Did you know that teamwork and team building have many benefits, including an increase in happiness and a decrease in stress? Employee activities, including team building activities, can be a great way to strengthen relationships and improve workplace productivity.
Have you considered team building exercises to help strengthen your workplace relationships and increase employee well-being? Here are some team building ideas to get you started.
Campfire Story Circle
A campfire circle is a wonderful way to incentivize employee bonding because it allows employees to share common stories and experiences. Start the game by writing down keywords that many people can relate to that will incentivize conversation.
Try starting with one person to pick a keyword, share his or her experience, and then move it to a different area. You can go around the circle and pick different keywords. That way, everyone will have a chance to share a different story, whether it be in your work or personal life.
Once your group goes through all of the words on the list, have the participants think of other words that remind them of the stories they heard. You can keep connecting them for as long as you want the activity to continue.
Shark Tank Pitches
If your company’s productivity stems from innovation or entrepreneurship, then doing a shark tank game is one of the best team building tips. This involves tactics similar to the popular television show Shark Tank, in which entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to a group of potential investors.
Shark Tank can be one of the best team building activities because it involves breaking out into smaller groups and coming up with ideas. This will allow your company members to get to know each other on a more personal level and communicate with each other.
You should also choose some people to be the mock investors. You can either go with management or pick them in a more random way. You can even rotate based on whose ideas make it to the next round.
Trust Fall
Few employee activities help gain trust between employees more than a classic trust fall. This can either be done in a large group, a small group, or just between two people.
One of the main benefits of the trust fall is that it fosters support and dependence between everyone involved. You have to rely on your teammates to catch you as you fall backward, similar to how you might work together on daunting projects at your company.
If you want to get even more crazy, you can have one person stand in the middle of a circle and fall backwards. When someone catches him or her, they push forward, causing the participant to fall into another person. This lets the person know they will have support in the workplace.
Group Trivia
Getting to know people personally is an important aspect of working together as a team to accomplish different goals. Playing a game of group trivia is a fun way to let people discover more about each other and even bring out their competitive side.
This game can be played with either individual participants or teams. One of the best team building tips is that you can switch up teams so that people have the opportunity to work with others and try to guess the answers as quickly as possible.
Write the questions and answers on notecards, pieces of paper, or simply project them using a presentation software. You can use both analog and digital methods to keep score so that you do not lose track of the winner.
Telephone
Since communication is essential to a healthy workplace, try a game of telephone with your employees to test their skills in this category. This can be with information passed verbally from ear to ear, or even used in a pictionary-like way.
Again, you can do this activity with quite a bit of flexibility, either with the whole group or by splitting up into teams. If you divide into teams, try giving each group the same phrase. At the end of the exercise, you can see which team had the most accurate version of the original sentence.
When these team building activities are complete, ask each person in the group what they thought they heard. This is a great way to demonstrate the importance of accurate communication in the workplace.
Two Truths and a Lie
One of the most fun employee activities is Two Truths and a Lie, which involves guessing things about your employees or coworkers. The premise of this game is that each person needs to think of three facts about themselves, two truths and one lie.
As you go around the group, each person says their two truths and a lie. Based on what information the others already know, they can try to guess which one of the statements is actually a lie.
This game usually does not involve a scoring system, but you can ask participants to track how many times they correctly guess the lie. It is a fun way to learn interesting things about your coworkers.
Make a Team Emblem
Designing anything together as a group can be one of the best team building activities to bring your employees closer together. You can assemble them by department, or randomly, to create team emblems that reflect workplace culture and values.
A team emblem can include a flag, a crest, or a group motto. Participants can be as creative as they would like with available materials like markers and colored pencils.
Use the Best Team Building Exercises
When you get to know your workplace employees and coworkers, you should not have to worry about team building exercises. With these tips and tricks, you can bond with each other in no time and lead to a more cohesive workplace.
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