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Published on
October 18, 2018
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Updated on
October 1, 2020
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Read time
19 minutes
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Speaking of workers’ correlation with productive team building activities, Pepper is one of our prized assets. Lately, that spark has been missing and her team members don’t seem to be in shape. Just in case you were wondering who Pepper is, well, she’s been an integral part of our nTask team – just like Fred.
Their workflows are just a repeating cycle of reviews, reviews, and some more reviews. The most common sight in the workplace is gloomy faces and droopy shoulders.
Now, what does this tell us? It is time for some productive team building activities!
Workplace team building activities are a great way to boost the morale of team members and induce some positive energy into their monotonous work routine.
This fun yet challenging activities are a sure way to bring an aura of constructive energies to the work environment, consequently enhancing the productivity levels of the team.
So, here’s our take on 22 productive team building activities that actually help in developing a strong relationship among team members.
The best part? They’re all actually pretty fun.
Pro tip
Not everyone is comfortable with every activity. Choose the productive team building activities for your team as per the comfort level of members and carefully decide the ones each team member feels safe while playing.
The 22 Most Productive Team Building Activities:
For your ease, we’ve divided each of these productive team building activities according to the objective they fulfill.
This problem-solving team activity requires very little equipment and can be performed quite conveniently without the need of a special space.
Objective: For this activity, team members get to explore their true problem-solving skills, PLUS play with LEGOS! Who doesn’t love Legos?
Tip for the facilitator:
Make a rule that the person who comes to look at the original structure cannot go back and touch the new structure for replicating it.
An activity inspired by classic shipwreck stories, when implemented at the workplace invokes a sense of decision making and how to get out of a particular situation.
Objective: There is no winner or loser in this game (not everything is about winning now). This team-building activity tests the individual problem-solving skills of a person and shows how they handle the clash of views while ranking the survival items.
Warning:
The gravity of a situation can get grave when teams cannot come to mutual grounds for selecting the items, and chaos can erupt. To avoid this, each team must assign a leader who knows how to tackle complex situations.
Objective: This deceptively simple activity checks the intellectual level of the individuals and how they solve the curious clues for finding their way out of the room. This helps the managers to get an idea of how that person handles unforeseen circumstances at the workplace.
Another goal of this activity is to check how tactfully one individual collaborates with the other in finding the hidden clues.
Tip:
A great way to make this activity even more interesting is to convert the space into some interesting themes. Some of the ideas can be haunted rooms, murder scenes, theft scenario (or just use your creativity and come up with one. We leave it to you)
A major chunk of this team building activity focuses on team communication, trust-building, and effectively interpreting the verbal messages.
Disclaimer:
No actual landmines are laid during the setting up of this activity, so don’t worry! It’s completely safe.
Objective: At the end of this activity, you can discuss the communication problems teams had to face. This can be used as an excellent source of understanding how individuals share and interpret information.
No, it’s not a public appeal to listen to a famous cover! We promise it’s an actual workplace activity that really helps with building the communication skills of individuals.
Objective: This activity invokes a sense of patience in you by making you listen patiently to the other person’s point of view without coming up with rebuttals. Fair enough, no?
For workplaces, it’s a great tool to analyze the open-mindedness of your employees.
Pro tip:
The topics on the cards could be the on-going problems in your organization or within your team. That way, you can get clear perspectives on what the employees feel about a particular situation.
Build a bridge is an interactive activity that focuses on building bridges, not walls! (See what we did there? 😉) This team-building activity helps in strengthening the communication skills of individuals because teams have to brainstorm and come up with ideas to build the perfect bridge.
A common issue:
When the teams are building bridges and communicating with each other, they can get into conflict and disturbance can erupt. To avoid such a catastrophe, try to appoint a leader for each team responsible for all communication and conflict management.
We know what you’re thinking! Don’t worry, even if you’re an amateur at drawing, you can still be a part of this fun activity that is a quick take on Pictionary.
When we’re talking about Pictionary, we automatically tend to think of the verbal skills of a person, and this is exactly what the focus of this team building activity is- building strong communication skills.
Objective: This quick team building activity can easily be played indoors or outdoors and is a great way to identify the communication flaws among team members.
If you’re looking for a quick activity to check how observant your team members are, office trivia was specially designed for you!
For the bonding of geographically scattered team members, office trivia can take a special form. Team members have to match the pictures of workstations with their respective owners. It can be a nice ice-breaker activity for newly developed remote teams.
Objective: If you’re wondering how sharing pictures of your personal space help with team bonding, it does so by helping the team members understand each other on a more intimate level and can help remote team members to open up in a better way.
Tip for future:
An interesting take on the remote version of the activity can be to ask questions about personal spaces of team members the next time it’s being played. For instance; whose workstation has post-it notes all over it? And so on!
Let’s admit that one of the hardest things at workplaces is to cultivate a sense of identity among team members. This simple team building activity can help you do that! It’s an excellent initiative to bring forward something every team member can connect with and shows the collective identity of the team.
Objective: This team bonding exercise is a great way to bring out the creative juices of your team members. They must work together to design an emblem for their team identity. It also promotes bonding through the sharing of creative ideas and builds a stronger sense of team cohesiveness.
We all remember playing with jigsaw puzzles during our childhood days and how we would all get excited with them. If you’re one of those people who were and still are enticed by jigsaw puzzles, you’re in luck, because we’ve just added jigsaw puzzles to our list of productive team building activities.
For successful completion, you have to bring your ‘puzzle completing’ skills to work with you.
Objective: In this process of solving puzzles, teams will learn how to work together and communicate effectively.
Unlike the infamous ‘Game of Thrones’ season, this team building activity does not have anything to do with any trivia. ‘Game of Possibilities’ spans over 5 – 10 minutes and does not require that many objects/ props, to begin with. It is more like a charade where one player takes an object and demonstrates its use through actions ONLY. Meanwhile, others do the guesswork!
Objective: This is a team-building activity where everyone gets to display their creative side. Also, there are no panic buttons and any possibility of your office breaking down into a quarrel. Overall, it is a fun activity for any team to bond over.
Just like ‘Tug of War’ this game is a perfect icebreaker for any office that’s usually moot at the communication side. Participants of this game have to rely heavily on communication, teamwork and problem-solving in a fun way.
The idea of this game is to have your team gather around in a circle. Make everyone hold hands with the person standing across the circle. Once the knot is complete, try to untangle without letting go of both your hands.
Objective: The objective of this game is to develop cohesive communication and problem-solving skills. It typically takes 15 – 20 minutes to complete. ‘The Human Knot’ is also a good icebreaker among office team members who don’t get to communicate frequently due to job placements.
‘Scavenger Hunt’ has taken many forms and shapes, depending on the organizational culture and team sizes. The idea of this game is to help members bond with one another, whilst being able to develop team-building skills.
A bunch of goofy, but harmless, tasks are written on a bunch of papers. Later on, each member draws a paper and performs the activity mentioned in there. Winner with the most number of completed tasks takes away the reward.
Objective: Scavenger Hunt is packed with oodles of fun and laughter for the entire office. People have their unique way of doing things, which brings in a bout of cheer from everyone. As part of recommended productive team building activities, it is an excellent team-building opportunity for businesses that don’t get to mingle that much.
This one for office cultures that are hard-pressed for productive team building activities and cognitive skills for problem-solving the purpose. Egg Drop has involved a protective make-do casing around the eggs and then dropping them to see which one doesn’t break.
Objective: This activity is a good example of a productive team building activity where everyone engages in completing the same task in a unique way. Although ‘The Egg Drop’ has been known to leave a mess on the office floors, it does makeup by helping team members bond with one another.
‘Barter Puzzle’ is a slight variation of ‘Team Jigsaw’ activity that we talked about earlier in this post. However, the emphasis in this activity is not only on honing team building skills, but also on salesmanship for concerned members.
This is a perfect activity where the participants have to haggle with other groups for key jigsaw pieces in a race to complete their puzzle first!
Objective: The objective of this team building activity is to polish the salesmanship and presentation skills of a company’s employees. Whilst doing so, team members get to communicate with one another to complete their puzzle first. It is a fun activity that’s laced with numerous challenges against a ticking clock!
You may have played this game before in your childhood where you need to guess the name of the person with different clues. Now you can play the guess the name game as a team-building activity in your organization as well with slight modification.
It goes by guessing the name of the person by acting and doing something that relates to that person. Your partner will guess the name of that person. The more people play this game you will enjoy more.
Objective: The main aim of this team building activity is to so create competitiveness among your team and learn how your team wants to be treated the way they act. Moreover, it will create a strong company culture where employees take care of their coworkers.
This team-building activity is for culinary experts or for the people who aspire to be the one. This fun activity will give you either a delicious meal and dessert, or it could be a complete disaster. The cooking challenge will bring out the hidden talent and creativity of your team. It will polish the leadership and time management skills of your coworkers too.
Objective: This team building activity will bring out the creativity, time management, and leadership skills of your team members. Moreover, they will learn how to cooperate with their coworkers when resources are limited and how they can stick to the plan and meet the deadline.
Warning: It will not be possible for every organization to set up for the inhouse cooking challenge. The only company that can arrange for the cooking and kitchen equipment should pursue this challenge. Even if you can easily arrange stuff for this team activity, it is important that you keep the first-aid kit with yourself and follow the safety precaution.
Karaoke dinner is an interactive entertainment arrangement where an amateur person comes to the stage and sing a song with recorded music. Mostly the music played is the instrumental version of the original song. This team-building activity can be conducted in your organization’s annual dinner where your team is given a chance to break the fear by getting them up to sing a song.
You can find creativity and a sense of humor in the lyrics of the song. Some people might not know the lyrics, so they can made anything up from themselves and sing.
Objective: The main objective of this team activity is to let your team break the shell and bring out their extrovert self.
This is a collection of many different team building games that you can play to improve collaboration and communication between team members. In addition to being the most fun thing that you will do that day, everyone will have something productive to learn from their experience.
Approximately 20 – 400 team members can take part in the beach Olympics and it’s a great way to let loose and get to know their peers outside the workplace.
This activity is very similar to the scavenger hunt but where a geocaching adventure shines is the addition of GPS coordinates to find out the clues.
Approximately 4-100+ people can take part in a geocaching adventure and it’s an amazing way to test the mind power and decisiveness of the team members.
Ever seen the show ‘Shark Tank’?
This game is based on that TV show where the teams have to present mockup business ideas and a team of “Sharks” is going to judge whether or not they are worth investing in.
Approximately 24 people can play the game. You can split them up into teams of 2-6 people.
This is a great team-building exercise where your team is going to count to 20 to practice different traits like teamwork, forward-thinking, and active listening.
Not sure about how they are going to do that just by counting? Give it a try, you’ll soon find out.
Approximately 5-30 participants can take part in this activity.
Sounds simple, right? Why don’t you give it a shot and see where ‘Count to 20’ takes you?
That covers our list of productive team building activities! It’s your turn now to use them according to your goals and team needs.
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