Energize Your People: 5-Minute Team Building Activities Everyone Will Enjoy

Harmonious, efficient and productive teams are crucial to the success of any business. If your people feel familiar with one another and work well together, you're in a much stronger position to seize exciting opportunities and take on any challenges that come your way.

Therefore, it's important for HR and department heads to think about what they can do to strengthen bonds between co-workers and build high-performing teams.

This doesn't need to be a time-consuming, complicated or expensive endeavor. In fact, there are various five-minute team-building activities that can deliver great results quickly and easily.

1. Paper tower

Office paper is all you need for this activity, which asks teams to build the tallest tower they can in five minutes with a set number of sheets of paper. No tape, glue, paper clips or any other items are allowed, meaning participants have to think about how they can build a tower simply by folding, tearing or manipulating their paper sheets in some way.

As well as being a fun task that gets people working together, the paper tower challenge helps stimulate creativity and imaginative thinking.

2. Movie ball

This is a good option if you want to get people on their feet and have a bit of fun in the office. After all, research has shown that having happy employees can make a big contribution to the success of a business.

Get everyone standing in a circle and ask them to pass a ball to each other. Whoever catches the ball has to say the name of a movie within five seconds. Anyone who can't think of a movie or repeats one that’s already been said is out.

You can adjust this game by changing the subject from movies to bands, sports teams or any other theme you can think of.

3. Who said this?

Get your team together and ask everyone to write down a fact or secret about themselves (one they're happy to share, of course) and put it in a box. The manager then reads them out one by one and the whole team has to match the fact to the person.

This is a great way to strengthen workplace relationships by helping your employees find out new things about each other.

4. Storytelling

If you want to get people together for a bit of creative, team-based fun, consider this game, which sees one person take on the role of storyteller, while two to four others are word givers.

The word givers start the activity by coming up with a title for a story, and the storyteller has to start telling the tale based on whatever ideas come into their head. The word givers then periodically call out random words to steer the story in a different direction. It's a game that encourages all participants to think creatively and always yields entertaining results.

5. Friday questions

This is an extremely simple five-minute team-building activity that can help bring your staff closer together by providing some light-hearted fun on a Friday. All you have to do is set a time for everyone to get together and think about a different question each week.

There are countless questions you could pose, from simple, silly ones like "What's your favorite breakfast food and why?", to deeper considerations such as "If you were in charge of the country, what’s the first change you’d make?".

One of the big benefits of this game is that it's easy for remote workers to participate in.

6. Two truths and a lie

Two truths and a lie is another good way to get people who aren't based in the office involved in team-building activities. This classic game asks each participant to say two things about themselves that are true, and one that's completely made up.

It's a fun and effective method to help employees learn some interesting facts about their coworkers, while taking part in a simple game that strengthens team bonds and brings some humor into the workplace.