Top 5 Team Builder Activities for Your Company
Team building activities are a great way to bond with your employees and have some fun outside of the office. These events also give your team something to look forward to other than project deadlines.
They can improve creative thinking, verbal communication skills and resilience. They can also encourage your students to try new things.
1. Embrace the Future
Embrace the Future is a great team building activity that helps to create positive communication and morale amongst your staff. Regardless of your company’s industry, team members need to be able to communicate with each other in order to work effectively as a team. Without fun team building activities, team communication can become stale and dysfunctional.
Creating a positive attitude towards the future will help your company become agile, ready to pivot to new markets and technologies in the years to come. Having fun together will also build camaraderie and creativity.
One way to encourage positivity is to play an icebreaker activity like this one during your next team meeting. Ask your employees to silently think of a unique memory from their past, ideally one they would like to relive if they could go back in time.
Once everyone has a moment, take turns asking each person a question about their past and share their answers with the group. You can even ask questions about their career goals and secret skills that they have.
This activity is perfect for a team with many different generations. Ensure that each employee submits at least two photos – one from when they were 23 and another in 2023.
Then, use a slideshow to show everyone the images submitted by each team member. It’s a fun way to bring laughter and reminiscence to the room as you look at the younger version of your team members.
For added team bonding, have the whole team create a Pinterest board dedicated to ideas, activities, and workplace suggestions for 2023! You can even create a virtual “in-the-office” Pinterest board for your team to share ideas and suggestions with each other.
2. Take a Walk on the Wild Side
Take a Walk on the Wild Side, a song by Lou Reed, is a jubilant, quintessentially New York rock classic that captured the frenetic underground of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the cross dressers, transsexuals, oral sex, and drugs that defined the city. The lyrics also included a few proto-snarky cultural references, including references to Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling and Jack Kerouac.
“Walk on the Wild Side” has been sampled in countless songs over the decades, but the best ones feature an off-kilter bass line that is both jaunty and melancholic. It’s a sound that has become a staple of rock ‘n’ roll over the years.
One example of this is HAIM’s track “Summer Girl,” which features a famous ad-lib by rapper Mark Wahlberg, who raps “Annie took a hit breathed two short breaths/One for life the last for death” over the harmonic bass line from the original version of the tune. The band spliced it into the track and added their own twists to it, resulting in an edgy, slinky love song that is just as good as Reed’s original.
The song was a beloved anthem of the 1970s, inspiring a generation to explore the wild sides of life and love. But recently, a group of students at the University of Guelph in Canada claimed that Lou Reed’s song contains transphobic lyrics.
It’s important to note that this has been widely disputed and that the Guelph Central Student Association, which made the claim, subsequently apologised.
The activity is great for bringing the team together, and it develops the skills of creative thinking, problem-solving, communication, trust, leadership, and collaboration. In addition, it helps everyone to see each other’s strengths and weaknesses in an unfamiliar setting. Plus, it’s a lot of fun!
3. Stand, Sit, Lie
Getting to know your team members well is essential for creating the kind of bonds that will help improve team collaboration and group happiness. It’s especially important if your team is new to one another or is working with people who don’t share the same culture, values and interests.
Whether it’s a new or established team, everyone has unique strengths and capabilities, and leveraging these talents as a group can help improve engagement and group workflow. The team building activities below encourage each member of your team to highlight their strengths and use them for group productivity.
When teams are working on a real-life challenge, it’s often important to create a sense of urgency in order to get things done. Using time-sensitive games can be a great way to help your team work together more effectively while having fun!
Stand, Sit, Lie is an activity that focuses on team communication and problem-solving skills. Each group is given a random selection of objects to place into categories. Once they have finished, they share their answers with the rest of the group.
Then, each team has to switch places with another person in the group for a short period of time. This stretches the minds of everyone in the room and is a great exercise to build trust within your team!
This is a great activity to use at the beginning of a team event as it encourages team members to get to know each other better and break the ice. It’s also a great team-building activity to use for remote teams because it encourages conversation and helps break the ice if everyone is in different time zones.
4. Build a Bucket of Legos
Team building is a process that ensures employees have the tools they need to collaborate successfully. It teaches teams how to work together and develop a shared set of values. This process also strengthens the bond between team members and helps employees achieve more in their daily tasks.
One of the most popular team builder activities is Build a Bucket of Legos, which is great for young builders and those who enjoy working with their imaginations. It includes more than 600 building elements and offers endless possibilities for creative play.
The game requires a large bucket of Lego blocks and can be played with groups of 2-8 people. Each group is given a sculpture made of blocks and must build a replica within a short period of time.
This team building activity encourages people to think about their future goals and contemplate the bigger picture. This activity will help them develop a vision for their company.
Before the game begins, hand out newspapers to each small group and ask them to mark down 10 fictional headlines about their company’s future. They will then share these with the rest of the team.
Next, ask each group to put the objects into categories. For example, one team may choose “simple,” while another might decide on “exciting.”
Afterward, have the teams write down their choices and discuss why they grouped the objects this way. This will give them a chance to compare their choices with the rest of the team and see what other strategies they can use.
This game is great for helping employees learn to listen to others and understand that everyone has different opinions. It is also a great way to encourage trust between team members and create a culture of active communication.
5. Escape the Room
Escape the Room is a fun team building activity that requires participants to work together to solve puzzles and riddles. It is a great way to build trust, improve communication skills and learn how to use logic and critical thinking strategies.
Escape rooms have many different challenges, including finding clues, unlocking doors, solving ciphers and more. These games can be very challenging, but if you work with your team, they can be completed successfully.
Another way to make the experience more rewarding is to recognize and congratulate each person who successfully solved a challenge. This can really help to boost their motivation and encourage them to continue working on future challenges.
A team that is made up of people with diverse skills and backgrounds can help to solve puzzles faster than a team that has only one individual with an expertise in one particular area. This is because all members will be able to contribute and bring something to the table, whether it’s an idea or a strategy.
It’s important to have an adequate number of leaders in a group, so that they can determine the best route to follow and ensure that everyone knows what they need to do to complete the task. For example, if a member of the team is trying to open a door but has to strain to do so, that will be an indicator that the door isn’t meant to be opened this way.
Teams that don’t have an adequate number of leaders aren’t able to complete the puzzles in the escape room within the allotted time frame. This is because they don’t have enough leadership to determine the best course of action and ensure that everyone on their team knows what they need to do.