Building Trust In Your HOA Board

Transparency and trust are the makings of any community. The same applies to your HOA board. Without trust, there won't be any confidence in the board's decisions or even capabilities to secure a bright future for the community.

You can achieve all these and much more through routine team-building activities with the other board of directors of your HOA. That can ensure a more harmonious, cohesive, and transparent function of the board. Additionally, you will get to enjoy several other benefits of building trust in your HOA board. Here is how team-building activities can help you build trust.

Improves communication

Communication is the key to a trustworthy relationship. Considering it's at the core of every team-building activity, you and other HOA board members get a chance to communicate freely. Additionally, the communication built here is stress-free and more personal than what you would get in a working environment. You will get a chance to know each other better and as such avoid future conflicts.

Increases the team's morale

Like with every working environment, misunderstandings happen, tension builds, and morale goes down. By working on your trust issues through team building, you can reset all that. Starting afresh is vital to the formation and retention of a much better trusting work environment. People not only get to have a great time but also make up for their differences. This is a brilliant way of ensuring that tension does not threaten what you've all worked so hard to build over the years.

Increases confidence and trust in other members

Not everyone likes the idea of relying on and trusting other people to have their back. Without the confidence that your team members will be there for you when you fall back, there's no trust. However, team-building activities allow people to let their guard down, have fun without inhibitions, and with time, forge a trusting relationship with others. This relaxed attitude is the foundation of trust.

Activities you can enjoy while building trust

There are numerous team-building activities and resources your HOA board can utilize while building trust. Here are some of the most common activities you can try:

How well do you know your colleagues?

This activity is vital in understanding what makes your colleagues tick. Knowing each other outside the working environment is essential and can help you understand why others do what they do. One of the best exercises to understand how well you know other board members is through the two truths and a lie game.

In this game, you all write down three things about your friends. Of the three, only two are valid, while the third is a well-crafted lie. You all then take turns each to read what those three things are. The rest of the group then discusses what they know about you and tries to determine which of the three is the lie.

If the other member disagrees on which the lie is, they vote. The statement with the most votes is the guess they present to the player. The player can then reveal the lie before allowing the next player to read their three statements. This activity may sound simple, but it isn't straightforward, especially once you realize you don't know much about the other members. But through this activity, you can learn more.

How well can you work together as a team?

There are two joint exercises of this activity. The first involves the entire team working together to come up with a great end result, and the second is a team trusting one team member to help the rest come up with a fantastic end result.

First activity

For the first activity, you can achieve it through the team-building activity known as ZOOM. It's a book with numerous pictures but no words. You can zoom out the images for you to have a better look. For this activity, you can come up with a team with the same number of people as the pages in the book. You can then remove each page and hand them out randomly to all the members participating in the game.

Each gets a chance to look at their picture and memorize it, but no one can look at the other members' pictures. They then describe to each other what they've seen and try to recreate the book in the correct sequence. Someone outside the team can then confirm that the correct order of the pages is followed. You can repeat the game numerous times until you get it right.

Second activity

The second game involves playing the construction copy game. Here, you break out into small teams, each with its own set of building blocks. The conductor of the game also gets their own set where they secretly build something with the blocks and hide it from view.

Each team can select a viewer to see the conductor's final product and relay what they saw to their respective teams. Viewing time should not take more than 10 seconds, and only two viewing sessions are allowed. The winning team should be able to create an identical copy of the conductor's construction.

Final thoughts

Trust is vital in every relationship and community. The picture you paint as a board will be based on how much you trust the other members. Contact us today for more information on HOA management.