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The Best Team Building Activities Create Experiences (Memories.)
The absolute best team building activities aren’t actually games or exercises. They are team building experiences that build teamwork and morale. By the way any activity can do this. However, there are a few team activities that are time-tested and audience approved and that also generate a fantastic emotional response from the group.
You won’t find any cheesy trust falls or visits to dude ranches in this list. This list of team building exercises was hand-picked by our team of professional speakers and facilitators. Your team will love them! (Uuhh, the events, I mean, but you’ll probably love our facilitators too. ;-))
How to Choose the Best Team Building Event for the Needs of Your Group.
With over 20 years of team building experience, we know that choosing the perfect team building activity can be a challenge. So, we create a series of questions that can help point you in the right direction.
- Will your team be meeting in-person or virtually? Many of your choices will be determined by how your team chooses to meet.
- How big is your group? How many people are you expecting? Large group activities are very different from small group activities.
- What Is the main purpose of team activity? Are you wanting to reward your team or have fun? Or is your team experiencing challenges? Different events create different outcomes.
- Do you want to include charitable activities to the event? Charity team building activities require more investment, but the emotional impact is worth every penny.
Great Options for Virtual Meetings
This is a new question, but pretty important post-pandemic. Will your team be meeting in person or virtually? If you are conducting your team meeting online, here are a few tips.
- First, in the virtual meeting world, shorter is better. We recommend an hour-long session. Set a time limit of an hour-and-a-half max.
- Make virtual team-building events stand-alone activities. (Don’t add them into an already crowded meeting agenda.)
- In the meeting invitation, ask participants to come to the meeting with their cameras and microphones on.
Virtual escape rooms and online games can be an excellent choice for virtual teams. We recommend using Zoom to access your meeting. Zoom has the ability to divide the group into breakout rooms. This will make your online team activity more interactive for your remote employees.
By the way, if you are looking for a few free virtual team building games to play with your team, click this link for a few of our favorites.
The Best Options for Small Groups (Under 30 People.)
One important thing to know about team building activities is that some activities work best for smaller teams. Other exercises work best for larger groups of people. For example, a gameshow style of activity can be really fun for a smaller group. The whole team can participate, and it will be a fun event for everyone. However, the larger the group gets, the more people will be viewing the activity and not playing the activity.
Charity team-building activities are another example of how the group size affects the satisfaction of the group. If you have 100 people participating in a philanthropic donation, the activity will be fairly cost-effective and the donation will be memorable. Do that same activity for smaller groups, though, and it will often be less cost-effective.
Here are a few of our best ways to build stronger teams if your group’s size is below 30 people or so.
By the way, if you are looking for fun icebreaker activities or free games to play with your group, visit this link.
Team Activities for Large Groups
The best team meetings are ones where the team leader is able to get the entire group to participate all at the same time. This is fairly easy to do with small teams. However, there is a big difference between large and small group activities. For large groups, making sure everyone is happy and everyone is participating is more challenging. So, our recommendations here are ways to get the entire team to have a great time while you as the organizer get great feedback.
A great way to get a group of people to form a cohesive team is to give them a challenge where each individual can contribute to the solution. When we designed the first charity team activity we realized that if teams just built a bike or just boxed up canned goods, they would also just be doing manual labor. That isn’t fun. And it doesn’t build a strong team.
So, the philosophy behind good large group team building programs is to use “team work” to build “teamwork.” We divide the large group into small teams. Each team is given a series of challenges to problem solve together. Successful teams work toward the common goal of accomplishing each challenge. When they do, acquire all the parts that they need to build a bike, fill a backpack, or stuff a Teddy bear. The donation means something to the group because they EARNED it!
These Options Build Teamwork and Also Benefit Your Community!
Build-A-Bike ® Team Building Activity
👍 Great for Big Groups (The Bigger the Better!)📊 Improves Morale/Makes Meetings More Fun.
The Original Build-A-Bike ® Team Building Event is still the most popular Bicycle Team Activity in the world! Each teams tackles a series of team-building activities designed to show a better way build improve team performance. As they solve each puzzle, they earn a new piece of the bike.
We create an emotional ending when the bikes are donated to local kids in the area!
⏰ 2 Hrs | 👥 25-999+ People | Virtual Available
Rescue Bear ® Charity Team Building Workshop
👍 Great for Events Where Setup Time or Space Is Limited📊 Improves Delegation/Identifies Strengths of Team Members.
Groups participate in fun team activities to determine the strengths (and maybe weaknesses, lol) of each team member. Then, participants with similar strengths work together to solve team challenges to earn the stuffed animal parts. The group eventually realizes that they need the strengths of all of the team to complete the task, though.
Bears are often donated to local firefighters, the , or the Child Rescue Coalition.
⏰ 2 Hrs | 👥 20-300+ People | Virtual Available
The Ace Race ® Mini Golf for Charity
👍 Great for Big Groups that Are Competitive.📊 Adds Energy to Meetings/Improves Competition & Teamwork.
Teams create an entire mini golf course out of non-perishable food items like canned goods and Mac & Cheese boxes. Once the course is built, each team races to get a hole-in-one (an Ace) on each hole. Each team member contributes to the progression through the course.
At the end, we crown a champion and the food is donated to a local food bank.
⏰ 2 Hrs | 👥 35-999+ People
aMAZEing Builders Custom Charity Event
👍 Great for Groups Who Want to Maximize the Budget.📊 Improves Communication and Organizational Skills.
Participants race through a team obstacle course picking up items to donate to charity. This event is customizable. (You donate whatever you want.)
Most often, teams choose to donate kids; backpacks with school supplies or arts & crafts. However, we have also donated care packages to servicepeople and pet supplies to animal shelters. This is a more cost-effective way to combine team-building and service projects.
⏰ 2 Hrs | 👥 24-999+ People
If Your Team Is Having Challenges, or You Want to Build a Team Culture.
Sometimes, a team building activity isn’t appropriate for the situation. Team events and activities usually just intensify the culture already within a group. So, if you have a great team culture and want to reward your team, any fun team game may work. However, if morale is down or tensions are high, a team workshop might be a better choice.
Team workshops are classroom training sessions designed to create a behavior change. If you want to improve communication, build trust, or teach your team how to resolve conflicts, this sessions may be a good fit.
Workshops can be delivered in one-hour breakout sessions, half-day workshops, or 2-day seminars. You can also pair a workshop with one of our other team building activities to get both the behavior change from the classroom session and the fun activity to benefit a charity.
Not sure where to start? Try a team assessment to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your group as a team. Team Assessment that Creats a S.W.O.T. Analysis of your team.
Classroom Training Sessions to Build Teamwork.
