Outdoor Training: Train Your Employees to Bring Out Their Best

Train Your Employees to Bring Out Their Best

One of a company's greatest assets is its human team. The same company will achieve very different results if its employees are motivated, well organised and bring out their best, compared to ones who find no incentive in their work, with little to no initiative or lack of organisation when facing problems. Improving a human team's skills and attitudes isn't something that happens spontaneously — it needs training. And one of the most effective systems is Outdoor Training.

What is Outdoor Training?

Outdoor Training, also known as outdoor education or learning "outside the classroom", is training that boosts a company's staff's talent, initiative, creativity, aspirations and motivations, framed within a game or outdoor activity (climbing, caving, gymkhanas, survival, canoeing, etc.).

It shouldn't be confused with Team Building activities or adventure sports, which only aim to get employees having fun together and help build bonds with colleagues through playful team activities. Outdoor Training goes much further: it's an educational method that presents a problem to solve, assessing and boosting logical thinking, cooperation and leadership skills within a team.

Outdoor Training requires customised design specially adapted to each professional team's needs, delivered by highly qualified instructors.

First, information about the group is gathered to adapt the activities to the company's needs. Then the training is split into five steps: experience, share, interpret, extend and apply. The activities combine competitiveness, teamwork, leadership and communication.

Origins of Outdoor Training

It's no coincidence that Outdoor Training originated within the military of the United States and Great Britain after World War II.

Several schools began applying military training strategies to executives and senior company officials with the aim of improving their productivity and boosting their initiative in resolving conflicts. The excellent results and clear benefits meant this new "outside the classroom" educational system spread to all staff, with a noticeable improvement in interpersonal relationships and teamwork also being observed.

Why Does Outdoor Training Work?

It's a scientific fact that we learn 20% of what we hear, 50% of what we see, and 80% of what we do.

Outdoor Training focuses mainly on inductive learning, where you learn by doing and discovering things for yourself. That's why experiential education — what we learn through direct, hands-on experience — is so effective. The conclusions from this learning are instant and lasting.

Thanks to this type of training in an outdoor venue, company employees, placed outside their comfort zone in an unfamiliar environment full of obstacles, awaken their best instincts and improve their skills and abilities. The team strategies applied in this environment will later serve them in their day-to-day work.

Benefits of Outdoor Training

The improvements gained through this learning methodology are excellent:

• Improved communication and teamwork. To overcome the difficulties or conflicts presented, employees collaborate with one another, improving their camaraderie, empathy and communication. This cooperation and trust in colleagues will have a direct impact on their day-to-day work. The smaller the teams, the greater their involvement and integration.
• Increased commitment to the company. By encouraging camaraderie between colleagues, motivation increases, and commitment to the company and its work is also indirectly boosted. Employees perceive this type of activity as a reward — an "emotional salary": non-financial rewards that increase their trust in the company and their commitment to daily work.
• Improved initiative and decision-making. In the conflict-resolution process, the benefits are also individual: each person explores new skills and boosts the ones they already have, improving self-esteem and self-confidence, which translates into improved initiative and decision-making.
• Stress resilience. Teams learn to successfully face urgent conflicts, applying effective methods to find solutions while also learning to manage their stress. It also improves their capacity to react to the unexpected and their ingenuity in situations of pressure and change.​
• Boosts leadership and the ability to delegate responsibilities.
• Creativity. To overcome the challenges, logic and creativity will be needed. In this regard, brainstorming, brainswarming and other techniques are taught, which teams will later apply in their day-to-day work.

More and more companies and consultancies are adding Outdoor Training to their investment programmes — an educational initiative whose benefits and returns are clear to see. At Kaizen we're Outdoor Training experts — discover how much your business could improve with us.