Team-Building Exercises

As teams grow in complexity, becoming more diverse, dynamic, and dispersed, organizations are searching for ways to improve their performance.

Research over the past 15 years has found that a successful team needs a clear direction, strong structure, a supportive environment, and a shared mindset (Haas & Mortensen, 2016).

These four enabling conditions are the foundations of great teamwork and reduce two common problems: a lack of information and us versus them thinking.

This article introduces team-building exercises that can improve and encourage collaboration, communication, and cohesion, and ultimately optimize team success.

The Role of Team-Building Exercises in the Workplace

Modern teams that are digital, often remote, and solving complicated problems need cohesion. While they face many challenges, several essential conditions ensure successful group collaboration and a clear group identity (Haas & Mortensen, 2016).

Managers can be more successful by focusing on:

• Compelling direction
  Team members need to be engaged and energized, with explicit goals.
• Strong structure
  The team needs the right number and mix of members, great processes, and positive dynamics.
• Supportive context
  Good performance needs to be rewarded and appropriate technical and educational support in place.
• Shared mindset
  The above three are all essential, but real success requires something extra. A team needs to foster a common identity and understanding.

How can team building help?

Regularly bringing teams together can build bridges, “creating shared experiences and common reference points and stories” (Haas & Mortensen, 2016).

The potential for project success can be improved significantly through transformational leadership (inspiring and encouraging staff to create positive change through innovation) and team building. Such group interventions can offer a “mediating role between transformational leadership and project success” (Aga, Noorderhaven, & Vallejo, 2016).

The idea of such collective activities is not new; the benefits of team building have broadly been accepted for at least the last 40 years.

While a 1999 review paper was unable to find evidence for the link between group interventions and team performance, it recognized that factors such as team size might be crucial to success (Salas, Rozell, Mullen, & Driskell, 1999).

A 2009 review extended the research, confirming that team building positively affects “goal setting, interpersonal relations, problem-solving, and role clarification.” While team size does indeed affect task outcome (surprisingly, larger teams gained the most), team building consistently benefits team functioning and increases team and member success (Klein et al., 2009).

Team building provides some of the essential skills, training, and resources needed to work together effectively and cohesively. To be most fruitful, it should be part of ongoing development (individual, team, and organizational) and be at the heart of the organization’s culture.

What are the needs of the team?

Before embarking on designing and running team-building exercises, it is essential to understand the needs of the group.

• Are members of the group resisting change?
• Are there conflicts and divisions that need to be addressed?
• Are individual egos putting the team’s success at risk?
• Is poor communication (inside or beyond the team) an issue?
• Is group morale poor?
• Is the team established? Does everyone already know each other well?

The answers provide a focus for the exercises and ensure that activities are appropriate and targeted to the problems, needs, or development opportunities.

What are the goals of team building?

Goals for team building must be tailored to the team while maintaining awareness of the overall organizational objectives.

Typically, they include the following:

• Opportunity for the team to get to know one another better
• Improving cohesion of virtual teams (they may have never met)
• Uniting toward a common goal or shared vision
• Understanding the strengths of team members
• Fostering strong team skills
• Boosting team performance
• Inducting new employees
• Becoming an employer of choice
• Teaching key skills

Successful team building can have many positive outcomes. Improved communication can enhance productivity and remove the risk of misunderstandings, delays, and wasted effort. Perhaps most importantly, a flagging, tired, and unmotivated collection of individuals can become a directed team with a clear focus on what is needed.

What roles make up a team-building session?

While there are many ways of running team-building events, there is a set of roles that are common to most exercises, such as (Anthony, 2017):

Team leader

Often, one team member will be designated as the leader either by the team itself or the organizer of the event.

The team leader will manage the group while encouraging functioning as a team.

Recorder

It can be useful to track what has happened and the agreements reached, to later refresh the group’s memory of the day’s events.

Timekeeper

Some activities will have strict timings. The timekeeper ensures that the sub-tasks and goals are completed on schedule.

Mediator

While the aim of team building is cohesion, disputes can arise. The mediator may need to take team members aside and discuss and mediate any disputes.

Note that not all of the above roles are appropriate for every event. Such formal positions may be discouraged if team building too closely resembles the day-to-day working environment.

For an extensive list of team-building exercises and games, see Herman Otten’s (2020) book 101 Team Building Exercises: To Improve Cooperation and Communication.

Team-Building Activities to Do During a Meeting

Team building doesn’t have to be an all-day affair. Taking 20 minutes out of the first half of your next group meeting can be enough to spark innovation and teamwork.

1. Solve a Puzzle

This can be a literal puzzle, like a 500-piece set (if you’re down to spend a few dollars on Amazon), or a brain teaser that requires thinking and brainstorming out loud. Toss one out to your team and, if you’re feeling overly ambitious, give them a time limit to complete the task. The key is that everyone has to contribute to the success of the project.

Once they’re done or time runs out, take a moment to reflect on the experience. Ask your team: What was your strategy to solve it? Who did what? Why did you make the decisions you did? Allowing everyone to think through their process might highlight unique perspectives or strengths in each individual—or at least lead to an eye-opening conversation.

2. Count to 20

This one’s super simple and great if you want to take a couple of minutes to bond.

Have everyone sit in a circle. Anyone can start the count off or say a number at any time, the goal being to count from one to 20. However, if two people jump in at the same time to say a number, the count starts over. This game requires team members not only to be cognizant of the group dynamic but to work together—with limited communication—to get to the end.

3. Try a Compliment Circle

There are different variations you can take on this to encourage your team to express appreciation for one another. One option is you can simply spend five minutes having individuals compliment one another, whatever pops into their mind (if you’re the manager, you should start to get the ball rolling!). This can be as easy as saying, “I wanted to tell Gina I loved her proposal this week” or “Big shoutout to Danny for bringing in donuts last week when we were all heads-down to meet a big deadline.” Or you can go around and have each person address the coworker to their right so that everyone gets a chance to shine.

4. Host a Brainstorming Session

Team building can be work focused, and oftentimes that’s the best kind. The key is to make these brainstorming sessions less about day-to-day accomplishments and more about bigger team goals. Maybe you want to outline your KPIs for the rest of the quarter. Maybe you want to hash out some new ideas for an upcoming campaign. Maybe your team’s strategy feels stale and you’re looking for ways to refresh it.

Whatever your goal, try organizing your conversation using one of these suggestions:

• An idea board: The simplest form of brainstorming. Give everyone an agenda ahead of time, and have them come to the meeting with three to five ideas. Talk through them, and have people contribute additional thoughts, questions, or concerns.
• First to five: Have everyone brainstorm solutions to a problem, then go through them one by one by holding up a fist or several fingers to five. A fist means you’re not on board and five fingers up mean you think it’s a great idea. Then, have everyone state their case as to why they chose the fingers they did.
• Went well, went OK, could have done better: At The Muse, we use this process for quarterly retrospectives and project post-mortems. Have everyone jot down on Post-it notes things they thought went well, things they thought went OK, and things that didn’t go well or could have been done better, and sort the Post-its into their respective categories. Once all the ideas are on the table talk through them and come up with potential solutions to the problem areas.

5. Have a “Show and Tell”

This can be a great way to get your team to brag a bit about their accomplishments and encourage them to stay updated on what everyone else is working on.

One great example of this at The Muse is something we call “Sip it and Ship it.” On Friday of the month, our engineering team hosts an open meeting where anyone at the company has the option to take a look at and test out our latest “shipped” or completed products—while “sipping” on alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverages.

You can do this on a small scale, too. If you’re a team of two or three, spend a few minutes a week or once a month getting together and highlighting something each member is working on, and allow people to ask questions, give suggestions, and offer up positive feedback.

Team-Building Activities to Do During the Workday

These activities are great for longer meetings, or if you want to spend an afternoon or a few hours away from your desk.

6. Share Your Personality

Have everyone on your team fill out a personality test (here are some of our favorites), then get together and discuss. What you decide to do with this is really up to you—the key is to have each employee understand their colleagues’ strengths, weaknesses, and ticks. Maybe you group similar personalities and have them chat about how their traits come out in the workplace or have them complete an assignment like designing their “ideal” office based on their personality type and sharing it with the group.

Another option? Have everyone fill out this “user manual” and share their findings with the team.

7. Play Team or Board Games

You don’t need me to tell you that board games bring people together (just read this article on the benefits of networking over games). And there are many great, office-friendly options out there!

There’s Apples to Apples (an SFW version of Cards Against Humanity), Code Names, Pandemic, and Jenga—all games that require teamwork. There are also non-tabletop games like Celebrity or Heads Up (available on iOS and Android) that require nothing but a phone or a pen and paper.

It may feel silly to pull out some games in the middle of the office, but you may be surprised to find that doing so loosens your team up and forces them to work together in different and creative ways.

8. Create a Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunts can be great for new hires to get to know the landscape and their team—requiring them to identify things around the office and ask seasoned employees questions during their first week such as “When was [Company] started?” or “Who was our first client?” or “How many people work on the marketing team?”

But they’re just as effective with veteran teams. Maybe you set one up for employees to uncover X number of facts or artifacts by the end of the day together. Or divide the group into multiple teams and see who finishes first. However you choose to do it and whatever you choose for them to find, this will encourage team members to work together on something far removed from their usual work and team of people.

9. Untangle a “Human Knot”

This is a camp favorite, but also a fun way to have team members come together to solve a problem. Have everyone squish together in a circle and grab hands with people not directly next to them. The goal, once everyone’s hands are interlocked, is to untangle yourselves without breaking the chain. You can make it even more challenging by not allowing people to talk or putting a time limit on it. It requires a bit of leg room to crawl over each other (not to mention an office culture where people feel comfortable holding hands—tread carefully with this one), but if you feel up to it it can make for a fun puzzle.

10. Give Out Blind Directions

Pair team members up and have one put on a blindfold—it’s then the other person’s job to direct them in making moves as best they can, whether that’s getting them to the other side of the office or having them complete a task like moving an object or drawing a picture. Have individuals who normally don’t work as closely together do this exercise, and it’ll help them practice communication and build trust.

11. Do a Silent Line-Up

Set a timer, and have people line up in various orders say, by height, birthday, or company tenure—without saying a word. Your team will learn a bit about each other while overcoming an unusual challenge.

12. Host a Lunch and Learn

Your team is probably full of unspoken talent—use those strengths as a way to bring everyone together. Maybe someone’s a great knitter, speaks another language, or is a pro at using Excel. Have them host a “lunch and learn” where they teach the rest of the crew a new skill over your midday break. Your employee will practice mentoring and giving presentations, and your team will learn something new and exciting about their peers.

13. Have a Hack Day

Hack days are big in the tech and engineering sphere, but they can be beneficial for just about any team.

The idea is simple: Have everyone drop what they’re working on and spend the day completing a special project that benefits the team or company. If you can, have multiple departments (if not the whole company) participate and require employees to work with people on different teams. The point is to have people think outside the box by creating something that requires a new set of skills or ways of thinking.

Maybe you spend the day rethinking your onboarding document for new hires, or brainstorming a new sales pitch, or building a new feature into a product—whatever it is, it should cost $0 to create and be something you can make (or conceptualize) in a workday.

14. Put on a Contest

For example, you could host a department desk decorating face-off (this is a big hit in The Muse office on Halloween), or plan a cookie or guacamole-making contest, where employees bring in their best recipes and the team judges their favorites (plus, who doesn’t like food during the workday?). It creates a bit of healthy competition while encouraging employees to spend time together and bond over a common hobby.

Team-Building Activities to Do Outside the Office

It’s certainly trickier to have people hang out outside of work, but if you can get everyone together (or can take the afternoon to go on an adventure), these can be great activities for team building.

15. Complete an Escape-the-Room Challenge

Everyone’s doing them these days, and it’s no wonder why: Trying to escape when you’re “trapped” in a room with people (in a set period) is a team effort. If you live in a city that offers them (some options here and here), you can find an assortment of escape-the-room challenges, including a submarine, jail cell, or even an office (how ironic!). Per person it may cost you around $30, the same price of say, taking your team bowling or paying for a few drinks at happy hour.

16. Take a Cooking Class

Cooking classes are a great way to help teams bond because they’re not just an individual activity—often what you’re making requires multiple sets of hands. CourseHorse and Groupon are great places to find these kinds of opportunities, for cheap.

17. Take an Improv Class

A lot more interactive than cooking classes, improv classes can teach you a lot of valuable skills for the workplace—including how to communicate with others and overcome various challenges as a team. Plus, they force you to get out of your comfort zone and have a laugh with your colleagues. You can check out sites like CourseHorse for options, or do a quick Google search to find the best comedy cellars near your office.

18. Sign Up for Trivia

Who doesn’t love trivia? Besides the fact that it allows employees to flex their history and pop culture muscles, it’s also incredibly team-oriented. Go together to a local spot’s trivia night, or bring in a host to your office and split the department into teams to battle for the winning title.

19. Volunteer

If your team is passionate about a certain cause or initiative, consider taking the day to do some community service. Not only will you bond, but you’ll come out feeling great and making a positive impact on your community. Here’s how to bring volunteer opportunities to your office, and some tips on various volunteering activities you can do, depending on your level of commitment.

20. Start a Book Club

Grab a book related to your field and have everyone read it over a few weeks. Then, set aside some time to sit and chat about it (over snacks!). You’ll spark interesting conversations, encourage colleagues to share ideas, stories, and input, and help everyone learn a bit more about their role within the team.

21. Tackle a Ropes Course

This is a bit more ambitious, but it’s a great day trip or retreat activity to get your team outdoors and still work together. Ropes courses require teamwork in so many ways, whether you’re encouraging a teammate to overcome an especially challenging part or trying to get through a maze as a group. Just make sure everyone on your team is on board with this before moving forward (for example, ensuring no one’s afraid of heights or has mobility issues)—if they’re hesitant you may have more success trying something else out.

22. Form an Intramural League

If your team is full of athletes, this could be the perfect option for bonding outside the office.

It doesn’t have to be a tiring sport, either! Plenty of cities offer opportunities to play things like skeeball, bocce, or cornhole. If you want your efforts to go toward a cause, consider signing up to run (or walk) a 5K for charity together.

Team-Building Exercises for Work: 3 Examples

One-off or regular team-building exercises can be effective at improving patterns of team interaction and are strongly linked to project success (Pollack & Matous, 2019).

Stepping Forward Exercise

The Stepping Forward Exercise can be the perfect way to begin or end a team-building day and understand the needs of all in attendance.

Once the exercise is complete, the team-building day can start, taking into account the needs of all in attendance.

If used at the end of the day, ask each person whether the day met their expectations. Their responses can shape future training or generate appropriate follow-ups and information that may help.

Alternatively, the exercise can be modified to form part of a project session to draw out new ideas and share everyone’s thoughts within the team.

Human Typewriter Exercise

Breaking down barriers and having fun in a team setting can be hugely beneficial for creating a team that works well together and is resilient to change and challenge.

The Human Typewriter Exercise is a fun way of involving all the team equally in a joint activity while working toward a common goal – in this case, typing a message.

The exercise has no formal purpose other than to create a little fun, break the ice, and attempt to communicate in a very different way.

Creating Shapes Exercise

Most meetings and training sessions involve sitting in one place for longer than is comfortable. Before and during a session, it can be useful to get people moving to change the social dynamics and stimulate new interactions.

The Creating Shapes Exercise gets people out of their chairs and moving and interacting in very different ways.

After all, members need to understand that a team can achieve more in less time when working well as a cohesive unit through understanding one another’s needs.

3 Activities for Fostering Communication and Trust

“Ultimately, the evolution of how self-organizing teams evolve into high-performance teams depends on mutual respect and trust of the members of the team,” says author and former director of the world bank, Steve Denning (Hakanen & Soudunsaari, 2012).

Team building can help build trust and improve communication within a team.

Blindfold Guiding Exercise

Building trust requires a degree of vulnerability.

For the Blindfold Guiding Exercise, divide the team into pairs and assign one the role of the blindfolded walker with the other as a guide.

The guide, while walking behind the walker, guides the walker around the room using only spoken instructions, such as turning to the right, stepping to the left, and keep moving forward, to avoid obstacles.

The exercise is an excellent icebreaker, building trust while practicing communication skills.

Trust Fall Exercise

Creating an element of personal risk (albeit minimal) can help build trust and break down barriers within a group.

The Trust Fall Exercise requires no materials and is easy to explain; though it may be useful to demonstrate in front of the group to gain trust in the activity.

The group is split into pairs; one will be the catcher, and the other will be the person who will fall.

The catcher stands half an arm’s length behind the person who will fall. They position one leg slightly in front of the other, in a strong, stable position, ready to catch.

The person in front closes their eyes. Arms are either folded or down by their sides. They gradually lean back until they over-balance and fall into the arms of their partner standing behind them.

Through repetition, confidence can be gained in the pair and can be carried over to the rest of the day.

Getting to Know One Another Exercise

Communication is essential for building relationships, team rapport, and good team performance.

The Getting to Know One Another Exercise can help build understanding, leading to more openness when sharing information.

The team forms into pairs and shares a story of a blunder. Their partner and ultimately the rest of the group are asked to remember and repeat the story.

This is an excellent team-building exercise to get to know one another better and practice active listening.

3 Icebreakers for Fostering Culture

A unit can be most effective when it has a clear and recognizable culture.

Games can be one of the best ways to break down barriers and build common approaches to solving problems (Depping, Mandryk, Johanson, Bowey, & Thomson, 2016).

Making Eye Contact Exercise

Openness can create a positive, delivery-focused culture where issues can be discussed without fear and risks shared.

Good communication is a great place to start and can be encouraged through nonverbal behavior such as making eye contact. After all, looking someone in the eye is important for showing both vulnerability and confidence.

Try out the Making Eye Contact Exercise for a great way to begin a day of training or breakouts during focused work sessions.

Back Writing Exercise

A work culture that encourages open and positive feedback fosters growth by supporting the open discussion of opportunities and concerns.

The Back Writing Exercise offers a safe, light-hearted approach to sharing feedback. It is an ideal activity when teams are looking to enhance communication and collaborate more effectively in a positive way.

This is a useful exercise for people to gain insight into how the group sees them and offers an opportunity to provide light-hearted feedback when there are different levels of the management structure present.

True and False Exercise

Telling stories can be a great way to break down barriers, especially when we use our imagination to make things seem a little more interesting.

The True and False Exercise involves each participant telling two true stories and a fictional third. The listeners are then asked to judge what is false and true.

Variations include having two fake stories and one real one, or one long story that starts true and the listeners guess when it starts to become fake.

If time is limited or it needs to be quick to energize the group, it can be performed with two real and one fake personality trait.

5 Online Team-Building Ideas

According to researchers Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen (2016), “digital dependence often impedes information exchange.” But when you have a remote workforce where face-to-face interaction is not an option, how do you create a team identity?

Online team building can be crucial to removing barriers and improving cooperation and communication.

So, what team-building ideas work well remotely?

Several of the team-building exercises already described do not require face-to-face contact or physical movement and can easily be modified for online interaction using tools such as Zoom or Skype.

• The Getting to Know One Another Exercise can easily be moved online by asking team members to share their blunder stories with their partners on a one-to-one call before joining the group video call.
• The True and False Exercise is an excellent fit for a video call. Each speaker can prepare several stories, and people can vote on their truthfulness by either shouting out or using a group chat function.

Team-building online exercises can also take a much more informal format and potentially be run in the evening, including family members if appropriate.

• Food suppliers are available that deliver ingredients and instructions for making meals such as Italian pizzas, Mexican, or Indian food. It can be fun to get on a group video call and share the act of making food at the same time – along with the mishaps.
• Similar online activities are available for making drinks, either cocktails or mocktails.
• Online quizzes can be a favorite and may involve leagues running throughout the year.

8 Ideas for Youths and Students

Many of the above team-building exercises work well with younger age groups where it is especially important to get children out of their seats and moving.

The following exercises work well first thing or post-lunch to generate some energy:

• Human Typewriter Exercise
• Creating Shapes Exercise
• Blindfold Guiding Exercise
• Trust Fall Exercise
• Back Writing Exercise (can be modified to replace celebrities with cartoon characters)

Children, especially younger ones, love art, especially when messy.

• Making shared pieces of art, such as castles, dinosaurs, and dragons can bring a group of children together to get to know one another and have fun.

Other games work for any age group of children or youths.

• The Balloon Train involves each pair getting a balloon from one side of a room to another and back. They must balance the balloon between them without using their hands. If it falls, they must start again. If they succeed, they pass it on to the next pair.
• Treasure hunts are always popular and can take many forms. They can be performed in various locations, either using maps or following a set of clues

A Take-Home Message

Working in teams brings many challenges, not least differences in personalities, expectations, goals, approaches, and styles.

Team cohesion, along with incomplete and incorrect information, is often either at the root of many of the problems or at least a contributory factor, making working together more challenging (Haas & Mortensen, 2016).

To perform at their best, teams need to be energized and clear in what they are working toward. And these goals must be challenging yet achievable; the team should be stretched, but not to the point of being disheartened.

A clear direction, strong structure, the right support, and a shared mindset are all essential (Haas & Mortensen, 2016). But the team needs to be aware of these components and feel that they are crucial to what they do.

Consistent, high-quality team building leads to improved communication, greater mutual understanding, and even increased team effort (Pollack & Matous, 2019).

Try out some of the team-building exercises in group sessions with clients or coworkers. They may lead to a great connection and closeness and a clearer sense of team identity.