Team Building Activities

Team building is an important yet often overlooked endeavor when you’re trying to make a team successful. Team bonding activities can be used to take members of the team out of the daily grind of projects and deadlines and allow them to connect with other members of the team on a more personal level. The FIRO-B^® assessment shows us that different individuals have different interpersonal wanted and expressed needs for inclusion, and thus their behavior may show differing levels of personal interaction. Yet it’s important to have some team bonding activities including the whole team while respecting the level of interaction wanted or needed by different personalities.

Fun team building activities don’t need to break the bank in order to be successful. Organizations of all sizes often have company picnics, and sometimes with larger teams they will hire outside professionals to come to the picnic and lead small events such as relay races, volleyball games, and other outdoor field activities. In addition, many facilities such as bowling alleys, restaurants with bocce ball or volleyball courts, laser tag and arcade emporiums, and theme parks will often offer discounts for groups over 10 and are willing to negotiate discounted ticket prices for group events.

All of these fun team building activities can help team members form relationships outside the office and away from the stress of the workplace. In addition, fun team building activities will often reduce conflict later on within teams, as those relationships outside the workplace foster patience and empathy between team members.

If you’re looking for quick team building activities you could do without leaving the office, here are 10 quick and easy team building activities from a company called Huddle: https://www.huddle.com/blog/team-building-activities/.

If you’d like your team building activity to be a little more intellectually stimulating or valuable to your employees’ development, you can use assessments such as the Myers-Briggs^® (MBTI^®) assessment and conduct a team building workshop around their assessment results. This blog post on CPP’s Blog Central will give you step-by-step instructions on how to create and conduct some of these workshops.

Specific reports such as the MBTI^® Comparison Report: Work Styles (click here for the sample report) can be used for a team bonding activity that helps all members of the team in their development, but when done outside the workplace, the activity allows team members to relax a little more than they would have in the setting where they do their work. Read more about the report and how it builds team cohesion here: http://www.cppblogcentral.com/mbti-talk/increasing-team-cohesion-with-the-mbti-work-styles-report/.