Games for team bonding

They have to. But somehow, no matter how ridiculous the events, you all want to win. And there you have it: kindred competitiveness is another magical ingredient in team bonding.

A really valuable way to do this is to offer self-defence classes; enabling individuals to learn the skills needed to keep themselves safe, particularly if they commute via public transport.

Offering self-defence classes to teams also has the benefit of helping with team bonding. Clay pigeon shooting and other country pursuits offer valuable experiences for team bonding, especially it would seem for normally-city-based teams.

Clay pigeon-shooting is challenging but fun. Teams will bond as they follow instructions together and trek to their shooting spot. Afterwards, they will enjoy talking about their wins, and comparing who has been most successful. Ever wish you could run off and join the circus? Perhaps your Greatest Showman ambitions centred on the idea of a bunch of misfits all bonding over flame-throwing and terrifying tigers. Putting the illusion to one side, a day of learning circus skills together is actually brilliant for bonding.

Sometimes the best team bonding ideas simply centre on having a jolly good time together. Check out local beaches or parks that allow barbecues, and head out armed with food for a cookout. Let the good times roll and allow team bonding to simply happen, naturally. Making sure there are plenty of social events like these in the calendar will ensure that there is always flourishing fertile ground for excellent ream relationships.

This is a type of fun that is impossible to emulate in any other way and frankly, your team deserve to float their boat across the grass. Events like this allow bonding as team members discover the thrill of some speed, some shared experiences and a darn good time. Was Fred already rescuing Princess Peach when you were still in nappies? Or is shy and quiet Shania an air hockey beast?

As pairs dive together into VR chairs, boss and subordinate race it out on motorbikes, and Harry proves himself to be a hoop shooting wonder, the arcade takes your cash but gives you back double in team spirit. For an easy win when it comes to team bonding, head to the arcade. Whether you head out on a boat for a sea fishing experience, or you organise an experience on your local river, taking the team fishing will serve as a bonding experience.

The pace of life slows, and you get a chance to simply be alongside each other. Indeed, fishing is how you discover the power of silence when it comes to forging connections.

Host a painting party at a local paint-and-sip studio non-alcoholic beverages can be served if you prefer. Good for: Encouraging collaboration. Work together to prepare and cook savory appetizers, luscious desserts or even a multi-course gourmet meal. Some classes feature food challenges for an added element of competition. Good for: Learning new skills and working under pressure while enjoying tasty creations made together.

Serving others as a team is a great way to bond, and it gives your employees a chance to give back. Volunteering is especially important to millennial employees. Projects could include serving lunch to the homeless, building homes for a housing charity, sending cards to overseas troops, stocking the pantries of a local food bank or myriad other philanthropic endeavors. Good for: Opportunities for various departments to work together as a team, and for employees to use hidden skills.

Most major league sporting teams offer group rates on tickets. Many companies rent out stadium suites to entertain clients. Why not do the same for your employees, if your budget permits? The memories made will be the fodder of water-cooler chatter for weeks and months to come.

Good for: Showing your employees you appreciate them; opportunities for employees to get to know each other better in a relaxed environment. Location, location, location. Getting away from the office can make all the difference to tired teams stuck in a rut. Good for: Annual planning and rewarding employees. Team building activities get us out of our normal day-to-day routines and help us see each other as humans.

When employees genuinely respect each other and enjoy working together, it creates a synergy that inspires everyone to do their best work as a team. And that can lead to greater productivity, increased efficiency and endless innovation for your business. For more ideas on how to build a unified workforce, download our free magazine, The Insperity Guide to Employee Engagement.

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The team will quickly learn how others work, solve, and think outside of the typical work-related realm. This will bring new understanding to work-related projects that need solutions. This team-building exercise takes place not in one sitting, but over time.

Make a large, blank journal or scrapbook available in the break room or other common areas. The book may have prompts on each page, asking questions or suggesting things to write or draw. Or, you may have guidelines printed and displayed next to the book i.

Leave pens, markers, tape, and other items that your team can use to write and draw in the book. When the book is full, put it on the shelf and get a new one.

Purpose: This team exercise creates a living history of your business that you can keep adding to. It is somewhat similar to the Zappos culture book, but allows your team a chance to build it more directly. This game encourages creativity, collaboration, and recollection. Divide your team into equal sized groups, and send them out with a list of items to locate and bring back. Whether they remain in the office or are to leave the building is up to you. The ultimate goal is to get back first with the most items.

You may want to set a time limit so that all groups are back in a reasonable time, whether they found all items or not. A scavenger hunt can be themed, and might involve a variety of clues or other twists that force a team to get creative and work together.

One variation is to make it a digital scavenger hunt in which they must find examples and specific information or web pages online. You may wish to restrict which search engines or methods they use to complete the challenge.

Purpose: A scavenger hunt is a fun activity that forces people to work together as a team. It spurs creativity, particularly if clues or riddles are involved. Much like a scavenger hunt, a geocache adventure relies on clues but has the added level of using GPS coordinates to find an item. Each group will need to have a GPS device that will work for finding geocaches. There are several apps available to use on smartphones that would suffice. You may wish to have a set time in which all groups must return.

The clues you hide in specific geographic locations could be part of a larger riddle or message that you wish the teams to have revealed to them. A variation of this might be to use QR codes placed around the office or neighborhood, mixing GPS locations with other clues found in QR codes. Purpose: This exercise helps team members work together to achieve a specific goal using a specific and narrow process in which close enough is not good enough.

It also promotes problem solving in a creative way if riddles and puzzles are involved. If you do this over lunch, be sure to cater food and make it a fun time. Require team members to be present. Have a question and answer session afterwards. Purpose: Most people are eager to let others know interesting things about themselves, but not all team members are able to make that happen.

Most teams are lopsided, with some members dominating discussion. Before your regular staff meeting, break your team into groups. Instruct the groups to find out one commonality among themselves. It might be a hobby or an interest they all do, or having the same favorite genre of music or favorite food. Once they discover a commonality they can agree on, they create a list of what might be stereotypical qualities of such people. Then, the groups come together to announce to the rest of the groups who they are.

The Roller Coaster Buffs, for example, might periodically raise their arms and holler, or the Jane Austenites might rephrase all of their speech to co-workers as quotes from Jane Austen books. At the completion of the meeting or day , talk about stereotypes that we assign to people. Talk about how people managed to find a commonality, and the process it took to dig it up. Purpose: The idea is to force your team to confront the foolish nature of stereotypes and how, if people really behaved as we casually write them off to be, the office would be much different.

The game also reveals the ability of a seemingly random group of people to find a commonality. To do this, remove key nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Create a worksheet in which the removed words are shown as a blank line with instructions on what kind of word is needed.

In groups of two, have one team member ask for the correct type of word and the other team member supply the word. Or, if you do not want to break the team into groups, ask the team as a whole to supply one word at a time. Once there are enough words, read the mission statement back. It will sound silly. Now that the team knows what the goal is, ask them for the same word types. See what kinds of words they supply. Repeat the exercise until you get a mission statement that the team feels is correct.

A variation is to categorize the types of words before the first round. So, tell them you are looking for words that apply to the team without telling them you are working on a mission statement. By stripping away the jargon and stiffness and allowing the mission statement to go through several rounds of nonsense, you allow your team to help you craft a statement that is more relaxed and honest. Using wooden blocks or an actual Jenga game, mark blocks according to the hierarchies present in your company.

For example, you might have some blocks denoted as the IT department, and others as HR. Divide your team into groups, giving them an equal number and kind of blocks. From here, either specify the type of structure each team must build, or provide guidelines and allow them to build any structure they want. When the time limit has been reached, each team, taking turns, must begin to remove a block at a time without destroying their structure.

Do not inform them ahead of time that you will be asking them to do this. If time allows, you may ask them to repeat the exercise. See if they find a way to build a structure that can withstand removal of blocks. Purpose: This exercise is meant to show how each department and the various managers and staff positions are necessary to complete the task, and that without everyone in place, things fall apart.

Divide your team into groups of two each. Have each person sit with their back to the other. One person will have a picture. The other person will have a blank sheet of paper and a pen. The team member with the picture must not show the other person the image. Instead, the are to describe the image without using words that give it away, while the other team member is to draw what is being described. For example, the picture might be of an elephant standing on a ball.

After a set time limit, the drawing time ends and both team members view the original picture and the drawing. Purpose: This is an exercise that focuses on communication and language. While the final drawing will seldom look like the picture, it is revealing to participants to see how different the interpretation of instructions can be even when they are supposedly talking about the same thing. Gather your team in a circle, and have them sit down.

Each team member should then put on a provided blindfold. Leave the circle. Instruct them to form a perfect square out of the rope without removing their blindfolds. You can introduce variations into this game. For example, you might, at random, instruct a team member to not speak. One by one, members of the group are muted, making communication more challenging. Or, let the team come up with a plan before putting on the blindfold, but once they cannot see, they also cannot talk.

Purpose: This exercise deals with both communication and leadership styles. There will inevitably be team members who want to take charge, and others who want to be given direction. The team will have to work together to create the square, and find a way to communicate without being able to see. On name tags or similar labels, write down the name of a famous person, or write down people types e.

For a set amount of time, the entire group should mingle, and ask and answer questions. They should treat each other according to the stereotypical way based on what kind of person they have been labeled. Each team member can use that treatment, as well as the answers to questions, to figure out what the label is.

As each team member figures out who they are, they can exit the game and let the rest continue. Purpose: By confronting stereotypes in both how people treat us and in the questions and answers used, the team can get a better sense of how we mistakenly see people as well as how it feels to be so narrowly defined.

This is also a good ice-breaker activity if you have team members that do not know each other yet. Using masking tape, create a large polygonal shape on the floor. It should be about 12 feet long by 6 feet wide, at least. Mark the start and stopping points.