10 Best Team Building Activities for Small Businesses
Are you looking for ways to improve workplace morale?
The daily grind your workers experience can take a toll on their minds and body. It can result in poor performance and harm your business altogether. Team building activities can help restore their energy and enthusiasm.
However, you need to choose an activity that is not only fun, but it should also build trust and boost dynamics among your employees.
Team building activities not only provide a break from the routine. They also improve your workers’ critical thinking.
Ready to learn excellent ways to bring your employees back on track? Here are ten activities that boost their performance, and thus your business output:
1. Escape Rooms
Escape rooms go at the top of the list because of their uniqueness.
One of the best team building activities, an escape room offers a lot. It will not only improve your team members’ morale. It’s also a great way to assess their leadership and problem-solving capabilities.
Employee engagement is crucial for every business. You want your workers to excel in challenging situations at the office.
An escape room is a very engaging activity and escape room popularity has only grown in recent years. It’s better than other traditional team building activities like paintball and cooking classes. It encourages your employees to bring the same focus when they get back to work at the office.
An escape room consists of a series of puzzles that a player needs to find a solution to. Solving these puzzles lead to a combination of clues leading to a way to escape the room. Teamwork is vital to solving the problems, and communication between players is critical.
Winning the game may seem to be the goal. However, it’s the whole problem-solving experience that makes playing escape rooms memorable.
The situations that participants have to go through to escape the room vary. Different factors help improve their focus and apply critical thinking. These same characteristics are what they’ll be using in the workplace.
The benefit of assessing employees’ capabilities is what makes escape rooms perfect. You and your managers will see right off the bat who can become a leader among the team.
2. Company Trivia
You won’t find a better way of enhancing company culture than with company trivia. Main trivia questions will revolve around company values, goals, and practices. However, you can mix in other categories as well.
Make this activity a group affair instead of having each person answer a trivia. This approach helps build communication skills. It can also improve brain function as a team.
You can use a straight-up point system to keep track of scores. However, you can make it more interesting by placing bets. It’s the same way as placing and winning bets on a poker game.
Each team will have the same amount of bets at the start of the game. However, they can then make larger bets if they’re confident about their answer. The winning team will have most of the money pool at the end of the session.
3. Sneak a Peek
While a game of Pictionary is a very engaging team building game, it also lacks depth. Sneak a Peek takes this game to a whole new level that’s three-dimensional.
To start, break off people into groups with at least four members. No one needs to draw the object, though. Instead, each group’s game leader will be crafting it using LEGO, clay, or building blocks.
Their respective team members have a chance to take a peek at what their game leader constructed. However, it’s only for 10 seconds.
Afterward, they will need to recreate what they saw using the same materials. The winner would be the first group to recreate the object.
Sneak a Peek helps participants to develop project management and problem-solving skills. It trains their minds to act fast with little information provided.
The game will also improve their ability to accomplish tasks under time constraints. What makes this activity fun is that it helps them to see how creative (or not) their co-workers could be.
4. Scavenger Hunt
The usual way of doing Scavenger Hunt is to bring the physical objects written on the list. However, you can modernize this with smartphone pictures. You can use the pictures as part of an album, plus it allows for more complex items on the list.
Set aside an hour or two when the weather is good. Allow separate teams to go outside and take pictures of what you have on the list. Try to list down more complex items such as “man wearing green tie” or “bike skid marks on the pavement.”
The opportunity to go out can refresh your workers. It provides an opportunity for quick destress and unwinding time. It also gives them a chance to stretch and work those legs as they walk around hunting.
5. Egg Drop Challenge
Egg drop challenge is another three-dimensional problem-solving activity. It’s the same game played in summer camps and school. This activity aims to prevent the egg from breaking when it falls from high ground.
For this activity, you’ll need a container, usually a box, to place the uncooked egg. You need to determine the materials that each team will use.
You need to create a shock-absorbing cushion that prevents the egg from breaking. Straws, popsicle sticks, and newspapers are only some of the materials they can use.
After a set amount of time, each team will drop the box containing the egg and its cushion. The winner will be the team whose egg didn’t break.
Egg drop challenge can help improve your employees’ skills. Some of them include analytical and conflict resolution skills using limited resources.
6. Virtual Book Club
If most of your team members are in different cities or states, a virtual book club is an excellent team building choice. It can help develop team spirit, allowing for a more relaxed way of communicating.
Each team member has different roles at work. You can bring them together by reading and discussing the same book. It’ll help create a cohesive unit regardless of diversity.
Discussions about the book can be possible through social media groups your team use. They can share favorite passages or chapter reactions on Twitter or Facebook groups.
7. Jenga Tournament
While you can use wooden blocks, an actual Jenga game is a great choice to play this game. Divide the blocks by the number of teams that will be playing. Hand each team their share of the blocks.
For a set time, each team will build a structure using the blocks they have. They need to use up all their blocks in building the structure.
It may seem to be a simple building game. However, you’ll need to announce the plot twist after everyone completed the structure.
Tell them that they need to remove each of the blocks without destroying their structure. The winner will be the team that’s able to remove every piece of block. Or, the team with the most number of blocks pulled wins.
For the final part of this activity, each team will have to do the entire process again. There is a difference this time, though. Participants know they’ll be taking the structure apart after building it.
This activity not only promotes teamwork. It’ll also develop modular task skills without compromising the entire solution. It helps them identify and resolve problems with an objective approach.
8. Classify These
Do you want your team to develop thinking outside the box while having fun at the same time? If so, then this game of Classify These is a great option.
What you need to do is collect a diverse number of unrelated objects. Try to go for a minimum of 20 items. From office supplies to toys to dinnerware—the more unrelated the items, the better.
Place these objects on a table and separate the participants into a team of four or five. Hand a sheet of paper and pen to each team and instruct them to classify those 20 objects into four groups.
When time’s up, each team will reveal their classifications and provide the reason for it. Pick the team with the most logical classification as the winner.
9. Dining Out
This classic approach to team building never goes out of style. It loosens up everyone and allows for easy team bonding as well.
Dining out with your team allows everyone to chat about non-work-related things. When done regularly, it helps to improve communication and rapport.
This is a low-impact team building activity that doesn’t have to require any alcohol for fun. You and your team can decide to have brunch, lunch, or dinner.
10. Company Retreat
If you want to turn your team-building activity into a longer event, consider going on a company retreat. Team members can meet in the same city and do several activities over the course of two to three days.
Teams might opt for outdoor activities like hiking, camping, or canoeing. Cap each night off the day with dinner and drinks. You may even combine the activities listed above for the full experience.
Get creative with this one. One of my most memorable company retreats was when my employer took the company on a 2-day orca whale-watching kayaking tour in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. First, you can only get there by ferry. Then, we could only bring what we could fit into our kayak. Next, we kayaked several miles in the Pacific Ocean to one of the islands where we set up camp. From there our guides cooked our meals, showed us around the island (hiking), and, of course, we got to see orcas from our kayaks!
Start Your Team Building Activities Today
Annually or quarterly, when your workers need a distraction from anything that has to do with their work, these ten team building ideas prove to create lasting bonds and loyalty to your company.
