The marketing team at Fitwise recently held its annual team development day, a day which was a combination of teambuilding and, of course, business planning.

• Business Planning: The day started with us looking at our ‘roadmap’, deciding where, we as a team, are on our journey to be the best marketing team possible. We firstly defined the attributes a first class marketing team would have, and then marked how close we thought we were to being that team and the reasons why. We identified areas that we still need to work on, and these informed our priorities for 2017, so we left with a department action plan. We completed this exercise two years ago and it was interesting to see how the market has changed, what technology has appeared and how far we have come as a team. 

• Teambuilding: Next we moved onto some teambuilding exercises. We started by decorating gingerbread men to reflect our personalities. What was abundantly evident is that we are a creative and happy group. It was helpful to share with our team how we viewed ourselves and what aspects of our life we placed in high esteem. Next we created a company ‘coat of arms’ for Fitwise – one panel to show a recent company achievement, the next to represent our company values and the final panel to show the company’s future. Both teams created remarkably similar images, both highlighting the fact that Fitwise has just celebrated its 25 year anniversary. Finally, we got to know each other a bit better by playing ‘three truths and a lie’, which is a classic ice breaker game where people have to guess which the bogus statement was out of the four options. Despite having worked together for years it became clear that we didn’t know as much about each other as we thought we did!

• Escape the Room: Next we moved offsite, we all had lunch together and then took part in Escape the Room. We were locked in a room and had an hour to solve puzzles, break codes and make our escape! This activity was the perfect teambuilding activity which encouraged interaction, creative thinking and brought us together, working as a team, on a common goal. We were delighted to complete the challenge in 48 minutes – one of the fastest team of the day!

We hope reading about our day gives you some ideas of how you could run your teambuilding day.

Here are some links you may find useful:

• Teambuilding activities (inc coat of arms): https://www.wrike.com/blog/ultimate-guide-team-building-activities/
• Teambuilding activities (two truths and a lie):  http://www.group-games.com/ice-breakers/two-truths-and-a-lie.html
• Escape the Room: https://www.escape-livingston.co.uk/