5 Great Team Building Activities To Boost Employee Collaboration

When you are managing a team of employees and multiple projects, you need to make sure that your workers actually feel like a team. Otherwise, you could be making your job a lot more difficult unnecessarily. It is not always easy to bring people together. With the right team building activities however, you can make even the most challenging personalities get along. If you are a manager looking to turn your band of assorted employees into a full-fledged collaborative team, use some of the great team building activities detailed below.

Escape Room

Escape rooms are one of the best team building games to foster collaborative problem-solving among your team. Escape rooms are hugely popular as of a late. That means you can almost guarantee that your employees will actually enjoy this team building exercise. A team-building escape room will be one of the few team building activities that your employees do not grumble at. In addition to being fun, these types of activities are one of the best ways to improve communication and collaborative problem solving in the employees you manage. Keep this in mind the next time you need to bring everyone together.

Losses Into Wins

Turn team losses into team wins with this employee team building idea. Thankfully, no supplies are needed to play it. All you need to do is group your team into pairs. Then, have team members share a negative experience with their partner. You can choose to limit the discussion to professional losses, or you can allow more personal responses if you would like to improve employee camaraderie. Once the one team member shares the story of a tough time they’ve experienced with their partner, have their partner repeat the story to them – only this time, they will only focus on the positive aspects of what happened. Then once these pairs are done, have them switch roles. Great team building activities like these help employees build rapport and improve their outlook on work-related matters, mistakes and even their personal lives.

Service Learning

Your employees can learn a lot from a team service learning trip, especially if you utilize the two factory theory of management. Take your team of employees on a group trip to the local food bank, soup kitchen or animal shelter. Then, spend the day, or just a couple of hours, giving back to the community. This is one of the most simple team building ideas to actualize. And, it is one of the best ways to bond a team and improve your team’s ability to work together. It is hard to not feel close to the people you do charity works with. This is one of those great team building ideas that is sure to improve how your team operates and responds to management strategies. Be sure to give it a try. Your community will thank you.

Unsightly Obstacle Course

What better way to bring a team together than to have them complete an obstacle course together? One of the best team building activities is to have employees navigate through an obstacle course in pairs. The only catch? One of the team members is blindfolded, leaving the other employee to guide them with nothing but their voice. There is a reason this is one of the great team building activities used by all top companies for the last fifty years. Hosting a blind obstacle course challenge will improve team communication and collaboration. It will also provide a ton of smiles and laughs. That is sure to make your employees happy to be apart of the team they are on. Take it back to the basics when you want to find team building games to better manage employees.

Find The Problem, Fix The Problem

If your group’s creativity and problem-solving skills are lacking, play find the problem fix the problem. For this team building game, have your employees each think of a problem that would require creative problem solving to fix. This could be an imaginary problem or a real-life work situation that could possibly turn problematic. Then after everyone has come up with an idea, have them pitch their ideas to their colleagues. Vote on the best problem, and have all the employees work together to solve it. This game requires no additional resources or materials, and it is sure to improve problem-solving, collaboration and creativity in any office team. That is why this is one of the great team building activities that should be added to your management tool box.

It is not easy for different personalities to get along. It is even more difficult to manage those personalities as a team if they are not exactly working well together. You may have attempted starting an employees eat healthy initiative to foster colleague relationships and realized quickly that it would not prove effective. But, managing a team of employees does not have to be that hard. All you need to do is find great team building games and activities to boost employee morale and improve team outcomes. Consider using some of the team building ideas detailed above. These are some of the best collaboration activities and are sure to put smiles on all your workers’ faces. Let us know what your team thinks of them in the comments below after your try them out.