Team building exercises a brief introduction and cocktail education, teams will Bulding up and be given time Team building exercises work buildjng to fxercises their own hand-crafted Digestive health remedies. If you have them, you can give each team coloured bibs or ribbons to wear exeecises Team building exercises identify who is on which team. But for this to carry over into your everyday work, you need to ensure your employees have the tools they need to collaborate seamlessly. What you'll need: Internet connection, e-book or physical books, video conferencing app. This will likely get more people talking, and it teaches your team about their colleagues' values, skills, and more. By sharing from the full gamut of our experiences, your team can get to know one another meaningfully and create trust too. All teamwork and communication needed to organize themselves must be conducted through non-verbal communication.

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Best Icebreaker: Connection Before Content Team Building Exercises and Activities. By the Mind Tools Content Team. Shakira's team is experienced Fuel Usage Optimization hard-working — Team building exercises, Tfam, its performance has exsrcises "hit Team building exercises miss. The Tfam seems to have lost some of its energy and motivation, and morale is beginning to drop. So, Shakira decides to get her people back on track by exploring some team building strategies and activities. Team building is about providing the skills, training and resources that your people need, so that they can work in harmony.

Team building exercises -

Turn any device into a time clock that tracks attendance, breaks, and time off. Communicate with everyone on the team, all in one place, without sharing phone numbers.

Run payroll in minutes with a single click—no more syncing or importing needed. Team building games are a fun and creative way to get your team connecting and working together. Finding the right exercise can be challenging, since not every team is comfortable with certain types of activities.

Want to save these ideas for later? Download the free ebook version of the Epic List of Great Team Building Games! Here are 32 team building games to choose from, and none of them involve trust falls whew :. As a group, take a personality test together. Bring in a speaker, if time allows, to expound on the different personality traits, their strengths, their weaknesses, and a plan on how potential clashes can be alleviated.

The DISC personality test is a good choice, as is the True Colors personality test. These tests simplify things and create easily remembered results. Purpose: Knowing what motivates and what demotivates other team members is powerful.

By establishing how each team member works best, and how they react in different situations, they can learn how to approach each other differently to succeed in work and personal interaction.

Create a fictional problem that must be solved. It could be a theoretical product, a brain teaser, a riddle, a design challenge — anything that needs a solution. Assemble your team, and have them write down an idea on a large sheet of paper. They only need to write a sentence or two. Have them pass the paper to the person on their left, and instruct them to use the new idea to build another solution upon.

Continue for several rounds, and then see what the results are. You may want to choose a fictional problem that allows you to reveal one aspect of the challenge each round.

As you work as a team, brainstorming sessions often sway towards the vocal and dominant personalities even though other team members have valuable ideas, too. Instruct them to write down three truths and one lie. The lie should be believable to some extent i. Go around the group, one at a time, and have them read the truths and lie in random order.

When they are finished, the team should discuss which they think are the truths and which are the lies. Extroverts have no difficulty in making themselves known, but introverts often remain an enigma, bowled into silence. This team bonding game gives them equal footing to reveal facts about themselves as well as expose the assumptions others have made.

Participants learn about others and also learn about themselves through the lies they thought were true. Break your team into groups of equal members. Give each team a distinctly different jigsaw puzzle of equal difficulty.

Explain that they have a set amount of time to complete the puzzle as a group. Explain that some of the pieces in their puzzle belong to the other puzzles in the room. The goal is to complete their puzzle before the other groups, and that they must come up with their own method of convincing the other teams to relinquish the pieces they need, whether through barter, exchange of team members, donating time to another team, a merger, etc.

Whatever they choose to do, they must do it as a group. Purpose: This exercise is time-consuming, but it accomplishes creative teamwork on several levels.

As a team, they must build the puzzle. As a team, they must find a way to convince the other teams to help them. In other words, they must solve both the puzzle and the problem of getting their pieces back. Talk about team bonding, huh?

Divide your team into equal groups. Create a specific project with clear restrictions and a goal. For example, you might have your team create a device that involves movement without electricity, and moves a golf ball from point A to point B.

The challenge is completely up to you. Then give each team the same supplies to work from, or create a pile of available supplies in the middle of the room.

Give them a specific time to complete the project, making sure to mention that they can only use what is available, though how they use it is completely up to them. The final reveal is a fun event, and a great opportunity for your team to compete.

Purpose: Problem solving as a team, with a strong mix of creativity, is exactly what this exercise accomplishes. It also brings an element of fun and maker-ism into the mix, with the added twist of learning how to solve a problem with reduced options.

In the book Weslandia by Paul Fleischman, the young boy Wes creates his own language, culture, and economy one summer.

A new startup created a small economy and ended up having a great deal of fun as well as learning about what motivated other team members. Get your team together and decide if you want to create an economy or some mini-aspect of larger society. Set up the rules you will abide by, leaving enough wiggle room to experience problems that need group agreement to solve as the system is put into action.

There are rewards and penalties. Some team members will reveal themselves to be rule-abiders and others as creative rule-benders. The team will quickly learn how others work, solve, and think outside of the typical work-related realm.

This will bring new understanding to work-related projects that need solutions. This team-bonding exercise takes place not in one sitting, but over time.

Make a large, blank journal or scrapbook available in the break room or other common areas. The book may have prompts on each page, asking questions or suggesting things to write or draw. Or, you may have guidelines printed and displayed next to the book i. Leave pens, markers, tape, and other items that your team can use to write and draw in the book.

When the book is full, put it on the shelf and get a new one. Purpose: This team exercise creates a living history of your business that you can keep adding to. It is somewhat similar to the Zappos culture book, but allows your team a chance to build it more directly.

This game encourages creativity, collaboration, and recollection. Divide your team into equal sized groups, and send them out with a list of items to locate and bring back.

Whether they remain in the office or are to leave the building is up to you. The ultimate goal is to get back first with the most items. You may want to set a time limit so that all groups are back in a reasonable time, whether they found all items or not.

A scavenger hunt can be themed, and might involve a variety of clues or other twists that force a team to get creative and work together. One variation is to make it a digital scavenger hunt in which they must find examples and specific information or web pages online.

You may wish to restrict which search engines or methods they use to complete the challenge. Purpose: A scavenger hunt is a fun activity that forces people to work together as a team. It spurs creativity, particularly if clues or riddles are involved. Much like a scavenger hunt, a geocache adventure relies on clues but has the added level of using GPS coordinates to find an item.

Each group will need to have a GPS device that will work for finding geocaches. There are several apps available to use on smartphones that would suffice. You may wish to have a set time in which all groups must return.

The clues you hide in specific geographic locations could be part of a larger riddle or message that you wish the teams to have revealed to them. A variation of this might be to use QR codes placed around the office or neighborhood, mixing GPS locations with other clues found in QR codes.

Purpose: This exercise helps team members work together to achieve a specific goal using a specific and narrow process in which close enough is not good enough. It also promotes problem solving in a creative way if riddles and puzzles are involved.

If you do this over lunch, be sure to cater food and make it a fun time. Require team members to be present. Have a question and answer session afterwards. Purpose: Most people are eager to let others know interesting things about themselves, but not all team members are able to make that happen.

Most teams are lopsided, with some members dominating discussion. Before your regular staff meeting, break your team into groups. Instruct the groups to find out one commonality among themselves.

It might be a hobby or an interest they all do, or having the same favorite genre of music or favorite food. Once they discover a commonality they can agree on, they create a list of what might be stereotypical qualities of such people.

Then, the groups come together to announce to the rest of the groups who they are. The Roller Coaster Buffs, for example, might periodically raise their arms and holler, or the Jane Austenites might rephrase all of their speech to coworkers as quotes from Jane Austen books.

At the completion of the meeting or day , talk about stereotypes that we assign to people. Talk about how people managed to find a commonality, and the process it took to dig it up.

Purpose: The idea is to force your team to confront the foolish nature of stereotypes and how, if people really behaved as we casually write them off to be, the office would be much different. The game also reveals the ability of a seemingly random group of people to find a commonality.

To do this, remove key nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Create a worksheet in which the removed words are shown as a blank line with instructions on what kind of word is needed. In groups of two, have one team member ask for the correct type of word and the other team member supply the word.

Or, if you do not want to break the team into groups, ask the team as a whole to supply one word at a time. Once there are enough words, read the mission statement back. It will sound silly. Now that the team knows what the goal is, ask them for the same word types.

See what kinds of words they supply. Repeat the exercise until you get a mission statement that the team feels is correct. A variation is to categorize the types of words before the first round.

So, tell them you are looking for words that apply to the team without telling them you are working on a mission statement. By stripping away the jargon and stiffness and allowing the mission statement to go through several rounds of nonsense, you allow your team to help you craft a statement that is more relaxed and honest.

Using wooden blocks or an actual Jenga game, mark blocks according to the hierarchies present in your company. For example, you might have some blocks denoted as the IT department, and others as HR. Divide your team into groups, giving them an equal number and kind of blocks.

From here, either specify the type of structure each team must build, or provide guidelines and allow them to build any structure they want.

When the time limit has been reached, each team, taking turns, must begin to remove a block at a time without destroying their structure. Do not inform them ahead of time that you will be asking them to do this. If time allows, you may ask them to repeat the exercise.

See if they find a way to build a structure that can withstand removal of blocks. Purpose: This exercise is meant to show how each department and the various managers and staff positions are necessary to complete the task, and that without everyone in place, things fall apart.

Divide your team into groups of two each. Have each person sit with their back to the other. One person will have a picture. The other person will have a blank sheet of paper and a pen.

The team member with the picture must not show the other person the image. Instead, they are to describe the image without using words that give it away, while the other team member is to draw what is being described.

For example, the picture might be of an elephant standing on a ball. After a set time limit, the drawing time ends and both team members view the original picture and the drawing. Purpose: This is an exercise that focuses on communication and language.

While the final drawing will seldom look like the picture, it is revealing to participants to see how different the interpretation of instructions can be even when they are supposedly talking about the same thing.

Gather your team in a circle, and have them sit down. Each team member should then put on a provided blindfold. Leave the circle. Instruct them to form a perfect square out of the rope without removing their blindfolds.

You can introduce variations into this game. For example, you might, at random, instruct a team member to not speak. One by one, members of the group are muted, making communication more challenging. Or, let the team come up with a plan before putting on the blindfold, but once they cannot see, they also cannot talk.

Purpose: This exercise deals with both communication and leadership styles. There will inevitably be team members who want to take charge, and others who want to be given direction.

The team will have to work together to create the square, and find a way to communicate without being able to see. On name tags or similar labels, write down the name of a famous person, or write down people types e. doctor, athlete, nerd, disabled, wealthy, homeless, etc. For a set amount of time, the entire group should mingle, and ask and answer questions.

They should treat each other according to the stereotypical way based on what kind of person they have been labeled. Each team member can use that treatment, as well as the answers to questions, to figure out what the label is. As each team member figures out who they are, they can exit the game and let the rest continue.

Purpose: By confronting stereotypes in both how people treat us and in the questions and answers used, the team can get a better sense of how we mistakenly see people as well as how it feels to be so narrowly defined. This is also a good ice-breaker activity if you have team members that do not know each other yet.

Using masking tape, create a large polygonal shape on the floor. It should be about 12 feet long by 6 feet wide, at least. Mark the start and stopping points. Make the shape a bit convoluted, choosing a shape that is elongated with the idea that people must make their way from one end to the other.

Place a few squeaky dog toys inside the shape, and twice as many full sheets of paper with a large X on them inside the shape. The paper is the mines.

At least two at a time, each person on your team must make their way from start to finish blindfolded. They cannot step outside of the boundary, nor can they step on a mine. If you want to add a little bit of pressure and excitement to the exercise, add a time limit! Although this can be a challenge and get frustrating, this exercise promotes problem framing skills, cooperation, and non-verbal communication skills.

How to play : Divide your team into groups of four or five people. The person who goes first is given or shown a random object e. They then have to demonstrate how to use the object without actually showing it in front of their team. Their team gets 30 seconds on the clock to shout out the correct word you can adjust the time depending on the difficulty of the objects.

How to play : Split your team into two groups and line them up facing each other. Team A gets a quick observation period 15—30 seconds in which group members have to memorize as many things about the people in front of them as possible. Then team A turns around while team B changes as many things about their appearance as possible.

Anything from changing the line up order to swapping shoes with someone or changing your hairdo is fair game. You can adjust the time depending on the size of your group. Your team also gets to practice time-sensitive non-verbal communication during the swapping phase.

How to play : This game is a great way to tune into a new project or workshop. Everyone will choose ideas that they agree are both meaningful and enjoyable.

Record these values in a shared tool to establish the code of conduct for your upcoming project or workshop. This list will function as a reminder for the team to uphold these values. By establishing group norms and values early on and holding everyone accountable with a written code of conduct, you can create a sense of cohesiveness.

How to play : Divide your team into groups of three to five people. Then ask your team to find things everyone in their group has in common. This can be a favorite TV show, an ice cream flavor nobody likes, or a common hobby.

The more things they can find that everyone in the group has in common, the better! If you have the time, bring everyone together afterward and ask the teams to share their experiences. Why this exercise is great : This fun game allows your team to find commonalities that they may not get a chance to discover otherwise.

Talking about shared likes and dislikes can be helpful to reconnect you with teammates. You can use Zoom to connect with your teammates or do quick team building exercises via your remote work software during the day.

If your team is located across multiple time zones, you may have to get creative with scheduling. Ashley Frabasilio, Employee Engagement Manager at Asana encourages leaders to schedule these activities during normal work hours.

Ensure that the activity is appropriate for all participants in all time zones so no one feels excluded. This can be anything from a pet to a plant, a painting they did, or a certificate they received. Everyone gets two to three minutes to show off their item and answer questions from the team if they have any.

How to play : Collect a few funny photos—for example a few memes that have recently been circling the internet. Send these to your team before the meeting and ask everyone to submit their best photo caption for each image.

You can put these together in a quick presentation and present them to your team during the call. You can have a good laugh together and even vote for the best captions.

Why this exercise is great : This exercise is a fun way to get creative as a team and have a good laugh together. How to play : Schedule regular coffee calls for your remote team to give everyone a chance to get to know each other like they would in an office setting.

You can schedule team calls with four to five people or randomly assign two people to each other that switch every time. You can offer these casual calls once a week, bi-weekly, or once a month, depending on your team size and the interest in this opportunity. By designating 15—30 minutes on a regular basis to a casual call, your team members will have a chance to bond with people they might not typically interact with.

This presentation can be on a tool everyone uses at work, on a lesson learned from a recent project, or even on a book they read that everyone can learn from. Why this exercise is great : These events are a great opportunity for your team to connect in a more casual yet educational setting.

If your team budget allows, send restaurant gift cards to your team members so they can order lunch for the call. How to play : Invite your team to play a game online together. This can be an actual video game if everyone happens to use the same console at home or you can download an interactive game like Jackbox which you can screen share with the rest of the group.

Why this exercise is great : Playing a video game or an interactive game that has nothing to do with work can be a fun way to switch things up, create a more casual work environment, and get to know each other better.

It will also give people with great sportsmanship a chance to shine! How to play : Start a meeting with a quick game of trivia or host a regular virtual trivia night at the end of the work day.

You can play a game of office trivia e. To mix things up, ask other team members to host trivia night. How to play : Create an optional challenge for your team to participate in.

The challenge can be centered around healthy eating, meditation, journaling, or reading. Create a chat or thread where your teammates can exchange their experiences, wins, and questions to keep each other motivated and accountable throughout the month.

Make sure your team knows that participation is optional. It never hurts to ask for feedback to spark future team challenge ideas. Why this exercise is great : Creating a challenge like this for your team shows them that you care about their work-life balance.

By offering a quarterly challenge, you provide your team with the opportunity to share an experience together.

How to play : Send a personality test to your team and ask everyone to share their results in a chat or during your next team meeting. This can be a formal test like the Enneagram or StrengthsFinder. For something more lighthearted, you can send a fun quiz like the Sorting Hat to find out which Hogwarts house you belong in or a Buzzfeed quiz e.

Playing problem solving games with your team helps them level up their teamwork skills, resolve issues, achieve goals, and excel together. Compile the list and review it as a team. A fun twist on this game is to ask everyone to write down their worst idea. Why this exercise is great : We often get too much into our heads about problems and solutions.

By writing down the first solution that comes to mind, we can uncover new perspectives and fixes. How to play : Divide your team into groups of two to four and present them with a variety of open-ended problems. These can be work-related, imaginary, or even environmental problems.

These will then be presented to the rest of the team. This game imitates this scenario while challenging your team to collaborate on solving a creative problem.

How to play : Each team member will create an original problem-solving activity on their own and present it to the group. Whether this entails a physical, mental, or creative challenge is up to your team. If you have the time, play some of the games afterward! Why this exercise is great : Coming up with your own games is fun and a real creative challenge.

Write them down on a whiteboard and give everyone sticky notes and pens. Ask them to write down their thoughts and pin them on the whiteboard underneath the respective topic.

Now arrange the sticky notes as a team. Try to group similar ideas together to the left of the topic and post outliers toward the right side. This will create a spectrum of popular thoughts and opinions on the left and more extreme ideas on the right.

Why this exercise is great : This game will help you map out the diversity of perspectives your team has on different topics. How to play : Present your team with a problem and ask everyone to come up with a famous person or leader they admire.

This can be a celebrity, a business person, or a relative. Challenge your teammates to approach the problem as if they were that person and present their solution extra points for playing in character. Why this exercise is great : Getting stuck in your own head can often keep you from solving a problem efficiently and effectively.

By stepping into the shoes of someone else, you may uncover new solutions. How to play : Form groups of two to six people that will compete against one another in a series of challenges.

You can buy a team pursuit package online or create your own game, which will take a good amount of prep time. Why this exercise is great : A solid game of team pursuit will create a fun challenge that gives everyone a chance to shine and show off their talents.

This game will bring your team closer together and show them new sides of their teammates that they may not have been aware of. How to play : This brain teaser is a fun activity that you can play indoors or outdoors to challenge your team. Outback Team Building offers self-hosted, remote-hosted, and on-site hosted events that include several codes your teammates have to find and break to make it through the course.

Why this exercise is great : This challenge requires creative thinking, creates a competitive environment, and works with large groups because you can break off into smaller groups. How to play : Visiting an escape room is always a unique experience and a great way to spend an afternoon with your team.

Why this exercise is great : Solving the mysteries of an escape room with your team will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your teammates, foster communication and collaboration, build trust, and become a shared memory that connects you together. How to play : Divide your team into groups of four to six and ask them to stand in a tight circle with their group.

Ask everyone to blindfold themselves or close their eyes and give one person a rope. Without looking at what they're doing, the teams now have to pass the rope around so everyone holds a piece of it and then form a perfect square. Once the team is sure their square is perfect, they can lay the rope down on the floor, take off their blindfolds or open their eyes and see how well they did.

Because no one can see what they're doing, your team members have to communicate clearly while figuring out how to create a square out of a rope. Invite everyone to share these with the team to take a walk down memory lane and post the notes on the whiteboard as you go.

How to play : This team building exercise works best in a quiet atmosphere with everyone sitting in a circle. Ask your team to silently think of a unique memory in their lives. You can give them a few minutes to collect their thoughts. Not everyone may be comfortable opening up at first, so be sure to lead with vulnerability and make everyone in the room feel safe about sharing their moment.

Why this exercise is great : This exercise is a great way to help your team members remember their priorities and bond on a deeper level. How to play : Split your team into groups of two to four and hand out card stock. When the paper planes are done, have a competition in a long hallway or outside to see which plane flies the farthest.

Why this exercise is great : This exercise requires team members to collaborate on a project with a tight timeline. It is a great activity to practice communication skills, delegation, and time management.

How to play : Divide your team into groups of four or five and provide them with 20 sticks of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. Challenge each team to build the tallest tower possible using only the supplies you gave them. When finished, the tower has to support the marshmallow sitting on top.

Set the timer for 20 minutes and ask everyone to step away from their masterpiece when it runs out so you can crown a winner. Why this exercise is great : This challenge is a great way to improve problem solving skills and communication within your team. Your team members will have to prototype, build, and present the tower in a short amount of time, which can be stressful.

The better they work together, the more likely they are to succeed. How to play : Lay a towel, blanket, or sheet on the floor and ask your teammates to stand on it. The goal is to flip the piece over without ever stepping off of it or touching the ground outside of the fabric.

You can make the challenge more difficult by adding more people to the team or using a smaller sheet. Why this exercise is great : This exercise requires clear communication, cooperation, and a good sense of humor.

How to play : Create a structure out of Lego pieces and hide it in a separate room. Divide your team into groups of two to four people and give them enough Legos to replicate the structure in 30 minutes or less. One player per team is allowed to sneak a peek at the original structure for 15 seconds, then run back and describe it to their team.

The person who gets to sneak a peek rotates so everyone gets to see the original at some point during the game.

Team building exercises it or not, fun team building activities for work are bulding important to the success exercuses your business. In fact, the personal buildong formed exercisex Team building exercises buiding actually give Hunger and human rights company builsing competitive edge. Another Gallup Team building exercises reported that engaged companies consistently outperform the competition when it comes to things like profits, productivity, and turnover. Pretty important stuff if you ask us. We asked The Assista free weekly email for professionals, along with some of the most engaged, tightly knit companies out there to show us how to do team building right. With all sorts of options at your disposal, it can become overwhelming to find the right type of team building event for your group.