Team Building Cooking Classes
Why should you try cooking as a team building activity? Cooking is universal. Cooking is fun. Cooking has a fantastic end result, which is delicious FOOD. If you’re looking for your next great team building activity, look no further than team building cooking classes, which are both educational and mouth-watering.
Why Choose Cooking As Your Team-Building Event Of Choice?
Not everyone loves to cook, but those who do love to tell you about it. Cooking is personal. Recipes, trends, and secrets are passed down from family member to family member. Cookouts, barbecues, and potlucks are trends that touch every great meeting or party event. There is a bevy of emotions that come with great food, emotions that stir the pot of nostalgia, cross barriers, and bring everyone together. Food is the great equalizer, and when it comes to coworkers and colleagues we can all get along over a delicious meal.
Differing from some other types of team building activities, the art of cooking includes everyone and creates new avenues of participation and outreach. Cooking is creative, not destructive, and the outcome of cooking is something that everyone can enjoy together. When we cook, we involve everyone around us, giving people opportunities to prep, cook, mix, bake, and chow down. Cooking hosts a huge variety of practical skills, abilities, and lessons that we can transfer to other aspects of our lives.
Benefits Of Taking Team Building Cooking Classes:
Encourages Teamwork
While cooking can seem a daunting task, the corporate-style cooking classes that are utilized by most team building organizations function based on the accepted top-down hierarchy of a restaurant kitchen. This gives everyone something to do and maintains the safety and quality traditionally seen in these environments.
Kitchens need structure to operate, and every single person within the kitchen is forming a bond with those around them. The structure of a traditional restaurant is paramount and is the difference between your food coming out on time or not coming out at all. From the sous chef to the dishwasher, everyone in the kitchen is important, necessary, and helpful.
By studying and emulating the traditional kitchen hierarchy, your team can learn new things about one another, focusing on cooperative tasks that lead up to a structured whole.
Connects On-site Workers With Remote Workers In A Fun Way
No matter your current situation, the entire world is decentralized right now. Everything has become topsy-turvy, and most of us are still finding new ways to adapt to this changing world. When it comes to team members, collaboration is as key as it’s ever been, even if many of us cannot meet up in person. There is a trust that comes with true collaboration, a trust that can be built upon the bonds of a kitchen.
Cooking is a central and essential component of the human experience; all of us like to eat. The most contentious of strangers can bond over a great meal, and bringing people together to break bread is a team exercise as old as time. Even if your team members are housebound and remote, connecting online and fixing a recipe together can churn out delicious new aspects of collaboration and productivity.
Step away from the keyboard, pick up a knife, and make something awesome together!
Develops Skills
While we all love to eat, not everybody cooks. In the last half-decade, more than half of Americans have stopped cooking their own nightly dinners. Because of this, many people might feel guilty, shy, or intimidated by a lack of cooking ability, which could reflect on the class. When it comes to a team building cooking class, your team needs to be open to learning new skills, just as with the workplace. Even those team members who don’t consider themselves “good cooks” will walk away with some great new skills.
Learning how to cook imprints upon us some wonderful abilities, from understanding recipes to knowing the safest way to hold a knife. The basic ingredients necessary for a kitchen might change the minds of the cooking-adverse, which benefits everybody.
Great cooking classes generate new ways of thinking, not just around preparing food but in the approachability to new skills as a whole. Working with kitchen equipment can be a good way to appreciate ourselves and the people around us.
Inspires Creativity And Innovation
Anyone in the working world knows the structured importance of innovation. New ideas and creativity are the lifeblood of all trades, and your employees want to feel like they are important and their ideas are heard. When people feel involved, it generates new and welcoming levels of empowerment and makes everyone work just a little harder. Innovation, inspiration, and creativity bring forth a stronger work ethic and a more cohesive workplace.
Kitchens have long been havens of creativity. Innovating in a kitchen is fun, and delicious. Cooking is creative. Prepping food is important, but if you ate the same thing day in and day out you would no doubt get bored and disinterested. Even when you make small changes to a dish, such as adding in some basil or trying a new kind of cheese, you end up with something that feels fresh and new.
Your employees want to feel that sense of creativity and newness. Team building cooking classes can bring forth unexpected boons, such as varied opinions on work ideas. You might notice that, while cooking, your team members are struck with sudden inspiration they’ve never had before. Adapt your mind to the model that “trying new things can be delicious” and apply that to your organization!
Creates Mutually Beneficial Social Relationships
Even when we spend much of the day cooped up in our offices or dealing with remote tasks, it can be tough to talk about anything but the job when we gather together with our coworkers. Interaction is important, and when our working relationships are only about work, we can lose sight of the human beings that we spend much of our time with. Sometimes people have trouble leaving their comfort zones, and some team members might not be interested in the common topics that pop up at social events.
Anytime you work to improve social relationships, your office benefits. Creating a safe and vibrant environment means having a team that knows one another. People need to be able to trust, and trust comes with understanding the particular strengths that everyone can offer. When you work in the kitchen, you build that trust and strength. In the average restaurant job, cooks have to look out for one another. They have to announce when they’re coming around a corner or when they’re holding a knife. In order to increase that sense of security and trust in your office life, you need to let people be themselves and open up in a safe place. The more your team members can trust one another, the stronger the bond of your workplace will become.
Encourages Cultural Awareness
We all have favorite regional foods, from Mexican to Greek to Chinese. The issue is that oftentimes we do not fully appreciate or understand the actual cultures behind these cuisines. When you learn how to cook, you learn how to mix together a vibrant array of spices and foodstuffs from all over the world. Cooking is a delightful way to inspire more cultural awareness, and cooking classes can have us try foods we’ve never considered before. This is an exercise in social and cultural awareness, and it can build trust and confidence in one another that your team members will continue to hold.
Increases Productivity When Colleagues Know They’re Cared For
Often, with true productivity, the buck stops with management. Management is responsible for the comfort of the workplace, the flow, and maintaining the confidence that threads the job. Employees want to feel valued and cared for. Team building activities such as this one are morale stabilizers because oftentimes we need to step back from our jobs and we don’t realize. Returning to the workplace with a new understanding and a fresh set of skills can create new perspectives that galvanize our jobs.
Take Your Team on a Culinary Adventure!
If you’re considering team building cooking classes for your workers (remote or no), think of all the ways in which they can help your hard-working employees. Look at cooking as both a benefit and a learning exercise, a place where everyone can gain something. Just think of the reward at the end of the class!
Create Your Own Experience
Cupcake Challenge
This delightful cooking experience is sure to be enjoyed by everyone.
Divide everyone up into teams, and give each team decorating ingredients—and cupcakes! For this exercise, the cupcakes can already be made (if you prefer) and you can just have the teams focus on making the most delightful decorations. If you’re doing this one at home or over Zoom, you can either send cupcakes to the home of each team member, give them a stipend to order their favorite cupcakes, or let everyone bake their favorite out-of-the-box recipe beforehand.
Have your teams work together to design delightful cupcakes! You can strategize if you want to, and remember that this is about bonding. Have each team show off their amazing designs, and then enjoy the cupcakes together. You can offer further prizes, take photos, and show off your team’s decorating skills on Instagram or over Slack.
Strictly Come Dining
This fun team building event is one that your colleagues can all book together, an event that includes professional chefs!
These corporate team building events are structured around the kitchen, where your teams will be split up so that they can cook a three-course meal to be enjoyed by the other teams! Knowledgeable chefs will showcase knife skills and help each team put together a stellar meal. At the end of this team building event, everyone will be hungry!
At the end of this cooking event, the teams give out scores for the dishes, provide feedback, and learn about the entire cooking process from expert judges. This event is about deadlines, time management, morale, teamwork, and communication.
Bakeathon
Have you ever enjoyed The Great British Bake Off? The popularity of this show has pushed a lot of people back into the kitchen, and this event will have everyone running for the ovens.
Your team members can join together with Goto Events for the ultimate baking experience. They have curated a team building activity with real professional pastry chefs that will help your team bust out the most delightful and delicious baked goods!
Their events are fun, focused, and great for team building. Everyone will learn how to bake their favorite treats together, and the end result is sweet indeed.
No matter what method of team building cooking class you decide on for your team, there is something in it for everyone. Cooking skills are great to have, and the more we learn about the kitchen the more we learn about each other.
Food is truly universal, and the laughter and discussions that are had over a great meal are remembered for years to come!
