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It can be hard to come up with new team building ideas for work. A quick Google search will likely turn up the same tired list of things that you’ve seen or done in the past. If you’re looking for some new team bonding ideas that can bring a group of people together, you’ve come to the right place.
No boring ice breakers here, these team building event ideas will bring your team members together, and help them improve their teamwork and communication skills.
Hosting a murder mystery is one of the hottest team building events on the market. This idea is so versatile because it can be tailored to your office size and can work in any venue. Hiring a trusted name like The Murder Mystery Company to handle your event will involve bringing in actors who will guide the mystery as well as provide light costuming and show materials. Someone will die, in a comical way, and it will be up to everyone to deduce who dunnit! We even offer Zoom murder mystery parties that are great for virtual team building and even make an excellent virtual office Christmas party idea. A murder mystery allows teams to flex their professional skills while having fun. Finding clues and piecing together the mystery is merely the guise under which this will be accomplished.
Find the person in your office that has a lot of swords. There’s always someone who has them. Under the safe watch of an HR manager, provide a quick tutorial on how to properly hold and swing the weapon. Then it’s sword time! Hit water bottles atop a wooden structure in the parking lot. Have someone record slow motion videos of the epic slashes and watch the water droplets fly everywhere. It’s fun and reinforces your team’s medieval sense of camaraderie and chaos!
For this activity, you will need a Jenga set. Larger blocks help for writing surface area! This activity operates like an icebreaker. Test your team’s limits by writing fun dares that can be done around the office. Examples would be doing fifteen jumping jacks, trying the hottest sauce in the office fridge, or singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” to their manager. Write these ideas down on the blocks themselves, then stack them up in usual Jenga style. When your team pulls a brick out, they must perform the dare written on it! When the tower comes tumbling down, you could even have one extra day-long dare (such as wearing a silly hat) for the person who caused it to fall! This is a humorous way of bonding your team and helping them loosen up around each other.
Will it be a delicious dessert, or a complete disaster?! The outcome isn’t as important as the creative fun had in this activity. A culinary team-building activity will involve dividing your office into smaller teams. Pick a food category, such a pasta or tacos, and challenge everyone to cook up something yummy. If you’d like, you can add a devilish twist like they do on Chopped and Cutthroat Kitchen, and require them to use a strange ingredient or cook with their non-dominant hand.
All you need for this activity is some art supplies and canvas/tarp. Have your team create their own personal masterpiece. You can put them all together and even use it to decorate a wall, or put them throughout the office. No judgement needed on what is the “best” art! This will help the office feel more like home and give coworkers a chance to mingle and compliment each other on their mural!
Take a little time to write 25-20 trivia questions about your workplace. This is an easy and interesting team building game. Test your team’s knowledge about random things about your company. “How many people work in marketing?” “What color are the walls in the CEO’s office?” “What is the most commonly ordered-in restaurant in the office?” “Who is the youngest in the office?” See who has been paying attention to their surroundings!
This game is truly a classic. If you have new hires you are trying to get integrated into the department, this is a quickie that will teach everyone something new about each other! Get your group into a circle and ask them to introduce themselves. They also should say three things about themselves, with only two of the statements being true. It’s up to the rest of the group to guess which statement is a lie.
Playing co-op games online, like Call of Duty, isn’t something you only see on The Office, it is something that real offices do for a little virtual team bonding. A fantasy based MMORPG like Minecraft is an example of one of these! Players must work together to complete quests. The strategy based gameplay will translate into real life creative thinking when it comes to overcoming challenges.
Sometimes people live in a city for years without doing the most common tourist trips! From a cheesy ghost tour, a well known art museum, or an infamous landmark, chances are your town has some funny or interesting tourist traps. Have a laugh with your group and see if there’s anything new to learn about the area!
An exercise based team building activity can seem daunting for some, but a trampoline park is a light, fun way to incorporate moving around into your bonding outing. It’ll be a nice stress release to bounce around and be silly with your team. A lot of cities have a park, like Airtime, that is set up for trampoline activities.
Taking time out of your week to help someone in need is one of the most fulfilling parts of being a human being. Help nurture this sense of compassion and servitude in your employees by making it a team bonding outing. Visiting a children’s hospital during the holiday, passing out food at the local homeless shelter, or working on a new home through Habitat for Humanity are all valid, wonderful ways to contribute to the community. You may also consider encouraging your office to use their professional skill sets to help charities. Examples of this would include maintaining a website for a non-profit or writing a news article for them. VolunteerMatch.org and Catchafire.org for are both great resources to discover volunteering opportunities.
Allow your team to get a little messy with this fun outdoors game! Leaky Pipe helps groups learn to work quickly and efficiently together to prevent the “pipe” from leaking! Materials you’ll need include water, pipes with drilled holes, two ping pong balls, buckets, and cups. The goal of the game is to get a ping pong ball reach the top of the pipe by filling it with water and getting it to float to the top. The teams will need to work together to retrieve water from the buckets using the cups, relay race style. They will also need to multitask and plug the holes as the water drains and the balls float closer to the top. Start the countdown! Fastest team to get their ping pong ball to the top wins.
A group truly bonds when it’s in a competitive environment. Race to the finish in this fun work outing that barely feels like a team building activity! Wait, why is this on the list as an option again? Just kidding! The opportunity to interact with each other in this adrenaline pumping environment will surely have a positive effect in the office.
