fbpx

5 Team Building Exercises to Improve Company Culture

Team building activities in the workplace can increase goal achievement, process efficiency and overall employee satisfaction.

Teams are a crucial part of today’s business landscape. Building a great team is essential for success. Even though you assign specific job functions and roles to your employees, you should strive to create a unified workplace with all members working together to achieve the company’s overall objectives.

Team building is essential as it can alleviate workload problems, breakdown organizational barriers and provide opportunities and growth for your staff. Winning teams hinge on two factors: the ability to accomplish mutual goals (tasks) and the interpersonal dynamics between team members (relationships). But the million dollar question for many company’s is, “How can we build a winning team?” The answer is simple. By employing simple team building exercises you can improve company culture and create synergy among your team members.

While there are various team building methods, one approach is through games and activities. So, here are five fun team building exercises you can use to improve your company culture.

 

1. Two Truths and a Lie

  • Time Required: 15-30 minutes
  • Goal: Encourage workplace communication and help employees get to know each other.

Ask every team member to secretly write down two truths about themselves and one lie on a small piece of paper. Participants are not allowed to reveal to anyone what they wrote down. Once each person has completed this step, allow 10-15 minutes for open conversation where everyone quizzes each other on their three questions.

The idea is to convince others that your lie is actually a truth, while on the other hand, you try to guess other people’s truths and lies by asking them questions. Don’t reveal your truths or lie to anyone – even if the majority of the office already has it figured out!

After the conversational period, gather in a circle and one-by-one repeat each one of your three statements and have the group vote on which one they think is the lie. You can play this game competitively and award points for each lie you identify or for stumping other players on your own lie.

 

2. Life Highlights

  • Time Required: 30 minutes
  • Goal: Create the perfect icebreaker activity for small or large groups.

Ask each participant to close their eyes for one minute and consider the best moments of their lives. This can include personal or shared moments; pertaining to professional success, personal revelations, or exciting life adventures. After they have had a moment to run through their life highlights, keeping their eyes closed, ask each participant to take a moment to decide which thirty seconds of their life they would relive if they only had thirty seconds left in their life.

The first part of the activity enables participants to reflect back on their lives, while the second part (i.e. the review section) enables coworkers to get to know each other on a more intimate level. Lastly, as the team leader, ask each participant to share what their thirty seconds entailed and why they chose it. This allows team members to understand each others passions and personality.

 

3. Coin Logo

  • Time Required: 5-10 minutes
  • Goal: Promote self and collective awareness by enabling team members to personally connect.

Ask participants to empty their pockets, purses, and wallets of any coins they may have and place them on a table. If someone doesn’t have any coins or only has very few, others in the room can share their coins.

Instruct each person to create their own personal logo, using the coins in front of them, in sixty seconds. Other materials they may have, such as pens, notebooks, wallets, etc. can also be used in the creation of their personalized logo. If you have a particularly large group, split everyone up into teams of 3-6 people. Then each individual or group can explain their logo to the larger team and discuss what the logo represents.

 

© YFS Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Copying prohibited. All material is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this material is prohibited. Sharing of this material under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International terms, listed here, is permitted.

   

In this article