Corporate event team builders are an essential way to build a strong team culture and can significantly improve team morale. As company culture evolves, every business needs to pay more attention to growing their team’s cohesiveness and camaraderie. Consider these fun corporate team builders (which can even be done remotely). Your employees will love them!
Preparing For Your Corporate Event Team Builders
Some planning is needed for your team-building event.
Your employees need to be prepared for this day as it may require that they bring extra clothes or that food is brought in.
You also want the schedule to be cleared, so team members don’t feel obligated to step away from meetings.
Plan out your team-building day a few months in advance. This will give your team time to clear the schedule and set the expectation that everyone will attend this activity.
Decide on which team-building idea you want to do, how long each takes, and then prepare a schedule.
You need a team leader to talk about what the employees were supposed to learn. Be prepared to do this. If you’re not prepared to do this, you can hire a team-building coach to talk your team through these activities and learnings. You can also ask one team member to lead the group, especially if they are looking to move into a leadership position. This can improve their leadership skills.
Types of Corporate Event Team Builders for Your Team
Team-building activities come in four types:
Communication focused
Solving a problem or making a decision
Adapting or planning activities
Building trust.
Teamwork does not have to stem from a strenuous ropes course or virtual escape room. Instead, you can pick quick bonding activities that more people will enjoy. It also doesn’t have to take all day. It can take an afternoon or a quick 30 minutes. No matter which type your team performs, the idea of the activity is that it is challenging and fun. If it’s too challenging, then they will consider it to work. If it’s too fun, then they will not have learned a lesson from it. With the right balance of challenge and fun, your team will improve employee engagement, employee performance, productivity, and team collaboration at the office. These activities can be used with a virtual team, but you may have to adapt the game a bit so your remote workers feel engaged. Most of these activities are great for any team size; you can break them up into small team groups as well.
5 Fun and Engaging Corporate Team Building Ideas
Here are five team-building activities for you to try:
1.Life Highlights Game
Time Required: 30 minutes Type: CommunicationYou’ll need Nothing!
The life highlights game is perfect for any size group. Ask that each participant close their eyes and consider the best moments of their lives. Allow them to think about this moment for at least one minute. Their thoughts might include moments they’ve had alone, ones they have shared with family or friends, or ones that pertain to professional successes, personal revelations, or big life adventures.
Let the participants think about this moment for a minute, but ask that they keep their eyes closed. Let them know that they need to narrow in on that highlight. Ask them to decide 30 seconds of their life that they could relive if they only had 30 seconds left.
These are two different sections of the activity. The first part will have your participants reflecting on a past event or moment, but the second part enables them to share how they would want to be treated if they only had 30 perfec seconds left of life.
Allow participants to think of this second part for another minute or two. Then, the leader will go through and ask each participant to share each of the reflections. The first 30 seconds allow team members to learn about their team’s past experiences. And the 30 second ideal moment will teach participants about each other’s passions, personalities, and loves.
2.Classification Game
Time Required: 10-15 minutes Type: Communication You’ll need Nothing but a bit of creative thinking! This game can be complex or a quick icebreaker. In this example, we will be treating it like a quick icebreaker.
You will be splitting the group into 4s, but before you do so, explain the game. The purpose of this game is to discover how someone would classify themselves to their team. Each person will introduce themselves and they must present some likes, dislikes, and favorite hobbies or activities.
Then, after each team member introduces themselves, the team will need to classify themselves into two or three subgroups that reflect positive, non-discriminatory classifications. They could separate team members into sushi lovers, pineapple pizza lovers, morning people, night owls, and so on.
This will help others get to know each other and their colleagues’ quirks. Be sure to also explain to the entire team the downsides of pigeon-holing someone and being discriminatory. This game is not meant to discriminate or stereotype.
3. Picture Pieces Game
Time Required: 30 minutesType: Problem-solving You’ll need: A printout of a picture, scissors, pens, markers, rulers, pencils, and paper.
The picture pieces team-building game is a creative and interesting one. Start with the leader printing out a well-known picture or cartoon that is detailed. They will need to print out the picture and then cut it up into an equal number of squares as there are participants.
Each participant is given a puzzle piece and is asked to recreate the copy of their puzzle piece onto a larger sheet of paper (around five times the size). The participants are given markers, pens, pencils, and rulers to recreate them.
In the end, the participants will piece together their pictures. This will be a giant copy of the original picture and can be spread out on a table.
This activity shows the group how vastly different personalities and ideas can come together to create the same picture as before. This changes the participants’ perspective on how the team works together, the perspectives that each person is coming forward with, and how different everyone is (in a good way!).
4. The Alien at Dinner
Time Required: 20-30 Type: Adaptability You’ll need: A dinner table set-up.
The alien at dinner is a fun and out-of-the-box corporate team-building exercise. This activity may be better if you take one group and explain to them what they are to do, and then take another small group and explain to them their goals.
You’ll essentially have a team at a dinner party and then another as aliens. You can have the aliens work together (by choosing 3 or 4 aliens) or each goes to the dinner party one by one.
Find a table that your team can sit around and tell them that they are having a fake dinner party. Give them some ideas of topics to talk about and discussion points.
Talk to your alien(s) and ask that they approach this gathering from an alien perspective. Ask them to try to forget their social etiquette and ask questions that you think an alien would come up with.
Without telling the dinner party guests that they invited “aliens” to the mix, they may find this point very interesting. If the aliens also don’t know why they are there, then they may genuinely confuse the dinner party guests.
After about 5 minutes at the dinner party, the alien(s) should then describe in their own words what the humans were doing.
All in all, the activity is meant to show the unique ways that we are as humans. It puts things into perspective and perhaps shows how your team members would be welcoming to a “stranger”.
5. Back-to-back Drawing
Time Required: 10 minutes Type: Trust building You’ll need: Chairs, pens, pads of paper.
Back-to-back drawing is a fun activity and can help build trust between employees. Pair up your employees with a partner and have them sit back-to-back on the ground or on chairs. Give one employee a pen and pad of paper. Give the other a picture with an obscure shape on it. The person with the picture needs to describe the shape, and the employee with the pad needs to draw it. Of course, the goal is to see how accurate the drawing is — you may be surprised!
Allow for the individual to draw for 3 minutes and then have them show each other the picture that they drew. Then show the team the actual picture and the drawn picture. Those who drew it well can describe the things that they focused on in the picture and the words they used. In any case, it could result in giggles and fits of laughter, especially from those who aren’t keen on drawing.
Your team can switch off with the partner and go with another partner too. This activity can highlight artistic differences and the importance of communication in a fun way!
Staying Connected No Matter What
Whether your team is still dispersed, or you are meeting back in the office, consider implementing these awesome corporate event team-builders. With a distributed team, you’ll need powerful virtual event software like Accelevents. With this software, your team can still take part in team-building activities, engage with the process, and enjoy one another’s company.
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