Team building activities can be an enjoyable part of workplace culture. They can also build meaningful bonds that help teams excel even more in their collaborative projects. Here are some ideas that can help you grow your company culture with group activities.

Mixing Fun and Purpose

Since the goal of team building activities is to build trust within your organization, it follows that your activities should be geared towards getting people to not only work together but to also believe that others will perform their necessary roles. While team building activities for work can certainly be fun, you want to make sure that they are serving a purpose. 

With that in mind, there are two general types of team building activities. The first type proceeds under the theory that when a team has fun together, they get to know each other better and bond. The second set of activities aims to get the team working together in specific roles, sharpening the group dynamic along the way. 

While it seems that it would be much easier to plan fun team activities, these still require some forethought. You will need to match the difficulty and strenuousness of the event with your team’s abilities, and you want to make sure that no one is left out. A mismatched team building activity can defeat its purpose and turn your group off from wanting to participate in future outings and events. At the same time, when you get it right, a fun group activity can help employees get to know one another.

Ideally, you should be looking for an activity that combines both of these in an engaging and purposeful manner.

Healthy Competition and Collaboration

When your team engages in healthy competition with each other, it teaches teamwork. One idea of a fun team activity that most people tend to enjoy is a sports day. Sports day works best when the focus is on team sports as opposed to individual events. 

Another activity that would fall into the “fun” category would be a community service day. It actually is enjoyable for your team to get out into the community and make a difference. Helping others becomes a shared experience that assists in the bonding process. Employees can see that their co-workers care about others, and it makes it easier to envision co-workers caring about each other.

Purpose-Driven Activities

Team building activities for work can also focus on resolving communication and trust issues. These events teach your employees how to solve problems together and work out potential issues along the way. Of course, you should take care to mix in some fun activities or offer rewards, especially if the team activities may require extensive engagement. Consider lightening the mood a little bit with food, which is an all-time great motivator. You can even include training as a part of team building.

One effective way to handle team building is to facilitate communication about people’s individual values as well as organizational values. You will want to tailor the activity to get people to disclose what is important to them as well as what they believe should be important to the organization. One possible way to do this is to ask everyone to write down their own values and what they perceive the corporate values to be and to have them make a poster or mission statement. 

Another creative way to do this is to present an ethical dilemma to the group and have an open discussion and debate about the issue. Preferably, this should be something unrelated to work and relatively light in order to keep the discussion from getting overheated or overly personal.

Sharing and Awareness Building

Another type of game that can help employees function as a team is one that encourages team members to give feedback to one another. It does not have to be related to work. These activities can help participants gain a better understanding of how they are perceived by others. This can help individuals build their own self-awareness. 

One variation of this game is to have an activity that relies on teams of two. One partner gives the other partner instructions on how to execute a task that the partner then attempts. Afterward, the partner who received the instructions will give feedback about the direction that they were given. This gives people the chance to see if the message that was received matches the intended message. 

Stimulating Participation

When you have purpose-driven workplace activities, you may need to incentivize employees to participate in the activity. Coming up with a theme for the activity session can help increase buy-in, especially when you pair it with swag that you give out to participating team members. As mentioned above, providing food will get people to show up, but that is only part of your task. Consider giving out prizes or holding a raffle after the conclusion of the event. Try to avoid designating an overall winner, and find a way to make participation beneficial and meaningful.

Along with your team building activities, good project management software can help build great teamwork. LiquidPlanner offers software solutions to help your team function more efficiently. Contact us today to find out how our offerings can help keep your team collaborating and communicating efficiently together on projects.