Benefits of Team Building Cooking Classes

Experienced managers in corporate settings are often on the lookout for rewarding and enjoyable ways to help employees build team skills. Team building cooking classes are one of the newer types of team building activities that are gaining popularity because they’re immersive, practical, and fun. 

Benefits of Team Cooking Classes

Team building cooking classes (also known as corporate cooking classes) are a relatively new method of bringing out the team players in your employees. You can be sure that these classes will be refreshingly effective and a worthwhile step to creating a more productive working environment.

1. Practice teamwork skills:

A team building cooking class can encourage and bring out plenty of beneficial traits in participants:

• Setting goals: The combination of having to complete the dishes with limited ingredients and a time restriction, motivates teams to produce something with what they’re given. This prepares them better for the office setting: working towards a certain standard in a short time-frame together.  
• Patience: Obviously, not all people have the same cooking skills and experience, so in a team building activity like cookery, teammates must practice the important skill of patience: they must help and encourage slower teammates to keep up the best they can. 
• Positivity: During the team building cooking class, things often go off track, as they with collaborative assignments in the workplace. The most important thing to do is to remain positive and work through the issue, and you can train this mentality using team building activities. Additionally, if the dish turns out to be less than expected, teammates can learn to accept the results and rather than to blame others, because the dish they made was a result of their hard work. It’s healthier to reflect and improve upon failures in order to do better.

2. Team bonding:

Colleagues can get to know each other when cooking as a team. As a result, they can better play to each other’s strengths in collaborative works, creating mutually beneficial social relationships. Your employees will become more willing to work together in the future. Good relationships outside the office environment will improve working relationships in the office, boosting productivity among each other.

3. Getting out of comfort zones:

Cooking is a new skill for many, and therefore, participating in a team cooking class can help make people more open to trying something new. This can translate to the workplace with greater confidence in embracing new strategies.

For some, the class may be a chance to learn about and try, new foods and food trends that are worth checking out. This is especially true if you combine the team building cooking class with a healthy cooking class. In this way, even experienced cooks may have their horizons expanded and be encouraged to take on healthier cooking styles.

4. Helping boost self-esteem:

In a non-competitive setting like the cooking class, teammates can build their confidence and push their personal boundaries at a comfortable pace. For individuals with lower self-esteem, this gives them a chance to do their part, where they would otherwise fade into the background behind their more vocal colleagues. When cooking in a group, every teammate is given something to do, encouraging equal contribution and everyone’s voice being heard. In turn, this can boost confidence and help more introverted workers to provide more input in the workplace.

5. Having fun:

Everyone likes food, and cooking food in a good, cooperative group can be immersive and enjoyable (especially given the results). This can be an important experience to reset the attitude of team members, especially those who have had previously only associated the team environment with stress, and hard work and possibly even conflict. The team cooking experience can help them see that working with the team can be an enjoyable experience and thus improve their attitude in the future.  The team cooking classes are designed to the tasks fun and easy for everyone, when they work together.

6. You can get creative:

The kitchen can be a great space to stimulate creativity and innovative ideas. Cooking promotes creativity in techniques and organization, to produce better results, making it more enjoyable for everyone involved. In terms of improving the workplace, creativity is the best way to break a drab routine and boost workers’ morale. 

7. Becoming culturally aware by discovering new food:

Food is universally liked, and it’s a great way to lower cultural barriers between people. With a selection of many international foods, depending on the program, making those dishes yourself is a great opportunity to learn about the associated culture (which is a plus in a culturally diverse workplace). 

What Type of Food to Cook?

When you book your team cooking workshop you can choose for the teams to cook almost any type of food that you desire, including sushi, pasta, desserts, Thai, healthy meals, vegetarian or vegan, anything at all. At Holistic Services Group we encourage our clients to select a healthy cooking style so that staff will also gain healthy cooking skills in addition to team building skills.

If you’re looking for a team building event that works, a team building cooking class is the way to go. Not only is it more fun and engaging than the almost repetitive outdoor activities, but there are also a lot of skills being learned that can be applied in and out of the office. As employers and managers, the result is a more cooperative, positive and creative organization that gets the job done better.