Team-building activities can be used by any company for a variety of reasons like improving communication, motivating employees, as an ice-breaker, improving productivity, or for simply knowing each other well. It is a great way to build connections between team members and help them collaborate better. But sometimes finding the right activity for your team may be challenging, so here are some ideas for team building activities that you can implement at your workplace. These activities can be implemented with little or no cost and will help you establish a fun workplace.
Team Building Activities and Games for Employees
#The Barter Puzzle
Divide your team into groups with equal members and then provide them with different jigsaw puzzles with the equal difficulty level. You may put some of the pieces of their puzzle in some other team. Assign a particular time to complete the puzzle. In this game, a team has to convince other teams to relinquish their pieces through barter, exchanging group members, a merger, donating some time, etc. The team that finishes first wins.
#The Common Book
This activity cannot be done in a single sitting, but is done over time. Place a large scrapbook or blank journal at a common place of your office. The journal should ask to write or draw something specific on each page. Provide some markers, pens and other craft items that they can use to write and draw things in the journal. Don’t forget to give a guideline along with the book that clearly mentions that nothing offensive or no complaints are to be written inside the book. Ask them to write about some fun event in the office or some quotes from their favourite book. Allow them to include pictures to describe some particular event. If the book is full, get a new one. Such activity will help you create a living history of your business and will also help members of your team to be more creative and collaborative.
#Blind drawing
Divide your team into groups of two members. Both the members should sit with their back to the other. One of the members will be given a picture and the other one will be provided with a paper and a pen. The person with the picture needs to describe the image to the other person who then needs to draw it on the blank paper. They cannot use words that directly describe the picture, and need to have the most resembling drawing with the picture to win. Such team building activities will help the members to know how different the interpretation of some instructions can be even when both of them are dealing with the same scenario.
#What’s my name?
Each member of the team will have labels attached to their backs which will contain a word that can be either some famous person or some people type like doctor, engineer, etc. People will have to guess the word that is written on their label by judging others behaviour towards them and by asking yes/no questions. Each member needs to treat another member according to their label so that everyone can get a hint of their own labels. If someone guesses the correct word, they will exit the game and rest of the members will continue with the game. This activity can be used as an ice-breaker before meetings.
#It’s your problem
Gather all the team members in a room and divide them into groups of two. Now tell each group to come up with some problem-solving activities that use teamwork, creativity, and communication. After 15 minutes, listen to each activity and choose the best one which will be performed by them. Or, you can also make them do all the activities so that your team building activities come directly from the members of your team.