Team-Building Activities to Help Your Employees Bond

August 13, 2024

Teamwork can help yield better problem-solving, heightened agility, increased innovation, improved employee engagement, greater learning and growth, more efficiency, and smarter risk-taking – at a minimum.

But team building rarely happens on its own. There may be friction, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, or just different ideas about what to do and how to do it. At best, dysfunctional teams can be unpleasant to participate in. At worst, they can have a negative impact on organizational performance.

On the other hand, the best teams succeed not just because of their collective and diverse skills, experiences, and points of view. These team members also share an ability to collaborate, cooperate, come together, and support one another, which helps make the real difference in team performance.

And that’s where the art and science of team building comes in. Business leaders who want to set up their teams for success can invest in team-building activities that cultivate cooperation, encourage creativity, strengthen trust and understanding, deepen relationships, and prepare teams to thrive. 

Here are some team-building ideas you can use to help strengthen teams and help boost employee performance.

Active Listening Team-Building Games

Active listening is a crucial communication skill that can boost the performance within any team, making it valuable fodder for team-building exercises. Put simply, active listening means being fully engaged while another person is talking to you. The intent is to understand the speaker, rather than to respond. This can involve physically displaying to the speaker that you’re actually listening to what they’re saying – by nodding, smiling, or asking relevant questions, for instance. Another reflection of active listening is the ability to echo what the other person has said without necessarily repeating it verbatim.

Team leaders might try this basic active listening exercise: After listening to a presentation or discussion, consider having your team members summarize, in their own words, what was said.

There are other ways to turn active listening practice into enjoyable team-building games as well. For example: 

• "Mime It Out" is like charades for the workplace. A leader gives each team member a topic or idea and up to three minutes to think about how to convey the topic using nonverbal expressions. Other team members then have to guess the topic or idea. This team-building exercise helps individuals get better at reading body language and deciphering nonverbal communication clues.
• “Telephone” requires team members to sit in a circle or around a table. The first team member is discreetly given a topic to talk about and whispers a sentence about the topic into the ear of the person to their right. That person then whispers the same sentence to the person on their right. This process continues until the sentence makes its way through the entire team. Any resulting distortion in the original sentence and its intent serves as a (sometimes comical) lesson in common communication challenges and the importance of active listening.
• Silent brainstorming sessions can promote active listening in relation to written ideas. The leader chooses a topic or problem relevant to the team and asks participants to write their ideas for solving the issues on sticky notes. The leader puts the sticky notes on a whiteboard or wall, grouping similar solutions together, then asks team members to silently review the ideas and provide any additional thoughts or pertinent questions on new sticky notes. At the end, the leader facilitates a team discussion of the solutions. This team-building activity not only fosters creativity and innovation by encouraging diversity of thought, but it also promotes more thoughtful consideration of others’ ideas and broader collaboration. 

Crossing the Line: A Team-Building Activity for Negotiation and Persuasion

Workplace teams are made up of individuals who each might have their own ideas of what is best, but still must come together to perform tasks and achieve business goals. Understanding how to negotiate with others and influence them for the common good is, therefore, an essential workplace and business skill.

A team-building game called “Crossing the Line” is an entertaining way to practice negotiation capabilities in a low-stakes environment. To play, a leader selects two team members and has them stand within a large circle with a line down the center, with each player on opposite sides of the line. The goal is for one individual to get the other person to cross the line, using any means necessary other than physically dragging them across. They can bargain, persuade, or even bribe the other person to achieve their aim.

After one – or several – Crossing the Line exercises, initiate a post-game huddle to discuss what happened. This team-building activity demonstrates to employees the most (and, often, least) effective ways to persuade and influence others. Teams may discover, for instance, that it’s more effective to ask another person what they want, rather than to make demands of them or offer them a reward that may be of little value to them. This team-bonding exercise can also illustrate the value of community over cutthroat competition.

Find the Common Thread: A Bonding Activity to Bring Teams Together

The power of teams often lies in their diverse skills, experiences, and personalities. When team members bring their various capabilities to bear to achieve a common goal, the returns can be exponential. But while a team’s varied makeup can be a strength, it can also be divisive. It’s important to team bonding that individual members find some common ground from which to work.

That’s where team-bonding activities like “Find the Common Thread” can help. To play, the leader breaks up the team into small groups, giving each group time to discover something they all share. Perhaps they all have dogs. Maybe they all love Motown music. Or they all hate pineapple on pizza. Once each group has found at least one commonality, the leader brings the larger team back together and each group shares what they discovered.

Once they have completed this exercise, team members will know a bit more about their colleagues. But that won’t be the only takeaway. The discussions required to play this team-bonding game can open up low pressure lines of communication and foster connections that otherwise might not happen. Some team members might even realize that the preconceived notions or assumptions they had held about their fellow co-workers were incorrect.

Scavenger Hunt: Team-Building for the Win

Scavenger hunts are popular games for parties and other gatherings, but they can also be effective as team-building exercises at work. To put a business spin on this activity, leaders can split up their team into groups and send them off in search of hidden facts and questions around the office. So, instead of looking for, say, a candy jar, groups would need to seek out information related to the jar – e.g., how long Jon the receptionist has had the same treat jar on his desk or what the most popular candy is.

A scavenger hunt is tailor-made for team building, offering a fun way for veteran and new employees alike to explore the company and get to know each other better. This can be a particularly valuable team-bonding exercise for remote and hybrid teams that don’t often get together at the office.

“Getting to Know You” Games

Bite-sized icebreaker activities and “getting to know you” games are a good choice when first bringing new teams together – or even for jumpstarting stalled teams that may have never participated in team-building activities. For example: 

• “Two Truths and a Lie” is a game designed to help team members learn about each other – but with a little twist. Each team member comes up with three statements to share with the group about themselves. Two of those statements should be true, and one should be a lie. When each person shares their three statements, the rest of your team discusses and votes on which one they think is the lie. Then the team member reveals their truths. This game is particularly valuable in helping more reserved team members come out of their shell. It’s almost guaranteed to lead to some laughs and new discoveries. And it can help improve working relationships among team members.
• “Whose Fact Is It Anyway?” is another straightforward and fun team-building activity that encourages critical thinking and discovery. The leader hands out index cards and pens and instructs team members to write down a fun fact about themselves. The index cards are then placed in a bowl. Each team member draws a card from the bowl and reads the fact aloud, and the others attempt to guess to whom the fact belongs. Inevitably, team members learn new things about each other in the process of playing this team-building game.
  

The Bottom Line

Effective teamwork and collaboration can be an existential necessity for businesses today. But team building and bonding doesn’t just happen; it requires concerted effort. One easy, low-cost way to improve team dynamics and performance is through team-building exercises. Investing some time and effort to conduct team-bonding games and activities can deliver real dividends in the form of improved communication, greater trust, better problem-solving, and increased innovation.
 

Photo: Getty Images