Top 10 Company Team Building Activities

How can you build a tight-knit team? It’s a concern of many business owners. When you see that your employees have no enthusiasm or aren’t satisfied with working conditions, you’re in trouble. How to save a positive business environment?

It may sound surprising but a lot of people forget about team building or just think that it’s unnecessary. Well, they are unlikely to increase the productivity of their team. But if you are reading this article, you are not one of them and trusting relations within your team. Go on and find top creative group activities to help your employees enjoy being a part of the team.

Why Team Building?
What are the Benefits of Team Building?
Top 10 Team Building Activities

Why Team Building?

Employee productivity is essential for any company. When the members of your team are motivated and know that they can rely on each other, then they want to deliver results and will help you reach your business goals. But it is your job to ensure their productivity and happiness. How can you do it?

Step one is to build a stress-free working environment. The top sources of workplace stress include high workload and looming deadlines, unrealistic expectations, no balance between work and life and coworker conflicts. The best advice here is to appreciate the initiatives of your employees, to recognise their work, encourage and support them on their way and build good relations within the team members. And while the first tips are more or less clear, the latter one may be confusing.

Did you know that up to 80% of all companies provide team building activities? Another inspiring number is 50% of them that measure the results and try to improve the strategy.

Let’s see how good team building and communication can improve the business in numbers.

• Improved communication and collaboration via social networks can raise the productivity of workers by 25-35%.
• 85% of employees say they are likely to keep working with an employer that interacts and communicates with them.
• Businesses with team building result in 23% greater profitability.
• Companies that use team-building games see a 63% greater customer loyalty and 31% higher increase in revenue per year.

What are the Benefits of Team Building?

It was already mentioned that team building is an overlooked area in business. As the owner of a company, you can get many benefits from team building activities into your business culture. We’ve already said that team building is a must if you want to boost the productivity of your employees. But it’s not the only benefit. To make sure that is worth your time, money and effort, here is a list of our arguments.

Building Trust Among Employees

When employees need to collaborate outside the office, they relax and feel free to communicate at any time. If walls are lowered, coworkers can share creative ideas and seek solutions to the tasks more willingly. People realize that they are a part of a team and trust each other in daily tasks.

Making Quality Decisions

There is no secret that a good working team is better than one good employer. Team building can help to generate more ideas and choose the best one. When team members discuss and make decisions together, it guarantees the ultimate quality of choice.

Changing the Morale of the Company

What is the main rule of team building? Exercises and activities need to be fun and engaging for workers. Strange and creative ideas might seem foolish, but playing Jenga in the office can unite coworkers with a competitive spirit. As a result, the game influences the work environment and improves the overall morale of the company.

Identifying Weaknesses and Strengths of Employees

Corporate team building activities are a great opportunity for a business leader to get a full picture of the strengths and weaknesses of its team members. When employees perform daily routine tasks, they know how to do it and understand their responsibilities. But team building helps to identify core competencies such as abilities to solve problems, set goals, integrity, influencing and competitiveness. When business owners identify these traits, they can group people in teams and set up a workflow.

Uncovering Leadership Qualities of Workers

When you create a new team or just group together new workers, you can easily notice that some of them have personal treats and skills to rise to the top. As a result, they might need prodding to take part in the company’s activities. Your responsibility as an employer is to let them feel free to show their knowledge and natural abilities. Business owners can observe what type of leadership qualities people demonstrate and understand how to teach such people and help them develop their careers in the company.

Wrapping it up, team building is important because it helps a business owner to capitalise on the strengths of employees and minimise their weaknesses. As a result, an employer has a strong team that can collaborate and solve problems together, when they appear.

Top 10 Team Building Activities

What does team building include? It, firstly, is a daily interaction between employees working together. It is a natural team building form with team norms. It means that the work of a group is regulated and improved by specific norms that help to understand how to interact with the team members and the organization itself.

Team building also includes indoor and outdoor activities and exercises which can be handled by team leaders or responsible employees. If your company has a proper budget, you or your manager can contact the internal resources to manage your team building activities.

But how to find interesting ideas for team building? You can open Google to search for agencies to organize fun group activities or use our ideas of collective exercises to let your team feel good at work.

What’s My Name?

Let’s start with a well-known game popular all around the world. What’s My Name is not the main name of the activity, it goes by different ones. But everyone recognizes it by the main rule – the more people play, the better the game is.

To play the game, you need index cards, post-it notes or something like it. Each player is assigned the name of a person or hero. It might be actors, singers, models, characters, your colleagues and others. Players display the names on their head or body to let other players know who they are. But the player doesn’t know his or her character. When everyone has a name, the players sit in a circle and start asking questions. How? Everyone waits for the line to ask a question about the person – only yes-no questions. If a player hears yes, there is an opportunity to ask more till the no answer. The players ask questions until they guess correctly who they are.

The benefits of What’s My Name are that the team members can communicate with each other in an informal atmosphere. The game builds empathy and lets people look at colleagues from another side.

Truths and a Lie

The game Truths and a Lie has simple rules. It starts when all team members secretly write on small sheets of paper two truths and one lie about themselves. When you are done, show your sentences to the audience. Then players need to communicate with each other quizzing each other about these sentences.

The main goal of the game is to make sure the others that your lie is actually a truth. While you need to guess other players’ lies asking them questions.

The game has a number of rounds. Each lasts up to 15 minutes. When the time is over, players say the statements they think are lies. After that, players ask the person for which statement people voted the most. The player’s statement is really a lie, he or she leaves the game. If not, the person continues playing.

The benefit of Truths and a Lie is similar to the previous one – it helps to encourage better communication among the employees and lets people know each other better.

Board Game Tournament

We’ve mentioned ways to make friendly relationships between your team members. But how can you empower the competitiveness of your employees? Organize a Board Game Tournament between your workers or departments.

Organize a board game tournament between several teams. It is a good choice when your team is pretty big. You can bring a game to the office and ask your employees to bring their favorite ones. You can set the time for the employees when they can take part in the competition. And don’t forget to give prizes for first, second and third places. Who knows, your initiative might turn into a huge battle between your employees. If you don’t know what games to choose, you can pick Jenga, Scrabble, Monopoly, Catan, Mysterium and others.

The benefits of a tournament you already understand – let your employees feel some competition to improve their working results.

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Sneak a Peek

If you want to help your team work together and easily find solutions to any issues, we have a game for you. Google offers lots of problem-solving activities like puzzles or zoom but Sneak a Peek is the best one. To play the game, you need to find some building blocks for children and choose an instructor.

The role of the instructor is quite simple – create a small figure from blocks and hide it from other players. While players need to divide into teams from 4 to 6 members. Each team gets a set of building materials – all teams have the same sets. Their task is to duplicate the figure that was created by the instructor. When players are ready to start, the instructor places the figure at an equal distance from all players. Remember that players still don’t need to see it. Each team member has only 10 seconds to come to the instructor, look at the figure and memorize its structure.

The goal of the game is to recreate the figure by memory. Each team member who has seen the figure has 25 seconds to describe it or its parts. Then teams have 1 minute to recreate it. When time is over, the next player comes to the instructor and repeats the action.

Players are not limited by a number of rounds and the game continues till one of the teams recreated the original figure. So, the benefit of Sneak and Peek is to teach your employees working together, solve appealing problems and effectively communicate.

Buckets and Balls

If you want to improve the work of your team in active games – try Buckets and Balls. To play the game, you need to leave the office and find a court or a sports gym with plenty of space. Moreover, you need balls, buckets – at least two – and from 8 to 24 players.

So, what are the rules? Divide your players into two teams, so they will compete against each other, trying to move balls to the bucket faster than the other team without using their hands. For that, you need to divide your playing field into two parts and place a bucket full of tennis balls in the middle. Each team has an empty bucket at the end of their part of the field and a handler. A handler is the only person in the game who can touch balls with a hand. They don’t move on the field and place the balls when their teammates bring them. If someone touches a ball – not a handler – a person will be disqualified.

The game lasts 5-10 minutes; all teams play at the same time, which creates chaos and makes it funnier.

The benefits of Buckets and Balls is that players have to work together and delegate their responsibilities according to their strengths and weaknesses.

Karaoke Night-Out

You already have a variety of ideas on how to informally cooperate with your team and improve their skills. But why not try to spend some stare time with them and just know them better? Invite your employees to Karaoke or Bar.

To help your workers break out of their shells and relax Friday night, invite them to sing karaoke. You can even make a contest for the best singer or group performance. Award them with points for originality, interesting hats or something like this. But this type of activity is better for extroverted people, so if your team is afraid of a stage, try the other ideas from our list.

The benefit of Karaoke is that your team has more opportunities to communicate in an informal atmosphere and know each other better.

Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger Hunt is an indoor and outdoor activity. Here you need to divide your employees into teams and give them a list of things they need to find. Your exercise is to hide all the things. The ultimate goal is to find the most items and come back first to the start. You also need to set a time limit and penalties for those who come later. You can create different clues and puzzles on the way of the teams to make the game even funnier. You may restrict methods and devices they can use during the game.

The benefit of Scavenger Hunt is similar to all the others below – it helps people to work together as a team and solve problems.

Volunteers Activities

Doing good things you don’t only make others happier but also can bond your team members. And here we don’t mean investing money in charity, we offer to try some place-based Volunteering Activities. So, what can you do? Your team can volunteer at a local kitchen where people make food for those who can’t afford it, deliver presents to the children at hospitals during holidays, help to build a house and more.

What’s the benefit of Volunteering for team building? It’s a good way to let your employees use their skills in other spheres – marketing, building, writing, performing.

Common Book

This team-building activity is different from the others since it’s not limited in time. So, what is a Common Book? We offer to take a blank scrapbook and place it in the office – the best place is the break room. All your employees need to know where to find it. Leave pens, markers, scissors, stickers, glue, tapes and other decorative items to let your team use them to write down something in the book. The main task here will be to encourage the employees to write and draw there anything they want – interesting quotes, funny stories about their colleagues, photos from other team building events, feeling.

To help your employees, you can add prompts on each page, ask questions or suggest what to draw. You also can create a guideline and place it near the book. It should be a list of rules like no complaints, don’t be offensive, no swearing and others. When the book has no blank lists, put it on the shelf and bring another one – Common Book: Part 2.

The benefit of Common Book is that you are able to create a story of your company and encourage collaboration and creativity of the team.

Table Soccer and Tennis

The last team building that we want to share is a number of games popular in our office. We have Tennis and Soccer tables which anyone can use at any time. Do not set a time when your employees can play games. When people work all day long, sometimes they feel the need to distract from work and have some fun. As it happens in our office, employees come to invite their colleagues to play tennis or soccer when they want it.

Benefits? Your team plays together, compete, communicate and relax to come back to work after a few minutes of a fun game. After that, they have new powers to keep working not losing their productivity.

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Conclusion

No matter what team building activity you choose but the goal is what truly matters. Building strong relations between your team members is worth your time and investment as you will definitely notice the productivity boost. We hope that you’ve found some interesting ideas for your team building.

What fun group activities do you use? Share your creative ideas and result in the comments below!