and supported.
Leadership
Each employee is motivated by different ways of leadership. Some prefer persuasive, paternalistic supervisors, while others favour democracy most. It is important to adjust your leadership style to suit your work culture and environment.
Make sure you communicate with your employees and that they feel comfortable in expressing their opinions to management. Communication is vital for employees to know whether they are on the right track for managing their own tasks, working well with their colleagues, and upskilling. This includes having regular meetings, individual catch ups, and corporate bonding activities with your team members. Having a positive work culture helps keep millennials motivated and engaged.
Appreciation
Despite the type of leadership style one prefers, all employees wish to feel valued. Employees want to work for a company where they are challenged and not berated. An employee’s relationship with their supervisors directly affects their engagement and passion for work.
Appreciate your employees for their hard work and dedication. This can take many forms such as compensation and benefits. Benefits and even simple things such as movie passes, spa days or gift baskets are great ways to motivate them.
Flexibility
Millennials have now graduated from university, with many looking to start a family. Their parents are also beginning to seek their support. Millennial priorities have changed to account for their children and parent’s needs. This can mean a traditional nine to five job will no longer suit their schedules.
Incorporating a flexible working scheme into your company will allow employees to cater to these needs. This could be giving employees the option to work from home or allowing them to choose their own work hours. Doing so helps to create a supportive culture in your company. When millennials know their homes and families are being looked after, they will naturally be more motivated and engaged with their work.
Development
Providing regular feedback about your employee’s performance is important. Let your employees know you are there to assist with their professional development. Set aside some time to establish clear career goals and work together with them to achieve these. Always remember to be available whenever your employees have concerns.
Be transparent with your employees about company decisions or their future career progression. Letting your employees know how their daily work connects to the company’s wider goals will allow them to be more engaged. Whenever good or bad news comes to your company, keep your employees in the loop. This will show your team that you trust them with important information, and will also provide them with safe opportunities to share their professional opinions.
Collaboration
Encourage employees to work together. Working in an environment surrounded by others with a similar purpose is attractive to millennials. Implement mentoring schemes where employees can exchange knowledge and experience. Organising social activities can inspire team building and allow employees to get to know one another outside of work.
Creating an environment where people are comfortable with each other will establish trust. This translates to collaboration, engagement and efficiency, which all improve your company’s culture.
– By Harper Reid, https://msharperreid.wordpress.com/
As a freelance creative writer, Harper has discovered amazing freedom in her working life – being able to take her laptop to the park is a great perk! Self-management is an immense responsibility, but Harper’s passion for writing means she now loves and enjoys her job 100%. You can visit her personal blog, Harper Reid – be sure to come say hi!
Team Building Ideas For 2019 In Singapore
This is a team building activity that helps the teammates gain self-awareness, get motivated and increase their confidence.
The activity involves using wood boards as a metaphor for the barriers that impede us from achieving our goal. Everyone in the team will relate their personal barriers to the wood boards by writing the barrier on the board and the outcome that they will like to achieve on the other side.
Each participant then commits their heart towards breaking the barriers through the wood.
The drone challenge is a team building activity that helps execute manoeuvres to win. You don’t need to have experience flying a drone; you will be guided through the basics.
Before flying the drone, some obstacles will be set for the drone to pass through. Ensure you fly the drone safely with your teammates to have 100% fulfilment.
This challenge is a good indoor challenge that sparkles conversation about the effect if a small change in the nearby object in the sequence. The domino challenge can be referred to as the cascading effect that happens as a result of a change in one part of the entire system.
This challenge explains that the good and bad attitudes in an organization are both likely to cascade. The challenge has got no rules because you can create anything you can imagine by tolerating and understanding others.
This challenge is a team building activities that allows conversation and building a relationship between team members by allowing them to compete to save humanity from the outbreak of deadly diseases.
The team is challenged to fight the emergence and spread of contagious disease and each member is assigned a certain role and unique skill to stave off the outbreak. It is a challenge suitable for a corporate gathering.
This team building challenge requires the active participation of every team member to get the desired result. Each team is provided with limited resources and they need to work together in a creative manner to build a boat.
Different teams present results to another after the design and each both are scored based on functionality and design. The final test is the boat race that will be done on the water where speed is tested.
This is an indoor challenge that tests your engineering ability and role as a team player. This challenge sees you and teammates build a racetrack out of simple materials. The challenge has specifications to be met and it depends on the translation you give the material.
The build phase of the challenge helps in building relationships among team members.
This is an exciting and fast-paced challenge where teammates work together to bypass roadblocks while racing around the city. The amazing race is a timed outdoor challenge where teammates perform tasks at every checkpoint with the aim of getting to the finish line as soon as possible.
It’s not just about getting to the finishing line; it’s about completing the tasks at each checkpoint and getting to the finishing line as soon as possible.
The F1 challenge involves creating your own F1 car alongside your team members to participate in the F1 race.
The team is supplied with materials needed for the design and the brand they will be designing. After designing and building the car, each team lines up their car from the F1 race challenge. Points are awarded for innovative design and good construction.
This team building challenge is inspired by the chaos theory and is of the concept that small causes can result in large effects.
The task in this challenge has a series of the device performing a simple task linking to one another. This challenge is a simple holistic challenge that tests for resourcefulness, collaboration, and creativity.
The challenge brings about confusion, conflict and gives room for settlement. As the challenge approaches the deadline, the tension rises. Time will tell if your team will succeed or fail in the challenge.
The Beach Olympics Challenge is an outdoor challenge comprising of fun-filled team challenges.
This challenge aims at helping the teammates display their team spirit by planning, working creatively, coordinating themselves and communicating effectively as a team to get the best result out of every task.
Graffiti artist all about spray painting but it is more fun when it is done as a team. Graffiti art is a good team building activity because doing the spray painting as a team creates a shared sense of purpose, responsibility, creativeness, and cooperation.
The challenge is ideal for launching creative projects, celebrating summer outings, celebrating milestones and launching community service.
Art Jamming is a team building activity that is productive and positive when done in a relaxed environment. The challenge operates on the “feel flow approach” using the sensitive mindset to trigger creativity.
This is a fantastic concept that involves building a terrarium.
A terrarium is a sealable glass that houses plants and soils and has an opening for maintenance purpose. A terrarium is mostly kept as an ornament and the Terrarium making a challenge is about building a terrarium in a creative, fun-filled and eco-friendly manner.
Embrace Change Through Team Building
It’s an undisputed fact that change is constant in life. The word change is a six letter words that evoke dread in many, excitement in others and fear in some. But looking at the term change holistically, we will all agree that change simply means picking up the pace.
Importance of change!
The importance of change in every aspect of life cannot be overemphasised. This is why team building is one of the ideal ways to embrace change. It is also important we understand that without change, growth is impossible.
How change is constant!
The old saying “the only constant thing in life changes” explains that life changes, face changes, methods and strategies changes, procedures changes and lots more. Most of us tend to deal with the little changes in our daily activities and lifestyle but brands need to deal with changes from a unique perspective which is why team building is instrumental.
Let’s take a real-life example to explain this. Think of life like you need to pass through a forest before you get to your destination.
While passing through the forest you might encounter different wild animals that are more powerful. If you try to show how strong you are, you might end up not getting to your destination.
This is because the wild animals in the forest are more powerful than you. If you try fighting every animal you come across, one of the animals will outshine you and kill you. That sounds scary but true. You need to apply different strategies to scale through the forest.
Embrace changes, go through the forest with your team and achieve the best result within the shortest time frame. But remember you have to be headstrong to survive the journey while in the forest.
Embracing change makes progress significant!
Have a deep thought on the times you had significant growth. Was the growth as a result of your personal effort or as a result of teamwork?
Most significant growth is synergetic and can be seen as the effort of the people around you. The major impact of the team is that they help you achieve more than what you expect, team building also helps you push beyond your limit.
Change results in progress. To make progress, there is a need to make a sacrifice, get outside your comfort zone, conquer obstacles, and do better next time before the growth becomes significant.
Humans and brands rarely accomplish the feat of making progress as a result of embracing change themselves. Most time the significant progress is as a result of a little push. The little push is the perfect definition of the role change plays.
How an organisation can embrace change through team building?
The answer to this is not far-fetched and it needs little or no explanation. An organisation will embrace change through team building by working holistically and sharing roles among team members.
Working holistically will help them achieve perfect result because the progress and change are not measured individually but as a whole while sharing roles makes each team members an expert in their respective fields.
Jambar team building is the one stop shop to help support and engage your team throughout the journey of making progress. We are the number one team building provider in Singapore and we help you embrace organisational changes by aligning values and assigning roles.
Team Building Trends 2019
Do you know how team building events elevate your company? Very simple answer is by building better relationships between you and your employees, increasing productivity and driving high performance by each and every member in the team. Remember that business is not about just business; it’s about relationships. Cultivating and nourishing strong, positive relationships with your team members is the definite key to success.
The team within an organisation must learn and practice effective and productive collaboration with each other. This can be achieved through team building exercises that increase trust between group members. Team building events are not just fun but challenging at the same time to motivate employees to get higher performance. Therefore, if you are planning to enhance the team performance to get success, here are some ideas of top team building trends for 2019.
Innovative challenges
How exciting it would be to perform some innovative exercises being a drone pilot? No worries if you are inexperienced, team facilitator will guide you and the team in the Flight School to get the challenge. Every one in the team will get a chance to fly drone and overcome the obstacles designed and constructed by the other team.
The Airplane Challenge
We have the most innovative challenge of 2019 to boost your creative and out of the box thinking. Your team will have to make a simple airplane with the help of just a paper and a motor controlled by a smart phone to do tricks ad even take off from the ground. Your competitor team will also create the same plane and race their planes to show off their proficiency.
Collaborative challenges
The Virus Challenge is an excellent way to think and fight against the threatening diseases to humanity. In the challenge your team will be placed in charge of a worldwide health organization, and with each team member assigned a unique set of valuable skills, your team will have to mobilize quickly and exploit every possible resource to stave off new outbreaks. With the next epidemic only seconds away, teams must work quickly to overcome the odds and find a cure.
It is an outdoor tablet – based activity in which teams are made to find different objects, solve crazy puzzles and carry out various missions. Timely response and positive results are the qualities to get points.
Creative challenges
This indoor activity is created to evaluate your engineering abilities, you are given dowels, tape and cardboard to design and construct a racetrack. Teams will experience new relationship and extra bonding while building their section of bridge in a limited time. Then the team members will bring out their remote-controlled cars and engage in a mini-Grand Prix!
One of the most popular fun activities is cardboard boat building challenge. Teams are given few objects like card board, packing tape and some crayons to design and build a functioning boat. Creativity is tested in their designs and functionality, and then boats are brought to the water and put to the ultimate test: a boat race. Paddle fast and reach the finish line before you spring a leak!
Adventure challenges
This exciting challenge starts with a general map and some clues on it. These clues consist of architecture, monuments, currency and some art works to find out a buried treasure. The most cooperative team with the passion to succeed wins the activity. This game is an interesting way to learn history and culture and it shows the importance of communication in team.
This amazing race is designed like a reality TV show aired in early 2000s. Your team will compete with other teams in different check points. Every check point will have some ROAD BLOCK tasks to complete within the time allowed. You will find these ROAD BLOCK activities highly engaging and thrilling. The goal is to reach at all the stations in the shortest time possible. You will learn time management and enhance problem solving ability through this game.
Interactive challenges
Breaking Barriers
Breaking Barriers is the best activity to identify and overcome your fears inside, holding you back from achieving your goal. Participants are given wooden boards to write down their fears and what they have not achieved due to these fears. These wooden boards are then physically broken by the participants to show their power of focus and develop confidence. The game works as a motivation booster for the team members as a whole.
Your team will have to solve a murder mystery with the help of some evidences. It will be up to you how you collect the right information and avoid the rest to reach out the murderer. The activity enhances your analytical skills.
Team building is an ongoing process that begins with hiring and promoting the right team members in challenging environment of a company. It is the process of helping team members’ work efficiently to achieve positive results.
Team Building Activities for Work
10 Fun-Filled Team Building Activities for the Workplace
The idea of team building activities for work is mainly based on the principle that, fun-filled activities lead to improved motivation, which translates to higher productivity. They help in common areas such as communication skills, problem-solving, decision making and also adaptability for new employees. These activities also help in fostering a vibrant teamwork in the workplace. Teamwork is one of the essential determinants of how successful your company will be.
This article will look at ten team building activities for work that will see your employees have a renewed focus and improve on their productivity. They include:
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Two truths and a lie
How it is played
Have your employees secretly write two truths and a lie about themselves on a sheet of paper. Once they are through, allow fifteen minutes of discussion time. This is where employees quiz each other on their individual three questions. The primary reason is to convince your peers that your lie is actually a truth.
After the discussion time is over, have your employees gather in a group and let each read aloud their statements, as the rest vote on which they think is a lie. Points are given to those with the right guess.
Objective
This game helps improve communication skills in your work leading to a collaborative workstation hence improved productivity.
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Scavenger Hunt
How it is played
On a beautiful sunny day, have your employees gather into groups. Then, release them and let them wander around the street. Once departed from the office, have your scavenger (an employee who will hunt down other employees) hunt around the city.
Objective
The goal of this activity is to improve the mental health of your employees. They enjoy the warm weather and the clean air when outside hence feels rejuvenated.
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Winner/loser
How it is played
Employee A will have to tell of a negative situation at the workplace to employee B. then employee A discusses the same ordeal, but this time focuses on the positives. Employee B helps identify the silver lining of the experience.
Objective
It is meant to encourage employees to dwell on the positive side of any experience in the workplace.
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The mine field
How it is played
The first step is to find an open field near your workplace. Spread objects such as balls irregularly across the field. Have everyone pair up and choose one of the two to be blindfolded. His partner is to guide him or her from one end of the open field to another without stepping on the objects.
Objective
It focuses on communication skills, trust, and efficient listening. With such skills enhanced, there should be a collaborative environment in the workplace.
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Code of conduct
How it is played
Groups write on whiteboards what really matter to them. It is an activity that builds consensus on shared values. Perfect to be played during seminars and workshops.
Objective
It aims to build trust among employees and also establish team values.
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Campfire Stories
How it is played
Employees are divided into groups. The groups gather in a circle and each member shares his or her experience in the workplace. Through the game, they learn and understand each other as well as share memories.
Objective
To encourage employees to open up about personal and work-related issues. Through this game, they get the courage to ask for help from colleagues. A helpful environment leads to a productive employee.
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Memory wall
How it is played
Teams write down their shared memories, then place them on a wall. It remains upright all along the event acting as a pivotal point of the team’s camaraderie.
Objective
This team building activity fosters mutual relationships among employees. Healthy friendships in the workplace pave the way to a very productive workforce. Why? Friends seek to help those stuck and share success tips.
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The Domino challenge
How it is played
Teams work together to arrange blocks in a chain without falling any of the blocks. Once the last block is placed, the team is to stand back and watch the dominoes fall, which creates an amazing effect. The game involves a lot of brainstorming and creativity to come up with unique designs. It is offered by the Jambar Team Building.
Objective
This team building activity is meant to build patience in employees as they arrange the blocks. It also enhances their creativity as they come up with unique designs. Creativity and patience are employee elements that enhance productivity in the workplace.
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Cross Team Word challenge
It is meant to challenges employees with the overall knowledge of the company’s policies and values. The team building activity encourages team spirit and a better understanding of the company’s culture. This team building activity is offered by the Jambar Team Building.
Objective
It is meant to pull employees out of their comfort zones and interact with colleagues. It also encourages employees to speak their mind out on workplace issues.
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Bridging the gap
This fun-filled team building activity involves the creation of racetracks. Teams are assigned with different designs, whereby they use tools such as cardboard, tapes, and dowels. The building phase involves a lot of bonding, creativity, and brainstorming. In the end, teams present their designs and points are awarded according to their racetrack designs.
Objective
This team building activity offered by the Jambar Team Building fosters collaboration and creativity. Team members work together to come up with the best designs. Collaboration means that employees work on work-related issues as a team, saving time and resources which leads to enormous productivity.
You need to incorporate team building activities for work to foster collaboration, creativity, better communication skills and problem-solving skills. This way, your company is bound to improve its productivity.
