Choose a Fun Team Building Activity

Let’s say you are a manager or executive, and you want to reward your team with a fun activity to build teamwork, or perhaps you are an administrative assistant and a supervisor has asked you come up with a few team building event ideas. Where do you start? Most people go to Google and do a search, and get everything under the sun as options. So how do you narrow down the choices to something that will work for your group?

Determine the Purpose of Your Activity

First, let’s cover what “team building” is. Unfortunately, the term team building can mean just about anything. It is kind of like “leadership” or “customer service” in that each of these terms is extremely general. However, if you narrow down the focus, you’ll more likely find a better solution. For instance, if your leadership problem is that when your executives retire or quit, your company has a tough time developing new executives, then your leadership solution might focus around succession planning. If you own a restaurant, and your customer service problem is that customers are waiting too long to receive their food orders, then your customer service solution might involve faster food prep or more efficient ordering procedures. The point is that if you hire a motivational speaker to fix your leadership problem or force your restaurant staff to attend customer service workshops, the underlying problems will likely persist.

Team Building solutions can have a similar challenge. In order to find a good solution, ask yourself a few questions to determine the ultimate purpose of the activity.

• So why do we really want to do a team building activity, anyway?
• Are we rewarding the staff?
• Are we looking for a way to add some fun to a dry agenda?
• Are there challenges that we need to solve? If so, what are the specific challenges?
• If this activity worked perfectly, what results would we expect?

By asking yourself these questions, you will have a better idea of what success really looks like.

Activities for Reward or Fun

If your group already works really well as a team, and you are looking for a way to reward your staff or add some fun into the normal workday or meeting, then just about any fun activity will likely go over pretty well. For instance, many of our team building clients will often schedule their annual conventions to start the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday so that they can have a huge Super Bowl party in the hotel banquet hall for the entire group the night before. Charity events often work well in these kinds of situations as well. Organizers will often insert a bike team building event into an annual convention just to add some fun to the agenda and give back to the community in the process.

What if there is a Real Team Challenge, Though?

What happens if your group is involved in a challenge, though? If this is the case, you’ll want to put a lot more thought into your solution, because if you choose the wrong program, it can backfire on you. For instance, when two companies merge, two cultures are being forced together and conflict is likely to erupt. So, just throwing together a fun company outing probably won’t have a lot of positive benefits (and might have a lot of negatives). Instead, start at the top. Work with your executives first so that everyone is on the same page as to where the new culture is being developed. Then, identify team workshops, activities, and training that will help strengthen those aspects of the culture.

For example, a few years ago, a family-owned furniture company that had been in business over 30 years with two stores began to expand and grow very quickly. In the last three years, they have added an additional six stores, so the company owner, for the first time, has created a corporate support team for the stores. In the past, the few store managers were captain of their ships and pretty autonomous. Today, though, there is an entire level of new executives and support staff between the owner and the store managers. Conflicts began to develop almost immediately, so the human resource department hired us to come in and lead a fun charity bike build with the group. Instead, we showed them that if they really want to fix this challenge, the first step is to get the store managers to see that the corporate support team is there to “support” them. We organized a series of workshops to help the support staff improve communication skills and people skills. Once the culture of the organization begins to shift, then, the fun shared-experience programs work much better.

How Big is the Group?

One key aspect of determining the appropriate activity is to pick an activity that is appropriate to the size of the group. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the group, the more likely you are to want to get professional help facilitating the event. For a small team of under 25 or so people, it is much easier to both shift culture and lead a fun activity. Just taking your team bowling or out as a group for a big meal will create more of a team culture and build rapport. In fact, the high-energy shared experience team activities can actually fall flat in a small group. For example, with a charity bike build for 10 people, in order to make it team focused, you’d have to divide the group up into three, four, or five person groups. So, if each group builds one bike, the ending is anticlimactic because only two or three bikes are actually built. So a group outing is often actually less expensive and will likely get you better results.

However, as the group gets bigger, it is better to get help. It is pretty easy to keep 20 or fewer people active and entertained for a few hours. Keeping 100 or 1000 people entertained and active is a high-level skill, though. In addition, if you are doing something for charity as a group, the more people that you have, the bigger the donation, and the bigger the “reveal” at the end when the group gets to see the donation to the charity. For instance, if you are donating food to a food bank, then tons of food boxed up is more exciting than a couple of boxes, and hundreds of underprivileged kids rushing into a banquet hall to receive a new bike is more exciting than two or three. Big events like this take lots of planning, though, because things will not always go as planned. A good event planner or team building company might be a great investment.

So if you want to build a great team, don’t just throw something together. Plan ahead and ask for help if you are new to this type of activity, and you will be more likely to have a fantastic success.