Building Your Team

Fun Corporate Team Building Events

Three Important Questions when Choosing a Team Building Activity

February 6th, 2013

Stressed out and overextended
There are probably thousands of different team building activities out there on the market today. How can anyone possibly sift through them all and decide on the “best one” for their group? As soon as you put in the search term “team building” into any search engine, it’s easy to become overwhelmed just looking at the number of results that come up.

Here are three important questions to ask yourself when choosing the right team building activity for your group. They aren’t the only questions to ask, but the answers will give you a great starting point.

1. What is my goal for this group?
The three questions are equally important in my opinion, but this one happens to be first. If you don’t have a clear sense of WHY you are doing a team building activity, choosing one will send you off in a myriad of directions. You just might end up becoming so overwhelmed by the never-ending choices that you just give up.

2. What do I hope the group will do differently after this event?
This question is often overlooked by the planners of a team building event. It is easy to lose focus on where you are going if you didn’t have a clear sense of the path before you started. Asking yourself what you hope that your group will do differently or better after the event can help you narrow down the type of event that is best suited to help you reach that goal.

3. How will this benefit our business?
Finally, this question is also often overlooked but equally important. Team building events that are done well can have clear benefits for your business in that they can help your team be more productive, communicate more effectively, or increase your team’s collaborative spirit. Thinking about how that can benefit your business may make it easier to select an appropriate activity. It can also help with justifying the expense of a good team building program.

Selecting the right team building program doesn’t have to be overwhelming or scary. Gaining clarity yourself before beginning your search can help you stay focused on the goals you have for your team, and how a good program can move you towards reaching them. Happy hunting!

Colette Johnston is a Corporate Development Manager who works with clients in over 30 major cities including Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and New York. Interested in a Team Building Event?

Three Important Questions when Choosing a Team Building Activity

February 6th, 2013

New Video Slideshow with Our Team Building Events

February 1st, 2013

New Team Building Event Slideshow

We just created and uploaded a new informational video about all of our Team Building Events, and you can find it on our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OtuKcVKFqM&feature=youtu.be. This is an updated version of our slideshow which includes our new programs like The Ace Race and highlights some of our popular events like Build-A-Bike®.

This new video is a great place to start if you are interested in having your group do a team activity but you’re just not sure which one is right for you yet, because it gives a few photographs and some short videos about each program. If you are still unsure after viewing the video, call one of our instructors at (800) 872-7830, and perhaps we’ll be able to help narrow your selection.

Ice Breaker Activities

January 21st, 2013

One of the most often request that we get from callers into our office is for ice breaker activities and team building games, so here are a few very simple team building ideas that you can do as an introduction to your meetings or as a way to breakup a larger meeting and add some fun.

Just a quick warning. These are quick, stand alone exercises that can work well as a fun break to your regular meetings, but just stringing together a series of these activities as an event, can have big drawbacks. (See http://www.leadersinstitute.com/what-is-team-building)

We will add to these games over time, so make sure and bookmark or link to the page and come back over time for new ideas.

Ice Breaker Activities

Seven Card Stud: Since groups of seven people are typically a good size to do other activities, Seven Card Stud is a good way to organize a large group into smaller, more manageable groups. Just distribute a single playing card to each person and ask them to organize themselves into a winning hand of seven card stud. (If you just distribute cards eight through ace, you’ll end up with all Royal Flushes.)

Have You Ever: Create a big rectangle out of paper plates or some other type of place marker and make sure there is a singe placeholder for each person in the group. Then ask a question starting with the words “Have you ever…?” Anyone who has done the thing asked in the question has to move around the rectangle one complete time and look for any open placeholder to stand by. After the first question, remove a single placeholder so there is one more person than placeholder, and the person who is not able to secure a placeholder will ask the next question. Keep going a few rounds, and you should start to have some very interesting and fun things happen within the group.

Shrinking Disk: this is a great way to get a group organized into smaller teams. Hand every person a paper plate or some other type of placeholder and have everyone drop the placeholder to the floor and place the toe of their shoe on the edge. Give a direction to move to a different disk or placeholder and everyone will move. Then, take a few placeholders away, and ask them to move to a different disk again. Many will be confused, because now there are fewer disks than people, but just keep saying “Find a new disk… Hurry!” and they will figure out that they can now double up with other participants. Keep removing disks until you have the sized small groups that you want. For instance, if you have 21 people and want three groups of seven, just keep removing disks until you only have three left. Participants will automatically equalize their groups.

Bippity Bippity Bop: This game is similar to Simon Says in that the goal is to “trick” a teammate into slipping up. Organize the group into a big circle and have a single person go from person to person saying either “Bippity Bippity Bop” or just “Bop”. If the speaker says Bippity Bippity Bop, then the person being looked at must say “Bop” before the speaker finishes. If the speaker says “Bop” then the person being looked at can’t say anything. The key is to move and speak quickly and take the listeners by surprise. Keep adding new rules to make the game more challenging.

Yes… And: Divide the group into two lines of people where the line leaders are facing each other. One of the two line leaders starts a story, and then they take turns adding to the story beginning each new part of the story with “Yes, and…” Human nature is that people will want to change or alter the story by starting their addition with a “but” or a “however”. Once someone flubs and tries to alter the flow, they go to the back of the line. The goal is to see which team can go the longest without having their entire team flub a line.

One Word Story: Start a story by giving the group a title and an opening line such as “The Mysterious Stranger… No one really know where the stranger came from. He just showed up one day at the…” and point to the first participant. Each participant adds one, single word to the story. Keep going to see the story develop. Anytime a participant struggles or the story starts to diminish, just add a new sentence put leave the end of the sentence dangling just like you did with the first sentence.

Each of these ice breakers and games can be used as an introduction to meetings or larger events. Have fun summarizing the “take aways” from each exercise.

What Is Team Building?

January 18th, 2013

So what exactly is team building, anyway?

The term “team building” is thrown around quite often describing any type of activity that is likely to build some type of camaraderie or team environment, but the specific activities and games that make up a good event can be lumped into a few types of categories.

Team Games and Exercises

These games and exercises are the short activities thar often fun and competitive and are typically used as an ice breaker or warm up to a bigger meeting or event. These games are also sometimes used as entertainment or a distraction to break up a bigger event. For the most part, these exercises are easy to deliver and facilitate, and you can find a nice selection of these ideas on our website or by searching Google and YouTube. Anyone can facilitate these types of activities for free or a very low cost.

For example, an old standby as an ice breaker is Networking Bingo where everyone gets a sheet of paper that has a grid similar to Bingo. Each box in the grid has an attribute of one or more participants that the holder of the card must find in the room. The attributes can be just about anything such as a person with the same middle initial as the holder of the card or maybe find someone in the room who has both a pet dog and pet cat. When they find someone who matches the attribute, they fill n that box. The first person to complete an entire row or column wins.

Team Outings

Sometimes, you may want to reward your group or just get away from the office for some fun. Outings are a great way to build camaraderie and creat a shared experience for your group. Although outing increase the expense of you team building, they can create a nice team culture within your group. These can be as simple as reserving a pavilion at a park and catering BBQ for the group or possibly renting a bowling alley or taking the group to a ball game.

I have a friend who works for a company who rents out Six Flags every year four about four hours just for their employees. Other companies buy box seats or season passes at local sports teams and let small groups of employees alternate attendance as the season progresses.

Team Building Events

Events are entirely different from games and outings, because they often require a professional speaker or facilitator to get the best results. Events or workshops typically last two hours or longer and have a purpose to either fix a group challenge or keep a group active for the entire time. It is pretty easy to get a big group of people to do a single game or exercise for a few minutes, but the longer the event and the bigger the group, the more complex the facilitation of the event will become. As a result, an entire industry has come onto the scene comprised of facilitators who lead these types of events. Many of these facilitators started out conducting the simple games that we mentioned above, but the games and exercises don’t work as well with larger groups, so they had to get creative.

The first major breakthrough that came on the scene was charity team events where participants engage in a series of activities that ultimately conclude with a donation to charity. Our Build-A-Bike program is a great example. In Build-A-Bike, our facilitators have the entire group solve challenges to earn bicycle parts, and since every single part is important to the success, each solution to each challenge is critical. So once each small group accomplishes all of the tasks, they feel a sense of pride. They each get to present their newly completed bicycle to a young kid, so the entire event is uplifting and emotional. Now, it is very rare that an event planner or meeting organizer doesn’t add some type of charity team activity when he or she creates an agenda.

Confusion that Can Cause Problems

A big challenge that many event planners or organizers confuse the games or outings with formal events. For instance, one game is fun and interactive, but if a facilitator just strings together a series of games over and over to fill a time slot, each additional game will have a diminishing return on enthusiasm. It would be like playing a board game with your family. The first one is fun and rewarding, but if you immediately play a second game, and then a third, it won’t take long for participants to lose interest.

If you confuse an outing with an event, you can have similar challenges. We often get requests from potential clients where they will say something like, “we don’t really want a Team Building Event, we just want to build bikes for kids.” There are no real shortage of per-built bikes, so the actual building of the bikes isn’t what charities are looking for. In fact, if you buy a completed bike or a bike in pieces, the cost is pretty much the same. It is the shared challenges that are overcome that build teamwork, not the physical labor. That doesn’t mean that a shared work experience can’t be rewarding, though. I know of groups who volunteer to do Meals on Wheels or Habitat for Humanity and feel great satisfaction as a result, but those particular events aren’t extremely fun, though.

So if you want to reward your employees and you want them to have a lot of fun, an investment in a great team facilitator can be very rewarding.