If you’re a manager looking to improve morale around the office, give everyone a quick break from work and help bring a sense of shared responsibility back to the workplace, then a team building exercise might be a way to achieve those goals and have fun in the process.
Team building exercises come in many guises and can include anything from paintball outings to high-ropes obstacle courses. The underlying idea behind these team building exercises is to foster interpersonal cooperation and help everyone on the team clarify their roles and pool their resources together to reach a shared goal.
Here are some fun ideas that you can incorporate into your corporate team building events to get everyone on the same page and working together.
Cooking Course
Getting your team in the kitchen and cooking meals is a great way to improve communication skills among every present. As a bonus, you get to sample everything that you make. Some team building exercises that incorporate culinary experiences take your corporate team from the farm to the restaurant and walk you through every facet of the farming and cooking process.
Comedy Club
Comedy clubs around the country offer team building activities that usually share a common flavor. Each team member works off the other in creating an improvisational comedy sketch. The idea is for one team member to add details to the basic skit – it’s a lot like the game Telephone that you might have played as a kid. The idea behind this team building exercise is letting everyone really relax for a few hours and learn to rely on each other to create a whole greater than the sum of its constituent parts.
Ziplining Excursions
Ziplining is obviously an exhilarating experience, but it can also give you a new perspective on an area in your workplace’s backyard and create a sense of camaraderie among team members and their families as everyone hikes up to the ziplinning jumping off point. Ziplining is extremely safe and uses pulleys and harnesses to send team members across hundreds of feet of wire overlooking beautiful scenery along the way.
Songwriting Challenge
Creating a song as a team is a great way for everyone to feel like they’re working together and contributing to a musical whole. Professional singer-songwriters will walk you through the same creative process that they experience whenever they sit down to write a song. Teams work together and open-mindedly problem solve ways to let the voice of every team member be heard.
Car Building
Some corporate team building exercises have team members working together to create a makeshift racing car out of a kit provided by the team building company. Because this team building exercise taps into planning and management, developing a clear strategy and having team members step up and become leaders is essential to success. Working through problems in turning an appealing design into workable practice is a skill that many managers find transfers over from this team building exercise to the workplace.
Scavenger Hunt
Having team members engage in a scavenger hunt in a large metropolitan area with their families is fun, creative and a great way to relax from work responsibilities. Using a basic map, clues, and a compass or GPS, teams work together to collect clues around the city and score points for their respective teams. This team building activity combines teamwork and planning. A scavenger hunt that’s intelligently designed to take advantage of the sights and sounds of a big city is sure to be a relaxing and memorable time for corporate team members and their families.
Volunteering Exercises
Incorporating volunteering into team building exercises facilities a sense of social responsibility and teamwork at the same time that teams get to spend more time outdoors with their coworkers and families. Although this is a team-based competition, team members are cognizant of the fact that volunteering has less of a competitive edge and is more about giving back.
Hop to It
Team building activities at a gym that features a trampoline, foam pit and various obstacle courses can be navigated to help teams complete tasks in resource-efficient ways. You don’t have to try too hard to realize why this activity is a lot of fun once everyone on the team gets over their initial hesitation to act like a kid again. This team building exercise, though, helps create a sense of equal participation and is obviously a blast for team members and their families.
Create a Documentary
Ever wanted to do the news? Corporate team members can get the chance to put together their own documentary with a team building exercise that has team members delegate roles and carry out the process of creating a documentary from scratch. As an example, a corporate team based in New York might be asked to visit Rockefeller Center, a four-star restaurant in the Bronx and Madison Square Garden to capture all the excitement of the Big Apple. Teams can get points based on how engaging a documentary they create or based on how eclectic their featured hotspots were in the documentary.
Quiz Show
Creating a trivia night for your team building exercise is a great way to have team members work together and pool their knowledge resources. Topics are kept light and entertaining. The team that communicates best usually does well in this kind of team building competition.
We hope you enjoyed our list of team building event ideas. Have you had a positive corporate team building event experience? If so, we’d love to hear about it! Did we miss any of your favorite team building activities on our list? Please feel free to add your own ideas in our comments. With any of these ideas, the reward is more time spent working together towards a shared goal in a fun, stimulating environment. Focus on this and you’ll find that your team brings the same camaraderie, shared responsibility and sense of joy in working together from a weekend of team building exercises back into the workplace.