As a business leader, you want the tightest-knit group of team members possible. Your employees are the backbone of your company’s operations, and their mutual cooperation is required if you’re going to achieve success as a company.
Team-building activities are proven ways to bring your employees closer together, let off some steam, and create some shared fun. Researchers have long studied the benefits of teambuilding on workplace performance. The benefit of team-building is intuitive – we generally thrive in environments where we feel we are an important and valued member of a group working towards a shared goal.
Understanding how to harness this bit of human psychology, the need for cooperative problem-solving environments, can help jumpstart your business into hyperdrive in terms of productivity and employee satisfaction.
Here are some of the best team-building games that you can incorporate into your trainings.
Inflatable Obstacle Courses
Inflatable Obstacle Courses are great for engaging in some healthy competition among the office staff. You can rent an inflatable obstacle course for a small fee. Most rental agencies will even set up the course for you. Obstacle courses, aside from a fun way to compete, can benefit your business by fostering creative thinking among your employees and enhance their problem-solving skills.
Three Truths and a Lie
This is the adult, respectable version of “Truth or Dare”, a favorite game of youths across the nation. To play Three Truths and a Lie, four team members must collaborate to come up with three true statements and one false one, often featuring elaborate stories or hard-to-believe encounters from their past. The goal is the tricksters is to come up with a truth so outrageous that it is impossible to distinguish from the lies, and the rest of the team’s job is to figure out who told the lie. This is a great way to increase your employees’ personal knowledge of each other and share fun stories.
Charades
As an age-old go-to activity for dinner parties and getaways, charades is the game of acting out vocabulary terms without speaking. For example, if the word is “elephant”, the actor might dramatize using the long trunk of an elephant to fish out some bamboo from a tree. The room is divided into two teams, so the first to answer correctly wins a point. Charades can improve communication and impart the importance of nonverbal communication.
These are just a few of the many activities you can incorporate into your team-building program. A little bit of recreation for your employees can go a long way towards building a leaner, more integrated workforce ready to take on the challenges of your business together.