4 Team Building Activities for Work to Bring Your Team Together
Published October 11, 2022
Team building is highly beneficial to businesses. At worst, it gives your team a much-needed break. At best, it improves the team’s communication, performance, creativity, and productivity, among many things. But while it may seem easy on paper, creating a team building strategy is much harder than you’d initially think. You’ll find that most of the challenge comes from the difficulty of choosing the right team building activities for work.
After all, certain activities, while fun, aren’t suitable for team building. Activities like drawing and card games, for example, are more suited for showcasing an individual’s skills rather than fostering cooperation in the team.
Put simply, when creating a team building strategy or plan, activity and game choice are crucial. With that in mind, let’s look at a couple of team building activities for work that will surely bring your team together.
1. Guess the Sound
What: Guess the Sound is a game that requires teams to guess where the sounds of an audio come from. The best part about Guess the Sound is it’s applicable for remote teams and can take as much time as you want.
Why: Guess the Sound is an excellent way to develop the team’s communication, critical thinking, and decision-making, as they must come up with the best answer from the ideas contributed by each member.
How: Here’s how this team building activity usually goes:
- Form multiple teams to encourage competition. The team distribution is up to you.
- The facilitator records the sounds of anything they want with any device, like a smartphone.
- The facilitator will let everyone hear the audio. For remote teams, they can send the file to a group chat.
- The members of each team will discuss the source of the sound (e.g., hitting a pan, boiling water, scratching wood, etc.). The facilitator may use a timer to set a deadline for submitting answers.
- Each team can only submit one answer for each round. The team who submits the correct answer first wins. If no one gets the right answer, another round starts, giving each team another chance.
- The game will go on until one team guesses the sound correctly.
2. Reverse Line Up
What: Line Up is one of the most popular team building activities for work. It’s an activity where the team is given a specific trait. It can be birthdate, length of employment in the company, or number of pets. The goal is for the team to arrange themselves in a line in order of that trait. Though that in itself is a fun party game, you can put a twist by making it reversed. Basically, Reverse Line Up is when no one knows what the trait is. Instead, the team is already arranged in a line in order of that characteristic. The goal is to figure out the trait.
Why: Reverse Line Up encourages team building for work as it requires everyone to share something about themselves. At the end of the activity, everyone will know at least one more fact about their coworkers.
How: You don’t need anything for the game. But you do need to know certain traits or characteristics about each team member to be able to arrange them in a line in order. As for the instructions, it’s pretty simple. The facilitator just needs to arrange the team members, brief them about the game, and let them do the rest.
3. Two Truths, One Lie
What: Two Truths, One Lie is an activity where every team member must think of three statements, two of which are true and one a lie. The rest of the team will have to distinguish which of the three is the lie.
Why: It’s not the best activity for improving cooperation since it’s all about tricking one another. But it’s an excellent activity for the team to understand one another on a deeper level. The activity encourages telling absurd and seemingly unbelievable facts about oneself that often turn out to be true. Hence, each team member will likely share things that they don’t normally share with others, like a funny secret or a bizarre fact.
How: Just like the two previous team building activities for work, Two Truths, One Lie doesn’t require much props or equipment. A pen and paper, or pretty much any writing material for each team member, will do.
Here are the instructions for those who aren’t familiar with the game:
- The facilitator briefs every team member on the game.
- For three to five minutes (the time is up to you), everyone has to think of three statements where two are truths, and one is a lie.
- Once time is up, each individual will have their turn to be interrogated for a few minutes. During the interrogation, everyone can ask questions to the “interrogatee” about their three statements.
- After each interrogation, everyone except the “interrogatee” will write or type in which statement they think is a lie. Those who got it correct will get one point, and the “interrogatee” will get one point for each person they managed to trick. The person with the highest score wins.
4. Who’s My Match?
What: Who’s My Match is a game where everyone has a piece of paper stuck on their back, forehead, or in any other place they cannot see without removing the paper. It’ll have a word written that’s often associated as a pair of another word (e.g., peanut butter and jelly, Romeo and Juliet, Tom and Jerry, etc.). Everyone won’t know what their own word is, but others will. The goal is to figure out what your word is by asking other people Yes/No questions, then find the person with the word that matches yours.
Why: In this game, you must ask others questions to help you figure out your word. But in return, you must also answer their questions to help them figure out their word. Hence, it’s a great way to encourage cooperation.
How: For this team building activity, you need paper and an adhesive that doesn’t stain clothes.
- Write a bunch of “pair words” on pieces of paper.
- Assign one word to each person by sticking the paper into their back, forehead, etc.
- The facilitator must explain the game to everyone.
- Once the activity starts, each individual can ask others Yes/No questions to narrow down their word.
- After figuring out their word, the individual must find the person that has the word that matches theirs. The first pair to match themselves successfully wins. The game can continue until everyone has paired with their match.
Closing Thought
Unlike business, team building activities for work don’t need to conform to metrics. Even if the activities don’t seem to improve the team’s productivity much, as long as they’re clearly having fun, there’s no real reason to stop the activities. But if you really need your team to show satisfactory results, you must prepare projects that your team can work on with their improved productivity and morale after team building for work.
(Related: 20+ Hilarious Office Puns to Break The Ice at Work)
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About The Author
Lenard Arceo is an experienced writer who enjoys learning to coding as a hobby. He has spent many years blogging about a vast array of topics and has helped many reputable websites grow their audience over the years.