57 team building activities to improve collaboration (and have fun!)

What are team building activities? 

Team building is an activity or process designed to build connections between members of a team, create lasting bonds, and enable better teamwork and working practices.

Team building activities are self-contained group exercises and games that help bring your team together and build the collaborative skillset of your group. They are especially effective in a work environment, where collaboration and cohesion is imperative to a team’s success and overall happiness.

Examples of team building activities include team games and learning experiences, away days and retreats, or simply doing things together as a team. Whether it’s an escape room or a deep activity designed to help your team get to know each other more deeply, the key with any of these activities is to bring your team together with purpose in a fun and engaging way.

As Forbes notes, team building is the “most important investment you can make for your people.” Being purposeful in how you choose team exercises and activities is how you ensure that investment is worthwhile.

Unique team building activities

If your team has done one too many trust falls and trivia quizzes, a less familiar activity can bring back their curiosity. When people don’t know what’s coming, they stop running on autopilot and you see how they really work together. These unique team building activities use cooking, acting, design and storytelling to get teams collaborating in ways they won’t have tried before.

Break the Ice with The Four Quadrants Activity

Purpose: Breaking the ice with a group, self-reflection, deeper sharing
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 30–120 minutes

Sometimes pictures are better than words when it comes to helping a team get to know one another. Creative games like this one can also be especially effective at helping introverts or distanced teams share with the group.

Start by handing out sheets of paper and inviting each participant to draw a 2×2 grid and pose four questions to the group. Each team member draws their answer in one of the grid squares and once the time limit is up, invite the group to share. If you’re looking for a fun game that encourages creative thinking while being visual and memorable, look no further! 

Complete instructions for Break the Ice with The Four Quadrants.

Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament)

Purpose: Build excitement and camaraderie, break the ice in an active, engaging way
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

Encouraging team members to play and have fun is an often overlooked aspect of building better teams. Play is an inherently human activity, and by doing this as a team, we can start to see ourselves as more than just a group of people who work together.

In this version of Rock, Paper, Scissors, large groups pair off until only two players remain for a final showdown. We love that losing players become fans of the winners and cheer them on. This is a quick and easy team game that can build excitement and get the group ready for deeper team building activities to come!

Complete instructions for Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament).

Positive Gossip

Purpose: Build a culture of appreciation and start creating a culture of positive feedback
Participants: 12+
Activity length: 15 minutes

This Liberating Structure works like ordinary gossip, except everything said is positive and designed to uplift others. People pair up for three quick rounds of one minute each way. In the first round, they talk about a mentor or supporter in their life. In the second, with a new partner, they talk about someone else in the group. In the third, they say something positive about the partner in front of them.

Encourage people to exaggerate and have fun with it (“Did you see Nancy come to the rescue again?”), and where possible, ask folks to use examples based on actual experiences. Close with a short group reflection on how it felt and where the team could use positive gossip day to day. This activity also works well as a closing activity or a celebration.

Complete instructions for Positive Gossip.

9 Dimensions Team Building Activity

Purpose: Building relationships by evaluating and sharing perspectives on team dynamics
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 20–60 minutes

Building better team relationships and improving group dynamics often means sharing something about ourselves and finding space to discuss and be honest. In this team building exercise, give each team member a set of red, green, yellow and blue dots alongside the 9 dimensions you’ll be looking at. Each participant puts a dot on each dimension based on whether they believe they’re crushing it or need to do more work. 

By sharing some of their 9 dimensions, your team gets to surface things they’re proud of, as well as those that need work. You’ll explore what your group is aligned on in the debriefing section and then move forward together as a team.

Complete instructions for 9 Dimensions Team Building Activity.

Human Machine

Purpose: Generate energy and get the group working together as one
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

Everyone stands in a circle. One person steps into the middle and starts a repeating movement and sound, like flapping an arm while going “whoop whoop”. A few seconds later, someone else joins and connects to them with a movement and sound of their own. This carries on until the whole group is moving together as one noisy machine.

It’s a great energizer after lunch or before a big collaborative task, and it shows how much each person’s small contribution adds to the whole. With groups of under 20, take the machine apart one person at a time for a satisfying finish.

Complete instructions for Human Machine.

Workshops & Wizards – Magical Kudos

Purpose: Celebrate good collaboration and help teams recognize the skills that make them work well together
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 10 minutes to set up, then runs throughout the session

Each card in the Workshops & Wizards deck is a magical item that stands for a collaboration skill that is helpful for anyone working in teams. Give everyone three cards and challenge them to hand them all out by the end of the session, each time they see a teammate show that skill.

It’s a simple way to spot and celebrate good teamwork as it happens and create a culture of positive feedback. Download a free set of the cards to get started.

Complete instructions for Workshops & Wizards – Magical Kudos.

Awareness Circle

Purpose: Getting to know each other, improving non-verbal communication
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–30 minutes

Getting to know people is easier for some members of a group than it is for others. While extroverts can start chatting to new team members with ease, introverts may find it more difficult to bond with their team and create meaningful team bonds.

In this activity, you’ll encourage a group to get to know each other without speaking and show that everyone in a team has a connection. Another great takeaway from this activity is to take note of the diversity (or lack thereof) in the room and consider this as a point for future team development. 

Complete instructions for Awareness Circle.

Doodling Together

Purpose: Build creative confidence and practice building on each other’s ideas
Participants: 4–200
Activity length: 10–30 minutes

In this activity, everyone starts by drawing a simple shape on a blank card and passes it to the person next to them. The next person turns it into an object or character, the next adds a setting, the next adds some action and the last adds text.

What you end up with is a set of strange and often very funny postcards that no single person could have made. It shows a team how much they can build together when they go with each other’s ideas, and it works online with a shared whiteboard too. In some contexts, it can be useful to set a theme or ask people to connect it to the team they work with.

Complete instructions for Doodling Together.

Traffic Jam

Purpose: Practice communication, problem-solving, leading and following
Participants: 6+
Activity length: 15+ minutes

Two teams stand on a line of markers, facing each other across one empty space, and have to swap sides. People can only step forward into an empty space or step around one person facing them, and any wrong move sends everyone back to the start.

It’s a quick puzzle that shows who leads, who follows and who gets left out, which gives you plenty to talk about in the debrief.

Complete instructions for Traffic Jam.

Passions Tic Tac Toe

Purpose: Break the ice and deepen team understanding in a fun, physical way
Participants: 10+
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

Helping employees get to know each other more deeply and connect beyond the scope of their job roles is a great space to explore with a team building exercise. In this activity, your entire team fills in a 3×3 grid with a passion or core value in each of the boxes. Then, ask your group to mingle and compare passions.

When someone finds a match, they each sign for the other person in that square of the grid. Continue mingling until the first person is able to get three passions in a row and win the game. (Though obviously everyone is a winner because they learned something new about their colleagues!)

Complete instructions for Passions Tic Tac Toe.

Team building activities for getting to know others

Team building doesn’t have to take all day. While running dedicated team workshops like a team canvas workshop can have a profound effect on team dynamics, you can also run team building exercises in as little as 5-10 minutes.

In this section, we’ll share some effective yet quick team building activities you might use to warm-up your group and kick off the team building process. If you’re looking for quick team building activities to easily slot into your meetings, events or your next team offsite, this is a great place to start!

Best and Worst

Purpose: Encouraging open sharing and deeper understanding among team members
Participants: 5–10
Activity length: 10–15 minutes

Team building activities are often at their most effective when you ignite the passions of everyone in a group and bring up talking points that enable people to share something of themselves with the team.

Best and Worst asks each participant to ask one question about the best and worst thing they want to learn from the group. For example, “What’s the best recipe you know?” or “What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had?” After putting all the questions in a hat and choosing a random pair, invite the group to share their answers and related stories.

Complete instructions for Best and Worst.

Group Order

Purpose: Facilitating networking and recognizing commonalities within the team
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

Supporting the get-to-know process at the start of a session or with a new team can be as simple as asking participants to group themselves together based on what they know about each other and inviting them to find out what they don’t.

This activity requires nothing more than getting your group together in a room and asking them to line themselves up in an order based on a criterion such as distance from home to the workplace, birth date in the calendar year or number of different countries visited. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to get people talking and sharing when in pursuit of a common goal.

Complete instructions for Group Order.

3 Question Mingle

Purpose: Breaking the ice, deepening team bonds, networking and movement
Participants: 2-40
Activity length: 30-60 minutes

In 3 Question Mingle, each team member writes three questions on sticky notes and then has a one-minute meeting with another person. They each ask another one question and then trade those post-its. Invite the group to move around the room asking questions in pairs and swapping questions afterwards. 

3 Question Mingle is a great way to help an entire team get to know each other while also inviting the group to ask the questions they really want to ask. By combining structure with self direction, you can get your team building workshop off to the right start! Bonus points for adding those sticky notes to a memory wall for later reflection!

Complete instructions for 3 Question Mingle.

Happiness Exercise

Purpose: Build positivity, team bonding, share appreciation
Participants: 4–30
Activity length: 10–20 minutes

Good teams know how to appreciate one another and share joyful, happy experiences. When a new team is getting to know each other, using an exercise that encourages the sharing of positive stories and experiences not only allows people to connect but also builds a positive atmosphere in the room.

You might also use this team building activity at work or with a more established team. If your team has been going through a challenging period, it can be transformational to share things that make everyone happy and defuse stress or tension as a team.

Complete instructions for Happiness Exercise.

Name Juggling

Purpose: Enhancing name recall and energizing the group through interactive play
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 1–15 minutes

Working with new teams means having new names to learn. Team building starts with getting to know everyone, but how can we make this more fun and dynamic than simple introductions?

In this get to know you game, start by having everyone stand in a circle and introduce themselves by name. Introduce a ball and have people state someone’s name before throwing the ball to that person. That person thanks the person who passed the ball by name before then passing the ball on to someone else. Once people get comfortable, spice things up by introducing more balls and trying to keep them in the air!

Complete instructions for Name Juggling.

Just One Lie

Purpose: Encourage sharing and connection in a lighthearted manner
Participants: 5–20
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

Not all team building games need to reinvent the wheel. Particularly with new teams or groups that aren’t used to team building, keeping it simple with a tried and tested method can be your best bet.

Just One Lie is adapted from the well-known icebreaker two truths and a lie, though encourages participants to mingle and share lots of facts about themselves with one another – great for breaking the ice and getting to know one another too!

Complete instructions for Just One Lie.

Cross the Circle

Purpose: Encourage sharing, building team connections
Participants: 10–25
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

Finding common ground and shared experiences across a diverse group is what team building is all about. In this playful team building activity, participants are encouraged to cross the circle in response to questions posed by a person in the middle.

For example, “Cross through the circle if you have worked here more than 5 years.” or “Cross through the circle if you can play an instrument.” After each stage, a new person gets to pose a question and your team gets to know one another and their commonalities in a simple, effective way.

Complete instructions for Cross the Circle.

Fun team building activities

In an increasingly stressful environment of deadlines and meetings, it’s worth remembering the value of joy, play and simply have fun as a team.

Injecting fun and laughter into your team building event is effective on many levels. We often recommend starting a session with one of these activities, as they can help set a more relaxed and personable tone in an instant.

We’ve also found that some of the more memorable moments of our sessions have come out of these kinds of activities. It’s lovely to have something funny to reference in future meetings too!

Bringing team members out of their shells and loosening them up with a funny game can also help prevent existing hierarchies or team structures from affecting the team building session. 

You can also use these funny team building activities to kick off your session, or when the energy levels drop and you need to get your team re-engaged for the team workshop ahead. Let’s take a look.

Human Knot

Purpose: Enhance teamwork and communication skills, get the group moving
Participants: 7+
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

Human Knot is a fun team building game that encourages your group to loosen up while working together to solve a puzzle that involves their bodies!

Start Human Knot by getting your team members into groups of 7-12 people. Ask each group to stand in a circle, close their eyes and then link hands with two other people in the circle. Next, ask each group to work to untangle the human knot they have created without breaking the chain. This is a really fun game that requires clear communication, collaboration and a little flexibility too!

Complete instructions for Human Knot.

Snowball

Purpose: Knowledge sharing and movement, energizing the group and encouraging playfulness
Participants: 8–50
Activity length: 20–40 minutes

Snowball is a great activity for getting people out of their seats and moving around while also breaking the ice. 

Start by asking a question relevant to your group and ask each participant to write an answer on a piece of paper. Once that’s done, invite everyone to crumple their paper and come to the centre of the room to have a snowball fight! After a few minutes, ask everyone to keep a snowball and find the person who wrote the answer. Not only does this team building exercise invite energy into the room, but it encourages people to get to know each other too.

Complete instructions for Snowball.

Bang

Purpose: Energizing the group, encouraging quick thinking and name recall.
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

Having fun and energizing your team is a great way to kick off your team building event. Bang is a simple and effective game that encourages quick reactions and fun – perfect for both new and established teams to play together! 

Start by electing a sheriff and having the rest of the group stand in a circle around them. The sheriff spins around and points at one person in the circle and says “bang!” That person then crouches as quickly as possible. The two people on either side of the person crouching must quickly point at each other and shout the other’s name. Whoever does not react quickly enough is eliminated. Try using this one at the beginning of a team building event to really loosen up the group!

Complete instructions for Bang.

Build-a-Shake

Purpose: Lighten the mood, encourage creativity and collaboration
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

Creating a secret handshake was something many of us did as kids. This team building activity taps into that same sense of creativity and also encourages team members to get to know each other while sharing and building on their handshake in pairs. By moving between pairs and teaching others the steps of your handshake, this also helps create group closeness and cohesion. We love team building activities or office games that encourage people to bring a little of themselves to the table and Build-a-Shake is a great example of that!  

Complete instructions for Build-a-Shake.

Sync Claps

Purpose: Encourage presence and focus, energize the group
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

This fast-paced exercise is fun but gently challenging game that helps create focus and presence in a group. Get started by getting your team into a circle and ask them to move a clap around the room quickly by having two members clap at the same time.

By asking your group to synchronize and move quickly, sync claps is a fun way to energize the room and help your group feel more connected.

Complete instructions for Sync Claps.

Count Up

Purpose: Enhances group focus and non-verbal communication
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

Simple tasks that require team focus, cohesion, and awareness are great for any group working on team building. In Count Up, a team has to come together and count up to twenty with their eyes closed and without any other communication. People cannot say more than one number at a time, and if two people speak at the same time, the group must start over. 

Count Up is really effective at focusing the attention of the room, and so I like to use it when bringing people back from a break or before moving into a problem solving section of my agenda. 

Complete instructions for Count Up.

Follow the Leader

Purpose: Encourages observation, build group cohesion, laughter!
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 5–20 minutes

Simple activities that focus on creating movement are often the best strategy when trying to loosen up the group. Based on a famous improv activity, Follow the Leader casts one person as the leader and everyone else as a follower. The leader performs a movement that everyone else must follow before swapping roles.

As people start to get synchronized and relaxed, expect to see the group get more daring and find ways to bring their personality to the movements performed. Follow the leader is very easy to teach and is a great way to build connections and build energy for the rest of the session.

Complete instructions for Follow the Leader.

Portrait Gallery

Purpose: Team bonding, collaboration, communication and creativity
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

Creative team building activities are great for breaking the ice or energising a team via play. In Portrait Gallery, you and your team will collaboratively create portraits of everyone in the group and have a fun, electric set of portraits to display afterward.

Start by splitting your group into two teams. Team B will draw portraits of Team A, though every 10-15 seconds, they’ll pass their current drawing to the next person to continue. By the end of this team building game, you’ll have a set of eclectic portraits for everyone in the group and have broken the ice significantly too! 

Complete instructions for Portrait Gallery.

Non-verbal improv

Purpose: Improve group communication skills, build connection with fun, memorable moments
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–20 minutes

Whether you’re working with remote teams or co-located groups, having fun when you get together should never be undervalued. We love simple games that are also ways to begin conversations about how we’d like to work together more effectively.

This improv game is easy to touch and is a great way to build team connections while raising some smiles. Start by preparing some actions on post-it notes, such as drinking a glass of water or eating pasta. Next, invite participants to mime the action without speaking. Include more difficult and amusing scenarios to challenge the group and create some funny opportunities for team connection!

Complete instructions for Non-verbal improv.

Wink Murder

Purpose: Create focus, sharpen observation skills and have fun
Participants: 6+
Activity length: 5–15 minutes

We love team building exercises that include space for friendly competition and laughter. Wink murder is a variation on a classic party game that asks every team member to try and catch the wink assassin, whose job it is to eliminate the other players by winking at them without being caught.

We especially like the fact this game asks team members to think outside of the box and develop a private language playing. Run multiple rounds with extra rules such as adding an accomplice to spice things up and keep players on their toes.

Complete instructions for Wink Murder.

Team building activities for small groups

Team work doesn’t always come naturally, and effective team collaboration needs attention, reflection and work in order to happen. It’s not enough to just assume your team members will be able to work together efficiently: all teams can benefit from a strategic and well-thought approach to how they communicate and collaborate.

Whether you’re having a team away day or using methods expressly designed to improve collaboration and communication in small groups, you’ll find inspiration in the activities here!

These team building games are helpful whether you’re trying to solve miscommunication or collaboration issues, or just want to strengthen your company culture or communication skills in small groups.

Conflict Responses

Purpose: Reflect on past conflicts as a team and develop effective conflict-handling guidelines
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

It’s important to remember that every team is made up of individuals and sometimes, conflicts or disagreements can arise. While its regular working practice to disagree, our responses to conflict and how we deal with them when they arise are in our control and can be improved.

In this exercise, reflect on previous conflicts as a team and collectively create a set of guidelines to use in the future. Resolving issues effectively is a massive part of team collaboration, and by including all team members in this process you can get more meaningful results too.

Complete instructions for Conflict Responses.

Heard, Seen, Respected

Purpose: Building empathy and team connections
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 35–45 minutes

Team empathy is a vital ingredient of good team work though whatever the size of your organization, it can sometimes be difficult to walk in the shoes of others and see things from other perspectives.

Heard, Seen, Respected is a team building activity designed to help participants practice deeper empathy for colleagues and build the kinds of bonds and working practices that can improve team collaboration. By inviting participants to notice patterns in the stories shared and find common takeaways, it’s a great way to get everyone involved on the same page and improve communication skills too.

Complete instructions for Heard, Seen, Respected.

Myers-Briggs Team Reflection

Purpose: Reflect on team dynamics, improve collaboration and mutual understanding.
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

One potential obstacle to effective team collaboration is when members of the group don’t fully understand one another. Team building activities for work that encourage participants to not only try and understand their colleagues but themselves can be especially helpful when helping a team be more cohesive.

In this activity, invite your group to first take a version of the Myers-Briggs personality test. Start by asking each team member to reflect on their own personality type before then moving towards small group discussion. 

When using this activity, it’s important to correctly frame the usage of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework: This can be a useful framework to understand different communication preferences between people, but team members should not be labeled or put into boxes based on their self-reported preferences. 

Complete Instructions for Myers-Briggs Team Reflection.

Life Map

Purpose: Create deeper connections and shared understanding, encourage visual thinking
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

Both groups and individuals go through many twists, turns and changes throughout their life. At its best, team building not only helps create better teams but allows time for reflection and deeper sharing between participants.

With Life Map, encourage your group to draw or create a collage of their life story they can then share with the team. This kind of deeper getting to know your exercise can really help bring a team together and allow for meaningful self-reflection too! 

Complete instructions for Life Map.

Strength Building exercise

Purpose: Celebrating team strengths, boost confidence and create a positive team environment.
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 15+ minutes

Exercises for team building come in many varieties. In this activity, the emphasis is on the team championing one another and increasing confidence, self esteem and mutual trust.

Start by asking team members to share an event where they accomplished something that made them feel good about themselves. The rest of the team chimes in to suggest two to three strengths they must have exhibited in order to achieve the accomplishment. Team collaboration often means helping others on the team achieve their best, and this activity helps the group uplift one another meaningfully and effectively.

Complete instructions for Strength Building exercise.

Strength Envelopes

Purpose: Share positive feedback, enhancing group morale and mutual appreciation.
Participants: 5–40
Activity length: 40–60 minutes

All members of a team have unique strengths, capabilities and working preferences. When working as a group, you can improve engagement and group workflow by having each participant utilize their strengths and do work that interests them the most.

With this team building activity, ask participants to write their name on an envelope and invite other members of their team to spend a few minutes writing down strength statements for that person. Place these in the envelope and pass them along so at the end of the session, each person has a set full of strengths they can use as the basis for reflection. 

Complete instructions for Strength Envelopes.

Team of Two

Purpose: Strengthen one-on-one working relationships, clarify expectations and preferred collaboration styles
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 20+ minutes

Whether you work in a small startup or a multinational organisation, the reality is that a large part of your working day will be spent working in pairs and interacting on a one-to-one basis. Whether in-person, over email or on video chat, finding ways to work together more effectively is vital for effective teams.

Try this team building exercise to help empower your groups toward more effective communication skills and have more meaningful interpersonal relationships at work. As a member of a remote team, I’ve found this method to be personally useful time and time again.

Complete instructions for Team of Two.

What I Need From You (WINFY)

Purpose: Improve collaboration and team communication
Participants: 10+
Activity length: 55–70 minutes

Some of the best team building activities focus on helping your group improve their teamwork skills and communicate and collaborate better as a team. A sometimes overlooked part of working as a team is clearly articulating what you need from other people and knowing how to ask for it.

What I Need From You is a team building method designed to help team members better articulate their core needs and be transparent with the group. This leads to a more cohesive team that works together with integrity and understanding.

Complete instructions for What I Need From You.

Physical team building activities

Teams often come together to solve big problems as a group. Whether in the form of large projects or daily collaboration, improving this skill is something all teams should do – in or out of a conference room!

Improving team work and problem solving skills with a physical game that asks for communication, collaboration and creative thinking is a wonderful way to bring everyone together.

By engaging team members in this way, they not only have fun, but they learn how to work together more effectively and reflect on how they can take that learning back to their day work.

In this section, we’ll look at team building exercises you can use to encourage creative thinking, build problem solving skills and teamwork in an experiential, physical way!

Blind Square – Rope Game

Purpose: Building communication skills, trust and collaboration
Participants: 4–20
Activity length: 40–45 minutes

Nothing energizes a team workshop like a seemingly simple problem that also gets everyone moving and engaged. In this team problem solving game, start by tying a length of rope into a circle and invite the participants to plan how to make the rope into a perfect square while blindfolded.

After planning time, team members is blindfolded and has ten minutes to form a perfect square. By debriefing afterwards, your group will find communication, planning and attention to detail are all important aspects of creative problem solving – all while having fun too!

Complete instructions for Blind Square – Rope game.

Crocodile River

Purpose: Team collaboration and problem-solving
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Crocodile River is a team problem solving exercise that challenges team members to support one another physically as they look to move across a wide outdoor space and reach the finish line together.

By changing the setting and inviting problem solving and strategic thinking to solve a challenge, your group not only stretches their problem solving muscles but also works on team communication, leadership and cooperation. As with any more abstract team building game, be sure to debrief afterward for best results!

Complete instructions for Crocodile River.

Egg Drop

Purpose: Encourage creativity and teamwork with gentle competition included too!
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–20 minutes

Classic team building games like Egg Drop offer tried and tested ways to encourage teams to solve problems together while improving the way they communicate. This game often generates a bunch of laughter and creative thinking too – how can we save this poor egg!

In this team problem solving activity, invite small groups to build a freestanding structure that can support the dropping of an egg from seven feet. Include some caveats and challenges to make it more difficult and encourage an even greater degree of team collaboration. Just make sure you bring a mop for afterwards!

Complete instructions for Egg Drop.

Helium Stick

Purpose: Improving coordination and communication as teams work together to lower a lightweight stick to the ground.
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 5+ minutes

Helium Stick is an example of a simple team building game that does double duty by encouraging fun, physical activity while introducing and exploring some core team building concepts. Ask the group to lower a long pole to the ground while keeping all of their fingers in contact with the pole at all times – more difficult than it first appears!

The magic of this activity is when folks debrief and explore how to solve a problem they’re all involved in solving. It’s a great springboard for future conversations about things in the team which appear simple but can end up being challenging in practice.

Complete instructions for Helium Stick.

Lego Challenge

Purpose: Improve team communication cooperation and explore the impact of assumptions on group dynamics
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Creating something is often the purpose of bringing your team members together. Tap into the engaging process of co-creation and collaboration with this team building game using LEGO.

Building on the concept of LEGO Serious Play, this exercise is a great way of encouraging play, out-of-the-box thinking and creative approaches to existing problems. Additionally, each team member has a secret assignment which increases the challenge and encourages finding inventive ways to cooperate effectively and achieve both personal and team goals. 

Complete instructions for LEGO Challenge.

Marshmallow Challenge with Debriefing 

Purpose: Promote innovation and teamwork while exploring roles within the team.
Participants: 6–100
Activity length: 45–60 minutes

Real-life challenges are often time-sensitive and need to be considered thoughtfully and pragmatically. Team building activities are especially effective when they help create this same sense of urgency in a safe container. Enter Marshmallow Challenge, a hugely popular activity that creates ample opportunity for groups to demonstrate how they work together.

In just eighteen minutes, groups must build the tallest free-standing structure out of materials including: spaghetti, tape, string, and one marshmallow, placing this last item on top. In this version of the team building game, there’s a debriefing section which encourages reflection on the roles of everyone in the team. 

Complete instructions for Marshmallow challenge with debriefing.

Spider Web

Purpose: Build group trust and problem solving skills in a fun outdoor setting.
Participants: 6–20
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

Getting outside and doing fun, physical activity can be a great way to bond teams and mix up a normal working routine. In this team problem solving game, participants are asked to work to make holes in a grid of string and rope that can safely and effectively accommodate everyone in the group getting through at once. Team members are not allowed to touch the string or rope and with diverse groups, the difficulty this presents makes for an interesting problem solving challenge for teams to solve. 

Complete instructions for Spider Web.

Stress Balls

Purpose: Energize the group and explore the importance of good team communication experientially
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–15 minutes

Stress Balls is a fun game to help start exploring team resilience and problem solving under pressure, and it’s easy to run with large groups too! Start by simply passing a single ball around the room before adding more complex rules to help team members learn a valuable lesson about communication and teamwork.

Stress Balls is particularly useful when you want to change up the flow of a session and activate different parts of the brain. Needing to physically coordinate after a long time sitting is a great way to wake people up again!

Complete instructions for Stress Balls.

Scavenger Hunt

Purpose: Encourage cooperation, problem solving and creative thinking in groups
Participants: 5–50
Activity length: 30–45 minutes

Activities that encourage groups to use teamwork and communication to achieve their goals are great ways to build team spirit. A classic scavenger hunt is a wonderful way to bring large groups together and have fun doing something a bit different!

Try office trivia, inside jokes or aspects of your company culture to inform what your teams are gathering: you’ll find it much more effective if it’s tailored to your group. Bonus points if you can mix in activities that speak to the various departments or skillsets in the group during your scavenger hunt!

In the virtual-friendly version below, you’ll also find rules to help you run this activity with a remote team.

Complete instructions for Virtual scavenger hunt.

Team bonding activities

Mutual trust is a vital ingredient for any group of people working together, though it doesn’t always emerge organically. Taking the opportunity to build team bonds and create trust creates benefits for team connection, happiness and your company culture too!

While many of the fun team building activities above will bring your team together in some way, these methods are designed to expressly create better team bonds and build trust.

When working on improving team trust, we recommend being open about the goals of the exercise and encouraging the group to be honest. Being intentional during these activities can really help bring the group together!

Trust Battery

Purpose: Self-reflection, honest discussions and trust building
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 20–40 minutes

Trust Battery is a team building activity designed to help all members of your group reflect on their trust levels and begin the process of building trust with those people whose battery is lower.

Distribute the Trust Battery worksheets and have each person fill in the battery for each other member of the group. Next, ask key questions for folks to individually reflect upon what they might do to raise trust batteries for themselves and others.

If you ask people to share worksheets with others, we’d recommend warming up and establishing group safety first. Trust Battery very effective at encouraging all members of a team to meaningfully reflect and opening up important conversations but it needs that ground work first.

Complete instructions for Trust Battery.

Telling Our Stories

Purpose: Encourage sharing of personal experiences, deepening connections and understanding within the group
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Everyone has a story to tell, though without a framework or guiding principles, surfacing those stories in a way that makes everyone feel safe and heard can be tricky, especially for new teams.

In Telling Our Stories, invite participants to reflect on childhood, young adulthood and today while answering questions on colored post-it notes. By sharing a wider range of experiences than those you might normally bring up in a team meeting, your team can get to know one another meaningfully and build shared trust too. 

It’s worth noting that some peoples life experiences can be challenging for them to revisit and so I’d always recommend giving people an option to opt-out of specific questions and share what feels comfortable to them.

Complete instructions for Telling Our Stories.

Better Connections

Purpose: Show how sharing a little about life outside work builds stronger working relationships
Participants: 2–100 (works best with 10–100)
Activity length: 20–30 minutes

In this Thiagi activity, participants pair up with the person in the room they know least well. Each of them privately rates how connected they feel to their partner on a scale from 1 to 9. Then they take turns spending three minutes describing a family member they’re close to, while the other person listens and asks questions.

Afterwards, everyone rates their connection again. Almost everyone’s score goes up after just six minutes of conversation, and that becomes the starting point for the debrief: why did it go up, and would it have happened if they’d talked about a work problem instead? It’s a powerful way to show a team why getting to know each other as people matters.

Complete instructions for Better Connections.

Feedback: Current Strongest Impression

Purpose: Build trust and openness by creating space for honest, open feedback
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Giving and receiving feedback is a great team building activity that sees benefits long after your session. When we find ways to be more open with one another and say what we really think, the results can be transformative for any group.

This activity is a great one to bring to any event where you want to improve team bonding, as it creates a safe and simple way to start practicing more honest feedback. The next time you think about how to improve the way your team works together, think about whether you have a good feedback culture. The trust that good, open feedback can create is a fundamental part of any high performing team!

Complete instructions for Feedback: Current Strongest Impression.

Trust

Purpose: Develop mutual trust and strengthen team bonds
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 40+ minutes

When a team doesn’t trust one another, the atmosphere and culture of a team suffers. Creating space to align and create a shared understanding of what trust means to your team is a great way to build team bonds and improve the way you all work together.

Start this activity by bringing together a set of trust cards containing characteristics, behaviours, attitudes, habits, values, and beliefs associated with trust in the workplace. Next, ask participants to create their own trust cards and move towards creating three core trust cards for your team.

By co-creating the output together, this team building activity is great for ensuring buy-in and creating long-lasting trust.

Complete instructions for Trust.

Translated Rant

Purpose: Practice deep listening and learn to hear the values behind frustration and conflict
Participants: Any number, in pairs
Activity length: 10–15 minutes

This activity comes from applied improv. In pairs, one person rants for 60 seconds about a pet peeve. Their partner listens for what’s underneath the rant: what this person cares about, what they value and what matters to them. The listener then “translates” the rant back using prompts like “You care about…” and “You value…”, leaving out all the negative content. Then they swap roles.

It’s a fun way into a serious idea: when people are upset, it’s usually because something they care about feels threatened. With an established team, try a “team rant” variation, where people rant about shared frustrations and the group then looks at what those frustrations say about the team’s values.

Complete instructions for Translated Rant.

Team building activities for purpose and alignment

Even the best teams can have differences of opinion and approach. While different viewpoints and perspectives are useful in many situations, it’s also vital that everyone is aligned on team purpose and vision.

Aligning on how the team will work together is an important part of helping the team be happy, productive and pulling in the same direction.

In this section, we’ll look at team work activities to help improve team alignment and get everyone working towards the same purpose. Let’s get started!

Alignment & Autonomy

Purpose: Help a team reflect on, and increase, both its alignment with shared goals and each person’s autonomy
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

This Hyper Island activity is built on Peter Smith’s Alignment & Autonomy model. Before Start by inviting team members to look back over the past three to six months and share moments when they felt highly aligned, highly autonomous, both or neither.

Next, each person reflects on what helps or holds back their alignment and autonomy, then suggests concrete actions for the team to take. Defining those boundaries up front keeps the conversation honest and the actions realistic. If the team doesn’t yet have a clear purpose, run Team Purpose & Culture first.

Complete instructions for Alignment & Autonomy.

Engineering Your Team OS

Purpose: Reflect on group dynamics and improve collaborative processes
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

When seeking to improve teamwork, it can be useful to think of your team as a system with complex, interlocking parts which may need a gradual refresh and redesign. This kind of abstraction can help prevent discussions from becoming too personal or difficult and ensure that your team alignment efforts are a success.

In this activity, your team designs an ideal working system by making aspirational statements and then methodically chooses a single statement to work towards ahead of the next meeting. By making positive changes incrementally, your team can achieve alignment and better working practices in a meaningful and sustainable manner. 

Complete instructions for Engineering Your Team OS.

Generative Relationships STAR

Purpose: Assess team dynamics and explore opportunities for improvement
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 20–25 minutes

Better working relationships start with shared reflection and the discovery and discussion of existing working patterns. This team alignment activity invites participants to assess their team along four vertices: Separateness, Tuning, Action and Reason and jointly shape next steps and future actions.

By including the whole team in the alignment process from start to finish, you can get meaningful buy-in and see real results! We love using this on an online whiteboard too. In any case, it can be interesting to go back to the STAR later and see how things may have changed over time.

Complete instructions for Generative Relationships STAR.

Team Canvas Session

Purpose: Aligns team members on shared goals, roles, and values, enhancing team cohesion and clarity
Participants: 2–8
Activity length: 90–150 minutes

Team alignment isn’t always straightforward. The more large, complex or multi-discipline your team is, the trickier it can be to help the group mesh and understand their roles and responsibilities to the team and each other.

In Team Canvas Session, you and your team create a shared visual resource for understanding and articulating your goals, values and roles of your team. It can be used for general alignment, for onboarding new team members and even for defining the structure and purpose of a brand new team. Simply recreate or download the team canvas and get started today!

Complete instructions for Team Canvas Session.

Team Self Assessment

Purpose: Create an open dialogue on team dynamics and encourage a culture of continuous improvement
Participants: 2–10
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

All groups need to go through a period of reflection and self-assessment in order to grow. But without structure or a guiding framework, these discussions can become bogged down or unproductive. With this reflective team building activity, you can enable a thoughtful and thorough team self-assessment along six guiding dimensions.

Start with individual reflection before bringing everyone back together to debrief and see what you’re aligned on and what needs more work. By then narrowing these down to the most important elements, you can align and enable better co-working practices quickly and efficiently!

Complete instructions for Team Self-Assessment.

Letter from the Future

Purpose: Create momentum for future action, team visioning and strategic planning
Participants: 6–30
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

Without a cohesive shared vision, teams can become unproductive or harbor frustration on team direction. By spending time with visioning activities, you can help everyone push in the same direction while still utilizing their unique talents.

In Letter from the Future, invite your team to imagine all the changes that might impact them in the next 5 years and write a letter back from that point. Ask your team to cover what’s been accomplished in those five years, and what kind of challenges and obstacles were overcome to make this happen.

Complete instructions for Letter from the Future.

Team Purpose & Culture

Purpose: Guide teams in defining their core purpose and cultural values, creating alignment
Participants: 2–10
Activity length: 60–240 minutes

Defining your team’s purpose and culture is an integral part of team building. By clearly articulating why your team exists and how you will all work together to fulfill that purpose, you can align and bring focus to all the work you do. This team values and vision activity aims to create a shared visual resource that your team can refer to in the future.

It also uses wisdom from other successful organizations to help enable meaningful conversation and move from individual purpose statements to a single one for the whole team. If you’re looking for a complete process that can guide your team values and vision efforts, this method from Hyper Island is worth a try!

Complete instructions for Team Purpose & Culture.

How to conduct team building activities

Picking an activity is only half the job. How you set it up, run it and close it decides whether your team walks away more connected or just mildly entertained.

Here’s some thoughts based on our own experience of facilitating that will help you run any team building activities more effectively.

1. Be clear on the purpose of the activity

As a facilitator, it’s your job to set-up the activity in such a way that it helps achieve its purpose, whether that’s loosening people up at the start of a session or opening up a difficulty conversation with levity.

Choosing the activity is part of this, but remembering the purpose frames how you talk about the activity and when you might course correct if the group needs it.

Always keep a hold of the purpose of your activity and facilitate accordingly. For many facilitators, it also helps to briefly tell the group why you’re running an activity. “This is about setting us up for success in the rest of the session” tends to get more buy-in than “lets play a game.”

2. Connection before content

Even with a team that knows each other well, it helps to open with activities that give everyone an opportunity to speak up and connect to other people in the room before jumping into deeper content. This can help create a sense of safety, as well as raising engagement in the room.

At its simplest level, always remember to create a chance for people to talk to one another as people before asking them to solve problems or get into deeper topics.

3. Set ground rules for how you’ll work together

A few simple group agreements, such as “it’s fine to pass” or “treat others with kindness”, can make it safer for everyone in the room to join in, especially in activities that ask for openness. If you have time, it can be useful to invite suggestions from the room or refer to an existing team charter for examples of how the group wants to show up when working together.

4. Keep instructions short and visible

Explain the steps, show an example and then ask “What questions do you have?” before beginning. For longer activities, put the rules on a slide, flipchart or handout that might be on each table in the room. Whatever you’re using, I find it useful to practice telling speaking them aloud using your available materials beforehand, especially if that’s all you’ll have on the day.

I also find that instruction-following abilities can waver during the day, based on energy and how much people have already warmed up.

5. Let people choose their level of involvement

Offer an observer role, a “pass” option or an alternative to physical contact. Psychological safety grows when people have a choice and can opt-out if they need to.

Where possible, it helps to plan ahead by knowing who will be in the room, how much they know each other and planning activities accordingly. Some activities can ask a lot of groups who may have low trust and be less successful as a result.

6. Step back and trust the group

Once an activity is running, resist the urge to jump in and fix things unless folks ask for it or things are completely off the rails. Watch how the team works instead: who leads, who goes quiet, how they decide and how they react when something goes wrong. What you notice will be the best material for your debrief.

Remember that the purpose of most team building activities is to create the conditions for connection, reflection and improved collaboration: not for the activity to perfectly follow instructions.

7. Make sure every voice is heard.

Notice who dominates and who holds back, especially when a manager is in the room. Use pairs, writing time or speaking rounds to bring quieter people in, and consider asking senior people to share last.

Many team building games listed above have this kind of democratic approach built-in, but of course, things can change in the room and this is where your skills as a facilitator can shine.

8. Treat resistance as information

If someone pushes back or switches off, get curious rather than frustrated. They’re often saying something others feel or providing valuable input you can use as a faciliator.

If your session design allows, it can be really helpful to use this as an opportunity to ask the group what they need or name the resistance. In some cases, you may want to check-in with that person quietly when you can and go from there. Making a judgement about what do do next is something that takes practice: it’s often what separates a good facilitator from a great one. See our post on how to improve facilitation skills for more.

There is no single solution to encountering resistance (it may not even be a problem), but the best advice I can give is to be curious and try not to take it personally. If nothing else, that resistance is a vital feedback point for something you might change in the future.

9. Read the room and adapt

Your plan is always starting point. In my experience, its rare that you run a team building activity in isolation and then call it a day. They’re most often part of a workshop, meeting or activity sequence.

Try to pay attention to what’s working, when energy is low or when the group may need a different approach. Often, the decision you make comes back to purpose. What is the aim of the session and does what you’re doing support the group in achieving that aim? Sometimes this means cutting an activity, changing it up or letting an important conversation keep going.

10. Invite group reflection

Reflection is where team building turns into team development. After an activity, try asking the group: What happened? What did you notice? What does this tell us about how we work together? What will we do differently?

Not every activity needs a structured reflection, but encouraging a reflective mindset from the group is helpful in making an activity go deeper than simple entertainment. Often, this is as much about setting intentions at the outset or guiding the group through an example after a particularly insightful exercise.

Designing more effective team building

Creating an effective team building experience means creating a balanced agenda of activities and group discussions while also keeping everything on time.

With SessionLab, you drag, drop and reorder blocks to build your agenda or use the AI assistant to create a first draft that matches your teams standards.

For internal teams, SessionLab is especially effective for scaling how you design and deliver team workshops and training sessions. Create a template library that managers and facilitators across your organization can easily reuse while ensuring session quality stays high.

Explore how teams use SessionLab to collaboratively design effective workshops and meetings or watch this five minute video to see SessionLab in action.

Over to you

Enabling better teamwork and building stronger, more cohesive teams isn’t easy. Whether you’re running a team building day, team workshop, or simply adding some team building activities to your meetings, we hope that some of the methods above can help you and your group come together and do better work. 

Looking for a quick team building activity you can add to any session? Explore our collection of 5-minute team building activities for a set of quick and simple activities you can bring to any meeting.

Got a team workshop to plan? Check out our complete guide to workshop planning to make the process a breeze. Want to start creating your agenda quickly? Use a meeting or workshop template to save time designing or get inspiration.

Which of these team building activities is your favourite? Is there anything missing from the list above? Let us know in the comments! We’d love to hear about how we can all improve our team building efforts.

James Smart Head of Content

James Smart is Head of Content at SessionLab. He’s also a creative facilitator who has run workshops and designed courses for establishments like the National Centre for Writing, UK. He especially enjoys working with young people and empowering others in their creative practice.