#1. Do you know your office?
Number of players: from 4 people + presenter
What you will need: about 30 questions about
“What color is the floor in the meeting room?”
“How many corporate events were there this year?”
Rules of the game: participants answer questions simultaneously, each writing down their answers in their own notebook, or in turn, depending on who raises their hand first. For each correct answer the player receives a point. The one who scores the most will win.
What is team building?
To build a successful business, you need to take into account a million nuances - from market features to risks. But there is another factor that should not be overlooked - this is the creation of a successful and strong team that will lead your company forward. Of course, the team starts with hiring the right group of specialists. And when specialists have already been recruited, all that remains is to make them an effective team. Team building was invented for this purpose.
Team building (team building) is a set of actions aimed at increasing the effectiveness of a team in order to achieve common goals. A team exists to enable a company to grow, scale, and prosper in a way that might not be possible if you ran your business alone. Here everything works exactly the same as, for example, in basketball: all the players work together and everyone understands their role.
So, team building is a complex multi-level process that includes a set of various events, and here we are not just talking about endless corporate events and “fun starts”. Let's look at this in more detail.
#2. Intuition
Game time: from 30 minutes
Number of players: from 5 people
What you will need: photos of employees
Rules of the game: participants share their pictures taken during non-working hours. Photos are placed in one place so that all players can see them. Then everyone takes turns expressing their assumptions about what the person in the frame was doing when he was photographed. The owner of the photo must choose the version that turns out to be more plausible.
This way people can learn more about how their employees live outside of work. The game will be useful for teams that have recently been formed and will help new colleagues to relax.
Courses on the topic:
HR and recruiting
Employer branding
Anastasia Stetsenko, Brand Ambassadors Lead, DataArt
HR and recruiting
Compensation&Benefits
Irina Andreeva, Head of Total Rewards at Colgate-Palmolive, Eurasia HUB
Games for building relationships in a team
Not every company has good relationships between co-workers. The following examples of tasks will help to find mutual understanding between employees and unite them.
"Puzzle Barter"
The team is divided into two teams and each receives a box with a puzzle. It is better that the pictures that need to be collected are of the same complexity.
The team puts together a puzzle
Whichever team completes the task faster wins. It is important that participants make decisions together.
“I believe it or not”
The next test is psychological. Participants sit opposite each other and come up with one false fact about themselves, and along with it they voice four true ones. Others must guess what is not true in the person's story.
"Drawing Blindly"
This game competition will require a presenter and drawing equipment. The entire team is divided into groups and two people sit on chairs with their backs to each other. One of the pair is blindfolded and given a felt-tip pen and a piece of paper, and the other is given a picture. The essence of the task is that the “seeing” person tells what is shown in the picture, and the “blind” person must try to depict it on a piece of paper.
The trainings are suitable for developing thinking in people of any age. It doesn't matter what kind of education a person has. Similar team building games are held at the camp among schoolchildren. There is a restructuring of the human brain at the psychological level. A positive effect can be achieved with regular exercise.
#3. Suggest if you criticize
Game time: 15 minutes to prepare
Number of players: from 5 people
What you will need: board, markers
Rules of the game: team members write down phrases on the board that demotivate their colleagues, “kill” ideas and prevent them from voicing their proposals.
For example:
“Managers won’t even listen to your idea.”
"That's funny"
“Your plan is borderline fantastic”
Violators who use similar phrases within a month are fined money. And with this amount you can go to lunch with the whole team or donate it to charity.
The game does not interfere with the work process; on the contrary, it will help to conduct negotiations and brainstorming more productively.
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How to spend
If you are a large company, then it is better to hire a special organization to conduct corporate team building. This will be more effective than implementing it yourself. But what to do if you are a small organization, but are also interested in the idea of conducting team building in the organization?
To do this, I have prepared the following instructions, which will help you organize team building without involving a specialized team.
Of course, you will have to study some points on the Internet, learn from the experience of conducting successful team building events, but you will have a general understanding of the sequence right now.
#4. Company coat of arms
Game time: from 30 minutes
Number of players: from 3 people
What you will need: paper, markers
Rules of the game: all participants must jointly come up with and draw the company’s coat of arms. It can symbolize recent achievements, corporate values or the future of the organization. The emblem can be hung in the office. Also, each employee can create a coat of arms, and then the team will choose the best option through voting.
The game will be useful for beginners - it will help them join the team and develop teamwork skills.
Varieties
Based on the location and time of the event, the number of participants, gender and age differentiation, many types of team building can be distinguished.
Team building in the office and outdoors
The benefits of “team building” in the office are as follows:
- Firstly, the office is an environment that has long been familiar to employees, it does not cause discomfort, people feel more confident.
- Secondly, after office events, new associations arise: the office is no longer perceived as a boring place where you only need to work.
- Team building in nature is different in that the subject of its scenarios is almost unlimited. This can be a relaxing holiday or an active sports competition, or even an overnight trip with various activities at different times of the day.
Summer and winter team building
The warm season, of course, is conducive to “forays” into nature, where you can organize not only various sports competitions, but also more interesting events. For example, “Field Survival,” where participants are divided into teams, and each of them is given a limited set of tools and supplies. After that, conditions are set for completing certain tasks. Joint challenges are guaranteed to strengthen team cohesion.
In winter, you can enjoy group ice skating, ski relay races or snowshoe races.
Team building for men and women
Men's team building is mainly characterized by a military focus (paintball, airsoft) or sports competitions associated with speed and adrenaline, such as kart rally or raft building with the construction of rafts and team tasks on the water.
It will be more interesting for a female team to take part in culinary competitions or creative team tasks, such as building a city out of cardboard.
Children's team building
This is a great alternative to the usual activities in kindergarten, a party with clowns and a sweet table. By taking part in competitive team games, the child learns to interact with friends, analyze the strengths and weaknesses of opponents, and make original decisions in non-trivial situations.
#5. Plane crash
Game time: from 30 minutes
Number of players: from 5 people
What you will need: all items that are in the office
Rules of the game: each team member must imagine that he and his employees were flying on a business trip, but the plane had to make an emergency landing on a desert island. After consulting, players need to choose 12 items that are in the office in order to survive in the wild. They need to be ranked in order of importance.
There is a second version of the game: each employee must make his own list. Then you can discuss the items that the team has chosen and, through voting, determine the most necessary ones on the island.
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Team and group are not the same thing
In fact, there is a fundamental difference between a team and a group of employees. Thus, in a group, its independent members defend their own interests, have a low level of trust in other group members, but at the same time try to achieve a common result. For example, if you assembled a team of builders to build a hut, they will work together, but since they know that this is a short-term project, there is unlikely to be any communication between them. A team is people who have common views and goals; their ideas receive mutual support, since people willingly share them with each other.
Thus, the mission of team building is to create a team in which:
- people clearly understand the company’s strategy and goals,
- interact effectively with each other,
- complement each other in terms of skills and functions,
- communicate effectively and solve problems,
- trust each other
- express ideas openly.
This all sounds great. But what needs to be done to make the team successful? Believe in the possibilities of team building.
#6. Emoji story
Game time: from 30 minutes
Number of players: from 3 people + presenter
Rules of the game: participants choose a leader. In a separately created chat, he writes the beginning of a story, which consists not of words, but of emoji (maximum 6). Then each player in turn continues the story, without losing its original meaning, using emoji. The game can last until one of the participants decides to end it or all the ideas run out.
#8. Five clicks
Game time: from 15 minutes
Number of players: from 3 people
Rules of the game: The team must choose two completely different topics. For example, “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” and “Justin Bieber”. Each participant needs to get from one Wikipedia page to another in 5 clicks (spending no more than 10 minutes). To do this, you can only use internal links.
Victory goes to the one who managed to completely move on to a given topic or got closer to it than other participants (for example, reached the Wikipedia page “Singer”).
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