How to do Team Building Activities at Work

Team building is vital to the long-term success of a business. Many times these sessions are done in classes that offer lessons and activities. However, some companies don’t have the money for that. Doing teamwork sessions at work can reduce the cost and increase the reward in ways that after work sessions can not.

Think About the Goal

When you are looking to have a teambuilding session, you should first think about your goal for the session. This could be something broad for the whole company or specific to one division. The goal should be SMART. In other words, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. A few examples of general teambuilding goals are listed for inspiration.

• Improving internal communication
• Building collaboration between teams and personnel
• Developing problem-solving skills
• Improving leadership among executives
• Improving relationships among diverse teams

Develop the List of Attendees

Once you have your goal, you will need to determine who will attend. If you’re focusing on improving communications among your marketing teams, your list should be the market team. On the other hand, if you’re working on improving relationships among executives, then the list should be all the executives.

Creating a complete list of who will be attending will help with planning all the different aspects of the event including coordination and what will be done. Make sure to note of those people’s schedule and any limitations that they may have.

Create the Plan

Once you have the plan for who will be attending and what the goal is, you need to create the plan for what they will be doing. Think about what their interests, struggles, and strong points are. Following is a list of what you could do at your team building workshop and what it helps with.

• Potluck: Each person brings their favorite meal and talks about why they brought it. This will help with communication and relationship issues. It’s best done at the end of the day for the closing meal.
• Scavenger Hunt: Perfect for teamwork and very versatile.
• Egg Drop: Perfect way to bond as an engineering team. Who can get their egg to stay intact after falling a few stories?
• Blind Retriever: Split your group into teams and get them to direct a blindfolded person through an obstacle course or maze. This activity is great for building trust and coordination.
• Active Listener: Schedule a boring meeting with the team in question. Give a boring speech filled with jargon. However, sprinkle random and unrelated sentences in. Quiz at the end and give a prize to the person who was listening to you the most.
• Group Jigsaw: Give each person a bag of puzzle pieces without instruction. As they put the pieces together, they will realize that they are all parts of different puzzles and that they will need to work as a team to get all the puzzles built.

Create the Schedule

Once you have your activities together, next, you’ll need to make the game plan. This is the calendar that you will follow that day. Make sure you’re planning based on when people will be there and what makes the most sense in terms of the order.

You’ll want to make lively tasks interspersed with the boring tasks to make sure people are staying interested. Don’t forget to leave time for breaks and food if you aren’t making food into an activity.

Send the Plan

This final step is optional. If you know that the team will all be there, then you do have the option to surprise them with a teambuilding day. In its way, that will teach them to go with the flow and expect the unexpected. However, if you opt to let them know about their training day, then don’t forget to tell them to bring anything they might need and that they all need to be present on that day. ​