Can freedom and playfulness turn your staff into team players?

In today's highly skilled labour market, people refuse to be treated roughly by their superiors or talked to with arrogance even by their peers. Furthermore, with the degeneration of the economic climate and business targets struggling to keep competition at bay, stagnating wages and the looming fear of redundancy are taking their toll on employee loyalty. Conflicts, disengagement and attrition are a constant worry for managers who know that team spirit can make all the difference between surviving and striving.

Most companies actively promote employees' engagement, sometime with great success. But faced with a lack of team spirit, HR departments struggle to find a solution. Classroom learning is suited to impart declarative knowledge but soft skills, such as team spirit, are intangible and rooted in implicit knowledge, the same kind of knowledge required to ride a bicycle or tie shoe laces.

People have shown us how to perform these tasks but ultimately you had to teach yourself through repeated trial and errors. Here, conceptualisation can support, but not replace, experimentation.

Extreme corporate boot camps were all the rage in the 1990s and are still quoted by some blue chip executives as a great way to forge and maintain team spirit. But rafting isn't part of day-to-day business, and favouring employees on their physical ability poses a serious and potentially unlawful threat to diversity at the workplace.

Unfortunately, beyond extreme sports and the great outdoors, the majority of experiential training programmes seem to rely on magical beliefs or pseudo-science, such as learning styles, Brain Gym and Neuro Linguistic Programming.

Improvisation-based training offers a potent way to learn soft skills, such as team spirit, without relying on a particular set of traits or beliefs. The practice gives each participant the experience of distributed leadership, switching from leader to follower roles dynamically and pro-actively, and embracing both point of views in turn. This allows them to experiment with the way they relate and collaborate with others and, in turn, increases their self-awareness and sociability.

Improvisation games and exercises are different enough from real life to offer freedom of choice, and close enough to relate to existing situations. During practice, failures are encouraged as a genuine sign of genuine risk-taking on the road to behavioural change rather than stigmatised. Described as 'real life with a rewind button', the learning experience takes place in a forgiving and collaborative environment before pervasively transferring into real life.

In short, improvisation allows participants to forge strong bonds through team play and learn by doing, finding out for themselves what works and what doesn't in the realm of social interaction. Such training enhances listening skills, assertiveness, negotiation skills, problem-solving skills, presentation skills and self-management skills.

It promotes the emergence of a team culture to support execution and facilitate innovation. The return on investment is to be found in the channelling of energies into a productive and co-operative space.

Imprology, a London-based training company specialising in improvisation, has developed a progressive teaching method to democratise the practice and introduce it to the corporate world. They understand that most people are nervous at the thought of making a fool of themselves in public, so they make sure that the learning experience feels safe and is agreeable for everyone.

Learners take time to break the ice and to warm up, taking part in group exercises where everyone is involved in any activity. Since all the participants are busy, nobody gets the feeling of being watched by a crowd of onlookers. Most games are simple and accessible, and calibrated to generate a light-hearted and positive atmosphere.

Mr Bertrand, who teaches improvisation in London and internationally, will be in Malta to conduct a class for beginners on October 28 at the Radisson SAS Bay Point Resort, St Julian's. This four-hour taster is for corporate workers involved in learning processes and team management. The cost for participants is €75. For more information, visit www.imprology.com. Booking can be made via e-mail at imprology@melita.com or by calling 2141 2652.