Why Team Building Activities are Useful

If working full-time, we often see our coworkers more than we do our own families and friends. This means the benefits of investing time and money in team building are integral to a strong and effective work force. 

Team building activities motivate staff members to bond and build trust with one another, bringing people together with different backgrounds, ambitions, skills and personalities.

 

The Benefits of Team Building Activities

1. Improved Communication Skills

Strong communication between staff within an organisation is one of the essential foundations for a successful business.

Team-building exercises aim to create more of a casual, relaxed environment so employees participating feel more inclined to communicate with each other and feel more confident communicating with each other in future.

 

2. Improved Productivity

If employees feel confident enough to collaborate and work together, this will increase productivity - two heads are always better than one. 

Team building exercises increase future productivity by allowing employees to get to know each other better. This helps cases in future where someone needs to ask for help or advice from an employee they are not too familiar with.

 

3. Leaders are Identified

Team building activities are also helpful for managers to be able to discover the natural leaders within their staff force and gain better insights into the characteristics and skills of their employees.

 

Planning a Team Building Event

There are several key steps in planning an effective team building event for work purposes. 

  • Have an idea of what your goals are and what you want to achieve

  • Get to know your audience, the different people you want to bond together

  • Find and select the right activities for the people attending

  • Choose a good time and an appropriate location

  • Invite the relevant people 

  • Make sure the venue partner you use has the experience to bring your vision to life

 

Team Building Activity Ideas

There are endless possibilities when it comes to team building ideas. 

You need to find appropriate activities that will engage these people and the more introverted members of staff.

Here are 5 staple team building activities that deserve a mention. If you aren’t a fan of these particular ideas there are hundreds of ideas and activities online that you can search for.

 

1. Group Line Ups 

Have different teams sort themselves out in order of height, age, how long they’ve been with the company and other similar categories.

The quickest team to put themselves in the correct order wins.

This activity really gets the brain working in the morning.

 

2. Office Trivia

You can search for premade trivia questions or have everyone submit their own questions and test how much people know their stuff.

The person with the most correct answers wins and to make things interesting you could even offer a prize.

Everyone loves a classic bit of trivia, this is a safe option to keep everyone happy.

 

3. Two Truths, One Lie

Everyone takes turns telling coworkers two things about themselves that are true and one thing that is a lie. 

Everyone must work together to figure out which statement is the lie.

 

4. Who Am I?

This is a great game to get employees interacting with each other and getting their thinking caps on.

Everyone writes the name of a celebrity on a sticky note and sticks it to the forehead of one of their colleagues.

Then, everyone must go around the room one by one and ask a question about who they are, such as, am I a man or a woman?

The first person to guess who the person is that’s written on their sticky note wins.

 

5. The Dinner Party

This team building activity is a quick and fun way to get people talking. A great game to break the ice with colleagues and get more of an insight into the interests of the people you work with.

This activity involves taking turns asking which three people (dead or alive) your employees would invite to a dinner party and why.

 

Team Building Virtual Activity Ideas

In the new age of hybrid working, virtual team building activities are becoming increasingly popular. Virtual team building activities encourage people working remotely to turn on their mics and webcams and get involved. 

There’s no reason why a hybrid event or virtual one, can’t be just as effective as a physical one, if not more so.

Similar to the in-person team building ideas, here are 5 virtual team building activities that we think are effective. However, the internet is saturated with virtual team building activity ideas.

 

1. Icebreaker Questions

Icebreaker questions are incredibly easy to kick off any virtual meeting with. Asking a fun icebreaker question is a quick and easy way to get people talking and bonding over shared interests. 

You can start with surface-level questions and build them up to get progressively deeper. 

Great examples of icebreaker questions include:

  • What’s a fun fact about yourself that no one knows.

  • If you won the lottery, what would you buy?

  • If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

 

2. Guess Who 

Everyone submits one unknown fact about themselves to the leader of the game.

One by one each fact is read aloud to the group and everyone must take a guess at which fact belongs to who.

The person to match up the most facts to the relevant person correctly is the winner!

Learning fun facts about each other is a fun bonding experience and an opportunity for a good chat for people that work remotely as working from home can often get lonely.

 

3. The Best Lunch Competitions

On a specified day of the week, there is a lunch theme. Themes could be anything such as ‘best sandwich’, ‘Italian food’ or ‘desserts’.

Everyone must make something for lunch that follows the theme, take a photo of the lunch they had that day and post it for other employees to see.

Everyone votes on whose meal they see as the best. The person whose lunch had the most votes is the winner. 

 

4. Virtual Quizzes

Virtual quizzes are a staple for team building. It gives people an excuse to show off their knowledge on interesting and quirky topics that they find interesting.

You can host a quiz on nearly any topic, all it takes is a quick Google search to find a quiz on your chosen topics.

Kahoot is a great platform for creating and hosting quizzes as part of your team building activity.

 

5. Pet Show and Tell

Have everyone join a virtual meeting platform together and show off their pets via webcam. 

There is nothing better to bond over than everyone’s love of pets and it creates ample opportunity for small talk and bonding amongst coworkers. 

It also gives people the opportunity to show off any of the more quirky pets that they haven’t had the opportunity to speak about at work yet.

 

Looking to Organise a Team Building Activity?

At Make Venues, we have venues across Leamington Spa, London and Bristol. These venues are perfect for accommodating your team building activities if you’d like to make things more exciting and organise a team-building event outside of the office.

Contact our team today on 0808 168 5876, or get in touch via our enquiry form for more information on organising a team building activity day.