Sometimes, a team doesn’t need or isn’t quite ready for an in-depth set of team building activities. Maybe it’s a team that is just forming after reorganization, or maybe it’s a team of individual contributors and teamwork is less essential to success. In these cases, team building icebreakers can be a great start to establish healthy communication habits with your teams.
These activities are all relatively simple to implement – most just need time on the calendar, and a little bit of preparation. People who know each other engage in teamwork more easily. Even casual events without an express goal can yield many benefits.
Types of Team Building Icebreakers
Here are some ideas for team-building exercises that tend to achieve better team camaraderie.
- Self-Development Training. There are many personality and team assessments that provide personal insights about individual strengths and weaknesses. When these assessments are administered and explained in a team setting by a skilled trainer, they can provide insights on both an individual and team level.
- Physical Games and Challenges. There are many skilled trainers that can facilitate team-building games, exercises and activities in both outdoor and indoor environments. These exercises can be modified to meet any physical limitations in the group, while still taking people out of their comfort zones for learning purposes.
- Cross-Functional Meet and Greets. To build connections across teams, schedule meet and greet lunches or field trips that bring together teams that rely on each other, but that do not work together every day. For example, have marketing and operations share a lunch, or have the technologists and human resources teams visit a museum together.
While planning out these corporate team activities, it is important to make it a common practice to revisit the goal. Many team-focused articles talk about the importance of mission clarity and alignment, but too often, teams don’t actually ask, “wait, why are we doing this?” in the middle of their work. To infuse mission focus into teamwork, start meetings with, “Ok, today we are going to talk about X. The goal is to Y. This is important to achieve because it will help A do B. Any feedback on that before we start?”
Corporate Team Building Example: Playing Cards
First, create small groups of 2 to 6 people, depending on group size. All groups begin with the same task, designed to address some topic of interest to the team. For example, the task may be to list:
- Projects that this team should consider in the next year
- Ideas for creating a new innovative product or service
- Ideas for creating efficiencies or streamlining business processes
Each group generates cards that respond to the assigned topic— only one idea per card. Each group may generate as many cards as they wish, as this is the brainstorming section of the activity.
Once each group has generated a stack of cards (takes about 10 minutes), the stack is passed to a different group (so each group gets a new set of cards). Then, in a second round, the group sorts through and reads the cards they have received from the first round. The group must select the top 2-3 cards from their inherited set— these are the top ideas that the group thinks are the best of all the cards received. For example, Group B receives a stack of 7 cards that list different ideas that Group A generated for new innovative services, and picks the top 2-3 ideas. This round also takes about 10 minutes.
In a third round, the 2-3 top selected cards for each group are then passed to a third group. The rest of the cards are set aside. For this final round, the group selects what they believe is the best idea from their inherited cards and then drafts a preliminary action plan to bring that idea into reality. The output from this step is a statement of the idea and a plan of attack for carrying it forward.
