Easy Team Building Activities Your Employees Will Love

If your company’s workplace is failing to impress in terms of its productivity, you may think that the fault lies in your employees. However, the real culprit may be the lack of team spirit at the workplace. For companies to grow, tight-knit teams are essential. When a team isn’t tight-knit, there’s bound to be miscommunication, a toxic work environment, and inefficiency – all the elements that can pull your productivity down rather than propelling it.

This is where team-building activities can make a difference. Team building activities are, more often than not, fun-filled activities that are aimed at bringing the individuals at the workplace together and building a team. However, if companies don’t flex their creativity from time to time, team-building activities can become monotonous and mundane. Ultimately, if the team members don’t enjoy the activities, their purpose would be defeated.

In this post, you can find a list of some of the most engaging team-building activities – activities recommended by HR consultants and ones your employees are guaranteed to love and enjoy. Experiment with these ideas at your workplace and your employees will start caring more about the team:

1. Winner/Loser

Winner/Loser is a team building activity that’s all about the importance of taking away positives from negative experiences. Here’s what you need to do to get this activity going:

• Divide the team into groups of two.
• Each group will get its turn during the activity, and when it does, one group member has to tell the other about a negative life experience.
• The other member will have to identify the positives that could be learned from that life experience.
• The activity will end after every group has finished their turns.

All in all, it’s a great activity to keep the team motivated even in the face of professional and personal hardships. It also presents an excellent opportunity for team members to know more about each other. If your team is on the smaller side (3 – 4 groups), you can quite easily get this activity done and dusted within ten minutes.

2. Minefield

On days you have around 30 – 40 minutes to spare, why not play Minefield? In terms of team bonding ideas for fostering trust, there’s no better activity. Here’s how it works:

• Take some soft objects to the workplace – the objects shouldn’t have any rough edges.
• Place the objects on the floor but not too close to each other in a start-finish line pattern.
• Divide the team into groups of two.
• During a particular team’s turn, one member has to put on a blindfold, and the other member has to direct the blindfolded partner verbally so the objects or ‘mines’ are avoided.
• The blindfolded partner has to stay silent.
• End the activity after each group has had its turn – the team that reaches the finish line the fastest wins.

If any team member is opposed to collaboration, this activity can make for a great lesson on why it’s important to trust colleagues at the workplace.

3. Frostbite

Frostbite is an activity for larger teams best experienced during outdoor team-building events. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can get your team engaged in this activity:

• Get several cardboard boxes.
• Divide the team into groups of 5 – 6.
• Each group has to pick a leader.

Next, the groups will be asked to imagine that they are in the Arctic as lost explorers, and they cannot hope to survive unless they build shelters.

• The catch is that the group leaders cannot build shelters as they are frostbitten, and the other group members have to be blindfolded during the shelter building.
• As the groups build their respective shelters, the group leaders have to verbally instruct the rest of the members on how the shelters should be built.
• The group that manages to build its shelter the quickest wins.

Within a work environment, team members have to trust their leaders, even if they don’t see eye-to-eye with the leaders’ opinions all the time. This is what this incredibly fun activity is all about.

4. Memory Wall

No matter how devoted your team members are, the fact is that they are human and human relationships aren’t always smooth sailing. Friction may occur between different team members – people who may have been close once. Memory Wall is one of the team-building games that takes team members on trips down memory lane and allows them to relive the positives they shared in the past. Here’s how you can get this game started:

• Hand papers and pens to every team member and ask them to write down their positive memories at the workplace.
• Once they’ve written the memories down, hand them fresh sheets of paper and ask them to draw their memories.
• Next, ask them to tape the drawn memories to a wall, following which every member will come forward one by one and share the memories with the rest of the team.

If your team is experiencing some tension right now but was full of motivation and spirit not too long ago, this is the game that can rekindle that lost spirit.

Conclusion

For more detailed information on how you can improve your team’s chemistry, reach out to an HR consultant. That’s it for this post. Try these activities out at your workplace. They are sure to play beneficial roles in making your team more productive.

Author bio:

Michelle Page has worked as a team leader in a variety of industries and understands the importance of improving teams for boosting productivity.