10 Effective Team Building Games Your Team Will Appreciate

Product success consists of many components. Each of them, including team building activities, makes the product a step closer to the desired results and leads it forward from competitors.

You can create an excellent product strategy, assemble a powerful management team, find the most suitable product management tool or service or provide a strong technical base. However, all these ways will not bring the result, if you do not have a dedicated, confident and proactive team.

What ways help to make teams stronger and more productive?

You may choose different types of team building activities from physical activities and sports to Intellectual games and challenges or even apply volunteering ideas. In this article, you’ll learn about a simple, but very effective way of team building and collaboration – team building games.

Any strategic team building game is a good way to get your team to collaborate and work together.

Nonformal games and exercises are aimed to achieve these goals faster. However, not every team is comfortable with certain types of activities, so finding the right game can be challenging.

It is important to choose the activity that will be useful, fun and safe doing. Here’re our top-10 team building games for different kinds of companies.

10 effective team building games

Game of possibilities

This activity is a great way to bring out your team’s quick thinking and extreme creativity. All you need is to gather a set of random objects.

You can use any stuff from a tennis ball or candle to your jacket or a plastic bag.

Every person in groups is given an object and must demonstrate the alternative way to use it. The other group must guess what function they are acting out. You’ll see how fun and creative it can be.

Ideas as construction blocks

This simple exercise demonstrates the value of everyone’s ideas. During brainstorming sessions, you can face the vocal and dominant personalities even though other team members have valuable ideas, too. This game allows forcing the ideas to have equal footing and each team member’s ability to contribute is established.

Any product has challenges and barriers. If you can not find it, just create a fictional problem that must be solved. It can be anything that needs a solution.

Gather your team, and ask them to write down their ideas on a large sheet of paper. A sentence or two would be enough.

They need to pass the paper to the person on their left and use the new idea to create another solution. Continue for several rounds, and see what the results are.

Blind drawing

This is a rather popular exercise that focuses on communication. Of course, the result (the final drawing) will not look like the picture. However, the fun game is revealing to participants to see how different the interpretation of instructions can be.

First, you need to divide your team into groups of two. Each participant should sit with the back to the other. One person will have a picture and the other one will have a pen and a sheet of paper.

A person with the picture must not show the other team member the image. After a set time limit, the drawing time ends and both participants view and compare the original picture and the drawing.

Truth and lie

The game is also very easy to implement, it helps to get to know each other better. As we know, extroverts have no difficulties in making themselves known, while introverts often remain an enigma. This team activity gives them equal footing to reveal facts about themselves as well as expose the assumptions. Each participant learns about others and about him/herself through the lies they thought were true.

Ask every team member to write down three truths and one lie on 4 sheets of paper. The lie should be believable.

Then go around the group and have them read the truths and lie in random order. Everyone should discuss what they think are the truths and what are the lies.

Human knot

This fun activity for team building relies heavily on good teamwork and communication.

This simple game will take 15 – 30 minutes. You will need 8 – 20 people for the better result.

Have everyone stand in a circle facing each other. Everyone should put their right hand out and grab a random hand of someone across from them. Next, all participants should put their left hand out and grab another random hand from a different person across the circle.

The group needs to untangle the knot of arms without releasing their hands within a set time limit.

Barter Puzzle

The barter puzzle is a time-consuming exercise, but it accomplishes creative teamwork on several levels. Your team should build the puzzle. As a team, they must find a way to convince the other teams to help them.

You should break the team into groups of equal members and give each a distinctly different puzzle of equal difficulty.

They will have a set amount of time to complete the puzzle. You should explain to them that some of the puzzle pieces belong to the other puzzles in the room.

The goal of every team is to complete the puzzle before the other groups, using different methods of convincing the other teams to relinquish the pieces they need. It can be a barter, exchange of team members, donating time to another team, a merger, and so on.

Problem Family Tree

The activity helps teams to see the real problems they deal with and define what causes them.

Give each participant a piece of paper. They should write down any problem they have at work at the top of the sheet. (It shouldn’t be directed at a specific person).

Then let them write below that two things they think causes that problem. Draw a line from the two ideas up to the main problem, much like a family tree structure.

They will have to break down those two ideas further, two for each, as far as they can go. The idea is to figure out what small things have led to the big things.

The results can be discussed as a group.

Use what you have

This problem-solving activity is good for teams with a strong mix of creativity.  It brings an element of fun with the twist of learning how to solve a problem with reduced options.

You need to group the team into the equal groups. Imagine a project with clear restrictions and goals. Give each team the same supplies to work from and provide a specific time to complete the project, making sure to mention that they can only use what is available.

Organizational Jenga

Organizational Jenga will show how the departments of your company may complete the specific task, and that without everyone in place, things fall apart.

You may use wooden blocks of the Jenga game and mark blocks according to the hierarchies in your company.

For example, you may have such blocks as the IT department, designers, HR block, etc. You have to divide your team into groups, giving them an equal number and kind of blocks.

Specify the type of structure each team must build. Then each team, taking turns, should begin to remove a block at a time without destroying their structure. You’ll see if they find a way to build a structure that can withstand block removal.

Scavenger hunt

This is a fun activity that forces teammates to work together. The game stimulates creativity and thinking process.

You need to divide people into equal groups and send them out with a list of items to locate and bring back.

The key goal here is to get back first with the most items. You can set a time limit. The game can be themed and might involve a variety of clues.

You may also use online tools to make the game digital.

All these team building activities and games are supposed to be enjoyable, fun and somehow educational. They will help your team learn about each other more.  

Hopefully, your team members will appreciate them and will want to play over and over again.