Article: 12 top team building games for a winning team

Employee Engagement

12 top team building games for a winning team

TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More. Thus, this acronym correctly signifies the saying, "None of us is as smart as all of us". This article showcases the 12 top team building games. Have a look.
12 top team building games for a winning team

The festival of lights, “Diwali” is round the corner. With the HR team busy in planning various fun activities in your organization, managers of other teams can gear up and conduct some team building activities in their own functional department. Mentioned below is an eclectic collection of activities with no expensive round of paintball needed to create a winning team in your office along with leveraging the festive mood. Here are some of the top picks:

What’s in the room?

Goal: To learn marketing strategy

This game activity needs the members in the team to pick up any random object in the room and prepare a marketing plan to sell it within stipulated time. The person that could sell the product at highest profit with most enticing marketing plan is declared winner. 

FedEx days

Goal: To give people autonomy in their field of expertise

In this game, the team members are asked to take up any business project of their choice and with a deadline to complete it within 24hrs. This will not only give amazing short term results for the business, but the people involved will feel happier and content after completion.

Team birthday line up

Goal: Helps to focus on problem solving, communication and cooperation

The participants are asked to arrange themselves in a line side-by-side. They are then asked to rearrange their line in order of their birthdays (considering only the month and date). What’s the catch? The challenge is that the group members cannot talk at all. They can resort to using sign language, nudges, and other techniques to determine each other’s birthday. This is ideal team challenge game wherein you can see how some of the members take lead and direct others to achieve the desired outcome. 

Stuck in Arctic

Goal: To test the team’s ability to survive in the worst

Divide everyone in groups of three. The scenario is that the teams are lost in arctic and they need to build a shelter to withstand the cold winds. The team elects a leader who is supposed to be suffering from frostbite, so he can’t move physically. The rest of the members in the team should be blindfolded. The leader instructs the team on how to build the shelter without manual helping and the teammates must do so without being able to see.

Coin your thoughts

Goal: To help team members open up and encourage stress free interactions.

Ask each team member to drop a coin in a box. The important thing to note here is that any of the coin shouldn’t be dated older than the youngest team member. Next, each participant has to pick a coin from the box and based on the year listed on the coin, he/she has to share something significant or memorable that happened to them in that particular year. 

Picture puzzle

Goal: To increase effective communication, appreciating other’s viewpoint and for leaders to emerge and control to achieve the final result. 

Distribute sequential pictures forming a narrative story to the entire team. The participants are not supposed to reveal the pictures to others; however they can describe what features on their picture. The end result is to create a cohesive story by placing the pictures as per the descriptions without looking at one another’s pictures. 

Memory wall

Goal: This is one of the most beautiful ways to build bonding in the team. 

Put up a white board and distribute post-it notes among your team members. Write down four to five work related themes on the white board like “My first day”, “1st interaction with your team mate”, “Work travel”, “Team outings”, “Group project” etc. and let people write down special team memories and accomplishments related to the themes written on the whiteboard. Take your team members walk to walk down the memory lane by sharing what they have written and post the same on the board. The end result will be creation of a nostalgic ambience with lingering smile on the members.

Classify-Simplify

Goal: To revamp thought process of the team members to view routine things in work and life.

Collect different objects from the work place and place them at the centre of the room. The objects can be a wide variety of things like pen, pen stand, umbrella, phone, food etc. Try to collect atleast 20 to 25 things.  Divide the team with two members in each group. Next hand over pen and paper to all your team members and invite a person from each group to speak on how they classified the things and why. 

Hear me loud

Goal: To remove conflicts and misunderstanding arising from misconstrued and partial listening.

In this activity, one person will read out loud a document in a monotone with many mind numbing and coherent jargon words. The rest of the members are given a sheet of paper and are asked to jot down their understanding from the document. At the end you can discuss with them and observe to what extent they perceived the document correctly. 

Zombie escape

Goal: To help the team come together with creative solutions in crisis. 

Take your team to a separate room with some horror attributes already done, switch off the light and play some horror sound to create effects that will replicate a zombie apocalypse scenario. Lock the door. The team members will be required to solve the puzzles and find the hidden key that unlocks the door and allow them to escape the dreadful room.

Shoe shuffle

Goal: To accelerate the thought process and emerge as a winner.

Ask all your team members to remove their shoes and place them in a big carton. Shuffle all the shoes. Next, divide the team with 4 to 5 members in each team. The first player of each team then goes to the pile, picks up his shoes, wears it and goes back and gives a hi-5 to the next member in the line and says “Go”. The first team to complete wearing the shoes wins. 

Salt & Pepper

Goal: To learn how to ask the right questions.

Think of pair of things like Mickey-Minnie, Bread-Butter, Sun-Moon and jot down on difrrent piece of paper, one on each piece. Then take one piece and stick on the back of your team members without they noticing what’s written on the paper. When the game starts, everyone must walk around asking yes or no questions in order to find out what word they have taped to their backs. Once they figure that out, they need to find their other pair. 

So, which one of the above is your favorite team building game?

Source: https://cake.hr/blog/top-50-team-building-games-employees-love-play/

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Topics: Employee Engagement, Culture

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