Fun & Easy Team Building Activities in the Office

Building a sense of cooperative team spirit within a work force can increase productivity and result in employees who are more efficient and motivated. Many companies do not have budgets for expensive corporate retreats to build morale and cannot afford to send their employees to remote team-building seminars. Several team building activities exist that teach useful skills in a fun manner and can be easily enjoyed right in the office.

"Get to Know Me" is an ice breaker, a simple game aimed at easing a group into team building and loosening them up. Split the group into partners and give them 10 minutes to talk to each other, each member in the pair gets 5 minutes. Hand them cards with questions such as "What is your proudest professional moment?" or "What is something you would like to yet accomplish in your career?" Each person answers the questions while their partner listens. Then each person shares his partner's answers with the group, providing some insight into each person.

"The Parlor Game" requires a towel and around 30 items small enough to fit beneath it. Allow the entire group to study the items for a determined amount of time. Then cover the items and have everyone individually write down as many items as they can remember. Split the group into smaller groups and have them compare lists to see how many they got right and help each other where they missed items. Allow each small group to read off a certain number of items while working together to try to re-create the whole list.

Let the whole staff in on the fun of creating a team-building game, making it more exciting for everyone. Have employees come up with trivia questions about the company: its history, founders, products, sales numbers and so on. Instruct them to email their questions and the proper answer to a central game organizer. Compile all of the trivia questions and let the staff play a tailor-made company trivia game in teams. Employees will have fun hearing their own questions and working together answering questions, while learning more about their company.

LEGO Racers is a group activity that mixes creativity with critical thinking and fun action. Break the group into smaller groups and provide each with a pile of plastic LEGO building blocks and four LEGO wheels. Give them a specified amount of time to create a LEGO soap box derby-style racing car. Instruct each team to not only build the racer, but to create a nickname for the car, a racing team name and a fictional mascot. Allow each team to line up their racers on a starting line and race them down a makeshift ramp.