Ship Simulators for Team Building

TEAMWORK requires team members to work together to achieve the common goal. This is only possible if all members perform allocated duties efficiently.

Course overview

Navigating a ship is a tough job, intrinsically based on multitasking. Each team member must successfully complete the allocated task to ensure safe navigation. As not all of us are the same, each one of us must support the others to make the team successful. To achieve this, we must know our team members’ strengths and weaknesses.

Ship simulators can provide an opportunity to realistically make this happen. The simulations help strengthen confidence through sharing and accepting ideas from others in the team to improve teamwork, communication, interdependence and understanding of other team members’ emotions. Confidence increases and stress levels decrease when team members know their colleagues will support them if required. 

In each simulation, participants are divided into ‘bridge teams’ with specific roles to perform. The team will only provide the required output if all team members work coherently. Keeping this in view, a sample of our team building day simulation can be:

• induction to simulators and practice with controls,
• Channel Dash 1 (or another agreed scenario),
• Channel Dash 2 (or another agreed scenario).

Other durations for the day can be discussed to tailor to client requirements. Generally, at the end of simulations, a debriefing session will provide an opportunity to discuss the actions taken by the team members to discuss:

• leadership,
• collaboration, teamwork and mutual trust,
• performance monitoring,
• shared mental models,
• closed loop communication.

Throughout the day, the teams will be put through enormous pressure mimicking reality to maintain or improve team effectiveness through better collaboration, mutual understanding and respect for the chain of command.