30 Team-Building Ideas for the Workplace

Updated November 26, 2022

If you are evaluating options to improve workplace morale and increase productivity, team-building activities may be the ideal solution. Team-building activities can be structured or performed on a daily basis to improve how effectively your employees work together. Learning about different kinds of team-building activities can help you identify ones that are most appropriate for your team. In this article, we discuss why team-building is important, how you can facilitate team building among your own team and 30 activities you can try with your own team.Related: Fun Team-Building Activities To Boost Morale

What is team building?

Team building is the process of helping a group of people learn to work effectively as a team. Team building usually involves activities and events that are fun and motivational and help the team build skills like problem-solving, planning and communication.

Importance of team building

Team building is one of the most important investments you can make for your employees. Team building:

Encourages networking and socializing. Socializing increases morale and helps employees work together more effectively to solve problems in the workplace.
Boosts team performance. After completing team building activities together, employees better understand one another's interests, strengths and weaknesses.
Improves productivity. Fun team-building activities can help employees connect in a more effective way, teaching them to work well together.
Fosters innovation and creativity. Successful team building contributes to a more creative workplace, as people tend to have a larger imagination when they're comfortable.
Improves communication. Team-building activities help people to be more comfortable with one another, improving communication in the workplace.

How to facilitate team building

There are a number of steps you can take to help your employees work together as a cohesive team:

1. Encourage daily team building

Team building can include daily interaction that employees engage in by carrying out the primary requirements for their jobs. Teams can brainstorm ideas for what guidelines they will implement. It could include things like listening to understand, being genuine about ideas and challenges and having confidence that issues discussed will be kept in confidence.

2. Implement team-building activities among departments

You can accomplish this by facilitating meetings to help employees who are part of a team get to know each other better in order to develop a more cohesive working relationship. You can also identify structured activities the employees can do together.

3. Use external facilitation

Another solution for facilitating team building among your employees is to use an external facilitator. This person works with a group of employees to design team building activities, such as discussion topics, group brainstorming, icebreakers, games and cooperative assignments.Related: Creative Team Building Questions (With Examples)

Get interview-ready with tips from Indeed

Prepare for interviews with practice questions and tips

Thirty team-building activities

Here are some examples of team-building activities that you could try with your own team:

Game of possibilities
Purpose mingle
Code of conduct
Campfire stories
Memory wall
Winner/loser
Human knot
Egg drop
Truth and lies
Blind drawing
Magazine story
Shark tank
Office trivia
Body of words
Buckets and balls
Build bridges, not walls
Team jigsaw
Sneak-a-peek
Tied together
Daredevil
Scavenger hunt
Shipwrecked
This is better than that
Minefield
The perfect square
Guess the object
Team emblem
Photo finish
Hole in many
Blind draw

1. Game of possibilities

With this game, a person in a group is given an object and then, one at a time, team members must go in front of the group and demonstrate uses for the object without using words. The team then is tasked with guessing what they are demonstrating.

2. Purpose mingle

Before a meeting, have everyone go around the room and speak with other employees in attendance, telling them what they plan to contribute to the meeting. The goal is to share with as many people as possible.

3. Code of conduct

With this game, teams list on a whiteboard what matters to them. You can accomplish this by writing the words "meaningful" and "pleasant" on a whiteboard and then asking people to shout out or write on notes what will make the event meaningful and pleasant. Those ideas then make up what the code of conduct will be.

4. Campfire stories

In this team-building activity, employees gather in a circle and share workplace experienced based on trigger words, such as "work travel," "first day," "side project" and others.

5. Memory wall

Have employees write down positive memories of experiences they've had working together. Next, have them draw a few of those memories on a separate piece of paper. Give them 30 minutes to accomplish this and then have them tape their drawings to a wall for the entire group to see.

6. Winner/loser

Pair up the employees and have one partner share something negative that happened with the other partner, either personally or at work. Next, have the other person discuss the same experience focusing on the positive aspects. This will help the first partner see the situation from a positive perspective. Then switch roles and try it again.

7. Human knot

Have everyone stand in a circle facing one another. Next, have everyone put out a right hand, taking the hand of someone across from them. Then have them do the same with their left hand. Finally, task the group with untangling themselves without releasing hands.

8. Egg drop

Group your employees into teams of three to five people. Then give them a box of supplies along with an uncooked egg and task them with building something to keep the egg from breaking when dropped.

9. Truth and lies

Have everyone sit in a circle and task each person with coming up with three facts and one lie about themselves. Next, go around the circle and have each person state their three facts and one lie. Everyone else must then guess which are facts and which statement is the lie.

10. Blind drawing

Have people sit back-to-back and give one person a picture and the other a pen and paper. One person must then describe the picture without actually saying what it is and the other person draws what they think the picture depicts.

11. Magazine story

Have your team create a magazine cover story about your company, creating headlines, images, quotes and sidebars.

12. Shark tank

Split your group into teams of two to six people and ask them to create an imaginary product and develop a pitch for it, including the brand name, slogan, business plan, marketing plan and predicted sales. Assign three or four people to be sharks and assign them imaginary money that they can invest in the products. The team that wins the greatest investment wins.

13. Office trivia

Come up with a fun list of questions related to your company and the employees who work in your department. The person who guesses the most right answers wins.

14. Body of words

Divide the group into teams of four to eight and give each team a word like book or cat and task them with making the word using only their bodies. The group that makes their word the fastest wins.

15. Buckets and balls

With this game, teams compete against one another to move balls from one bucket to another without using their hands or arms. Each team will have a handler, someone who can touch the ball with their hands. Teams must retrieve their balls from the finish line bucket and get them to the handler for their team, without ever using their hands or arms.

16. Build bridges, not walls

With this team-building activity, separate teams build different halves using the materials they are provided. When they finish building their individual sides, the teams must work together to make the separate sides of the bridge fit together.

17. Team jigsaw

Teams work together to complete a jigsaw puzzle within a specific amount of time. However, some of the pieces are with the opposing team. Teams can exchange pieces but only one at a time.

18. Sneak-a-peek

In this game, one playing from a team is given 10 seconds to look at a structure that the team will recreate using Lego pieces. The player is then given 25 seconds to instruct the team on how to build the structure. The team then has one minute to build the structure. Then another team member will be given a "sneak peek" at the structure for 10 seconds and have 25 seconds to give instructions. The teams continue until they are finished building the structure. The first team to finish wins.

19. Tied together

Teammates are tied together by the wrists in this game and asked to complete a series of tasks. You could task them with wrapping a present, pouring a glass of water or making a Lego structure. Add a time limit to make the challenge even more difficult.

20. Daredevil

With this activity, one person on each time is blindfolded and the others on the team give them instructions to retrieve specific objects from the playing area. Teammates cannot name the object directly, they can only describe it. They must instruct the blindfolded person on how to retrieve the object and then how to get it into their basket.

21. Scavenger hunt

In a scavenger hunt, you prepare a list of specific items that the teams are task with gathering or activities that they must complete. Align your activities with your intended purpose. If you want it to be just fun, pick less serious activities. If you want to help teammates learn to work together more effectively, pick team-focused activities.

22. Shipwrecked

Set up an area with survival items after a shipwreck. It could be pictures that you've printed of different items. Next, divide participants into teams and give them 25 minutes to collect the items from the shipwreck. Teams will have to collaborate and barter to get the objects that they need.

23. This is better than that

Split participants into even teams and then pick four or more different objects to give to each team. Participants are then given a scenario where they have to rank objects based on their usefulness in the scenario. For example, if they were stranded on an island or had to save the world from Godzilla.

24. Minefield

Place balls, cones and other objects across an open space. Next, pair up participants and put a blindfold on one person. The other person must then lead their teammate across the field without stepping on objects using only verbal directions.

25. The perfect square

Have team members stand in a circle holding a piece of rope. Next, have everyone put on blindfolds, set the rope on the floor and walk a short distance from the circle. Finally, have them come back and try to form a square without removing their blindfolds.

26. Guess the object

One person from a group is shown a common object and then demonstrates the object using gestures and actions. The rest of the group has two or three minutes to guess the object.

27. Team emblem

Divide participants into teams of three or four people and then have them plan, draw and paint an emblem to represent their team, something that identifies the team and its values. The teams can then present their emblem and explain what it signifies.

28. Photo finish

Task all participants to cross a finish line at the same time, taking a photo each time they cross to see if it qualifies as a photo finish.

29. Hole in many

Cut one or many holes in a tarp and then stretch the tarp between all participants on a team. Drop a tennis ball, or multiple tennis balls, onto the tarp and see how long the team can go without the ball falling through the holes. The team that lasts the longest wins.

30. Blind draw

Divide participants into groups of four to six and then ask one person to be the artist, placing them at the whiteboard to draw. Next, face the rest of the team away from the whiteboard and give them an object. They will then instruct the artist what to draw by describing the object verbally. The artist cannot look at the object and the team cannot see what the artist is drawing.