Team building activities to strengthen the team spirit!
Every job is different, but they all bring their own unique stressors. When your office is starting to feel the weight of the world and everyone is starting to lose sight of what they’re doing, the best option a company has is to let everyone take a breather and collect themselves. That’s where well thought-out and engaging team-building exercises can make a huge difference.
Team building activities can be a chore, but they don’t have to be. Gone are the days of trust falls and out of touch speakers. Some of the most successful companies in the world have embraced activities that encourage their teams to get out of the office and bond as human beings through games and challenges meant to foster open communication and outside-the-box thinking. Here are a few ideas to help the people you work with get on the same page and get re-energized to be their best selves at work.
Get Your Game Faces On for Team building activities!
A little friendly competition can work wonders. Whether it’s one-on-one or department vs department or even a collaborative game where everyone is working together to overcome a situation, competitions get people’s metaphorical juices flowing. Here are some options for you to use as team bonding activities.
Escape Rooms
More and more escape rooms are popping up in cities around the country—and for good reason. Putting your team in an environment that requires them to work together, share information, and use deductive reasoning encourages them to develop the skills that every company in the world would list as best-practices. Not only that, getting out of a room with a great time (or even just under the wire) creates a collective sense of accomplishment that will stay with your team for a long time.
Board Games
There are lots of ways to bring table-top fun to your team. Whether running an office-wide boggle or bananagrams tournament or playing some of the amazing new games that have come on the market since the popularity of titles like Settlers of Cataan has started to rise. You can even bring your team offsite to play. Venues like The Lumber Exchange are great for games. There’s plenty of rooms for tables, people can move around as they see fit, and there’s top notch catering and drinks at the ready.
Scavenger Hunt
If you’re getting your team out of the office, you may as well get them to go way out of the office. You can either set up a hunt that involves procuring items or snapping pictures of the items on your list. And if you really want to shake things up, you can send out a secret item shortly before time runs out that’s worth double points to make things really interesting.
With the advancements in camera phones over the last fifteen years or so, you can even challenge your team members to compile pictures and videos of their adventures to show to the rest of the office in the most creative way possible. Another great scavenger hunt option is to fill the list of items with acts of kindness your team can perform in the community. The bonds formed by doing good are hard to break.
Craft Fairs/Cook-Offs
Some of the most fun team building activities involve encouraging your team members to share their hobbies. Do you have a lot of people who like to cook? Have a cook-off! Encourage people to bring in their variations on popular dishes or have everyone create something unique based around a common ingredient or theme. Even the people who don’t like to cook will get behind this because it means they get a day with free lunch! Similarly, if you have knitters, crocheters, needle-point enthusiasts, or woodworkers in the office, throw a craft fair. Let the office decide on a charity and auction off items members of your team made to support a worthwhile cause.
Creating Connections with New Experiences
While games and competitions are great, they may not be right for your team. That’s when finding non-competitive activities can do wonders for you.
Fresh Air
Physical activity and simply getting outside can work wonders to shake off the cobwebs that can build up is an office. Whether bringing your team to a minigolf course or just to a park with great walking and biking paths can do wonders for morale. You could even take a cue from Mary Poppins and have kite-flying day. It’s important to take into account physical limitations some people in your office may have when you plan your day outdoors, though. You don’t want to leave anyone out because the company that moves together grooves together—in a business sense.
Improv Workshops
Improv forces people to think on the fly and develop skills reading and understanding the non-verbal cues given by the other people involved in a scene. Lots of cites have improv groups that specialize in conducting workshops for people with little or no experience with improv. Engaging in something like improv may seem scary, but sharing such a unique, fresh experience will create spectacular bonds between you and your colleagues.
A Night Out
Allowing your team to see each other in a different context can help them remember that everyone has a life outside work. Whether that means encouraging everyone to get dressed up for a play or a concert or bringing the office out for some stand-up comedy or a bowling night, just having a reason to get together somewhere new can work wonders. This doesn’t even have to be a big to-do. Setting a regular date each month to hit a happy hour or a karaoke/trivia night as a group makes for a nice change for everyone.
The Simplest Suggestion
The biggest and simplest suggestion for any team building activity is to get your team out of the office. No matter what games or exercises or speakers or workshops you have planned: get people into a different environment. The venue for your team building needs to be able to handle your event, though. You need a place that can work with you whether you’re just bringing out one department or an entire company.
The Lumber Exchange Event Center is perfect for team-building excursions. They have a variety of rooms to handle any size event you may bring their way and their staff is skilled at helping clients with their event planning. Additionally, their on-site catering will make sure everyone is well-fed and, if you want to serve drinks, the cocktails at the Exchange are second to none.
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