Types of Teams Building Activities for the Workplace

Teams Building Activities: Productive and high-performance teams are the backbone of a successful business. Building a productive and cohesive team is however not easy. Each person in the team comes with different priorities, tendencies, personality types, values, and aspirations. These differences while crucial and unavoidable, sometimes lead to unproductive conflicts, interpersonal clashes, and focus on individual rather than team goals. Hence, to build a cohesive team, managers must continuously encourage cohesive team behaviors like trust, collaboration, and accountability. Henceforth, team building activities are a good way to inculcate and enable team members to identify the importance of such behaviors in the team’s success.

Below, we discuss some types of team-building activities for the workplace that can help in building high-performance teams:

Who Am I?

The first step of team building activities is to break the ice. These activities are particularly useful for new teams where members are not very familiar with each other. Who Am I? is a simple and fun activity for participants to get to know their team members better.

• Number of participants: 10-30
• Duration: 30+ min
• Objectives: Introductions and Ice Breaker

How to play

• On a postcard ask participants to answer fun questions about themselves like – Hobby, Native Place, Favorite Food as well as, Educational Qualifications, etc.
• Note that Names should be written on the postcard
• Then we mix the cards and each participant picks 1 card other than their own
• Participants then read the inputs and try to guess whose card they have

Tribe & Totem

This is a fun and engaging game to arrive at common team values and define the team culture.

• Number of participants: 10-30
• Duration: 45+ min
• Objectives: Defining team culture and values

How to play

• Divide participants into teams of 5-7 members
• Accordingly, each team is given materials like chart paper, colored pens, scissors, newspapers, paint, paint brushes, sticks, glue, tape 
• Then, each team has to name their tribe and pick one team value as their tribe value. For example, the tribe Amazon can choose a trust as their value 
• Subsequently, each tribe is now given about 20 mins to depict the value with a help of a totem they have to build with the materials provided 
• Once time is up, each team presents their tribe’s name, the totem, and how the totem depicts their tribe’s value

Scavenger Hunt

This game is bound to bring some competition, fun, and lots of physical activity into the team-building training.

• Number of participants: 10-30
• Duration: 90 min
• Objectives: Problem-solving and working as a cohesive unit

How to play

• First, divide participants into teams of 5-7 members
• Each team is given a list of tasks they need to complete
• Each task has to be filmed by the teams on their mobile phones
• The list can contain tasks like singing a song in a group of 5, 5 people dancing to a song from the 60s, 2 team members doing 10 push-ups, making a kite, etc. Depending on the time at hand, the list can contain 10-50 tasks
• At last, the team that comes back first with all the tasks completed wins the first prize

In conclusion, team building activities should be carefully designed after considering the age, gender, culture, and physical abilities of the team members. In the end, the expected outcome from the team-building exercise should be at the center of all activities. If team-building interventions are not properly designed team-building interventions can become boring, inappropriate, and downright embarrassing for people.

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