6 Team Building Activities for Your Employees

An excellent way to build camaraderie and reduce work-related stress is by building a strong team spirit within your workforce. Thankfully, there are a lot of great team building activities available on the market to suit almost any kind of workforce.

1. Volunteering

An amazing way to build a strong bond between employees is to encourage individuals to volunteer for good causes within the local community.

Specifically, we recommend tackling a project that can use more than a few people and can last longer than a single volunteering effort. Working together towards a noble cause is a sure way to help build camaraderie. Especially as it gives employees a chance to work together in a low stress environment that is inherently rewarding. And there’s certainly no shortage of volunteer work available in your local area.

Typical activities to look for are volunteering in local soup kitchens, delivering gifts to children’s hospitals, and organizing a small team to clean the local parks or beach.

But when it comes to getting employees involved in volunteer work, make sure your managers and board-level employees also join in. Lead by example, and others will surely follow.

There are also other benefits of becoming involved in a volunteer project, such as building your brand within the local community as being trustworthy and wholesome. Volunteer work is, therefore, a great opportunity to bring employees together, give back to the local area and demonstrate your corporate responsibility.

2. Escape Rooms

A recent and incredibly popular trend, escape rooms are the ideal team building activity for many business.

In these, teams of people work together to solve puzzles to escape a room they are locked in before the time runs out. Escape rooms vary in theme and difficulty but are a universally great way to build teams since they require teamwork, logic, leadership skills and patience. Whilst people need to work together in order to escape, businesses can create a sense of competition within the workforce as different teams compete to escape faster than one another from the same room.

3. Sports!

Building a company sports team is the classical, true and tried method of building a sense of camaraderie among employees. With a massive range of sports to choose from that can suit any size or skill of the workforce, sports represent an amazing opportunity.

This method of team building can also foster a friendly rivalry with another company in your local area. Get in contact with other similarly sized companies and find out if they have their own sports teams. But if they don’t, consider creating a tournament between departments within your business.

4. Karaoke Night

If your company’s workforce isn’t physically oriented, but rather musically gifted, then organizing a karaoke night might be the one for you. Karaoke has a universal appeal in that anyone and everyone has a song they love to sing - and it doesn’t matter if they can sing well or not!

Karaoke serves as an excellent way to get employees to break out of their shells and get more comfortable with one another. Just remember to carefully judge your workforce before you commit to organizing a karaoke night. Not all workforces are made equal and extroverted enough to carry a karaoke night beyond the awkward wall of silence at the start.

5. Golf

While we did cover sports in a previous point above, we believe that golf deserves a special mention.

As golf is the universal language of business, it’s the ideal activity for some team building. Due to being an inherently relaxing activity, golf provides plenty of downtime for conversations that aren’t bound by your surroundings. Specifically, it’s much easier to talk and get to know someone on a golf course than in the office.

You also get the opportunity to take in the wonderful surroundings while enjoying each other’s company. So why not pick up a swing machine and get practicing!

6. Painting Classes

Finally, if your workforce is more creatively inclined, painting classes could be the ideal activity. As relaxing as golf, but with the added benefit of being indoors, painting classes are an awesome team building activity.

Local bars and art schools are well known to host laid-back painting classes for large and small groups.

Painting also serves as an excellent activity since employees can open up and step out of their shells in a quieter and more intimate space than a karaoke bar or sports tournament

Final thoughts 

Ultimately, choosing your team building activity shouldn’t be too hard, after all, you should be familiar with your workforce and their interests. Choose what you feel is the most appropriate and get stuck in.

Think of the time you’ll spend together as a business investment that will likely pay itself back quickly when you have a team that works better together and is more productive.

The key to any successful business is to grow in ways that last and building team spirit within your workforce is sure to last a long time.