Working as a team is not just about being productive, it is also about inspiring creativity. Here are five simple games to improve your team's camaraderie.
While teamwork is an important aspect of employee interaction, many companies and employees tend to shy away from team building games and sessions. In this day and age, collaborative games and interactive activities are a great way to get people talking. It helps them approach working together in a more fun way than just sitting at their desk or remote work stations all day.
Teamwork games are a great way for employees to have fun together outside of their day-to-day work tasks. They also allow them to work on their relationships with each other as they compete and collaborate with one another and help with overall employee engagement in the company. These games also help stimulate creativity, open-mindedness, trust, strategic thinking and resourcefulness.
The following team games are some of our favorites.
1. Where are you from?
2. Johari Window
3. Mirroring
4. Jeopardy
5. Move a line, add a line
Read more: Best Drinking Card Games for 2, 3 and 4 Players
Increase a team's inventiveness by generating as many solutions to the visual puzzle as possible by moving or adding a line.
Time: 15 minutes
Tools required: Whiteboard Integrations Like Miro, Mural, Lucidspark on Zoom & Webex
No of participants: <20
Game Description:
This game is a very simple icebreaker for meeting and new hires, It’ll take 2 mins per person and can help with instant team bonding. This game is an extension of Pictionary where users introduce themselves and draw something to represent where they are from. It can be a city, state or a country. For eg: If a member is from France, they can draw the Eiffel tower or something that best represent their culture.
Each participant get two minutes to draw. The team members have to take a guess. The game doesn’t end with winners or losers but with more familiar team members.
TLDR:
People draw where they are from without being explicit. This game is an excellent way for a facilitator to engage people one at a time as they log in to the meeting. Each person who arrives can see information about where the other people are from.
Time: 15 minutes
Tools required: Chrome Browser
No of participants: >2
Game Description:
Johari window was created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955. Johari window focuses on soft skills such as attitude, empathy, and interpersonal development. It's a fantastic model to use because it's simple and can be applied to a variety of scenarios.
Simply send this link with the words to your teammates. A participant selects a set number of adjectives from a list they feel best describe themselves. The participant then selects, from the same set of adjectives, the characteristics that best describe another person. This continues till all the team members have done it for themselves and others. You could also try to do all of this online, compiling the results into an online presentation and spend time analysing the results.
TLDR:
Teammates can benefit from this personality awareness by learning more about how their colleagues perceive them, as well as developing teamwide awareness of strengths and weaknesses. This is an excellent initiative to implement with newly formed teams or as a prelude to learning how to increase team performance by assigning the best roles to members.
Read more: 10 fun Slack games and activities for remote teams
Time: 5-10 minutes
Tools required: Zoom, Webex, MS Teams, etc.
No. of participants: No set number
Game Description:
58 percent of all communication is relayed through the body language, and you can build trust and rapport with others by trying to match and ape another person's gestures. Participants in this exercise will take turns being the leader, and everyone else must match their actions. Everyone will take turns being the leader for one minute at a time. There can be several variations to this game by including dance moves and music to pep it up.
TLDR:
Video matching and mirroring is a long established method of building rapport by having teams mimic the movements and gestures of the manager. This can also assist the team in becoming more cognizant of their video presence.
Time: 30-40 minutes
Tools required: Zoom, Webex, etc.
No of participants: 2 to 4 individuals per team with 5 to 10 teams
Game Description:
Go to this link and select ‘Create a game’. This tool allows you to input up to 25 questions and answers. Follow the instructions and make a 25 Q&A set, connect over video conferencing tool and share screen with the participants and play customised version of jeopardy.
TLDR:
Jeopardy is a fantastic game for testing knowledge and memory recall. This team-building activity is ideal after teaching a section on a particular topic and trying to assess which team can recall the best.
Read more: 13 Fun Question Games to Enjoy With Friends and Coworkers
Time: 15 mins
Tools required: Pen and Paper, Video conferencing tools
No of participants: 2-15
Game Description:
This game is an online version of a classic creative thinking challenge. Each of the challenges has multiple possible solutions. The exercise forces teams to think outside the box and come up with multiple solutions. This is a good way to get people in the right mindset for when they have to deal with a real problem at work.
Read more: 8 Fun Online Zoom Games to Play with your Coworkers
There are many great benefits to implementing a game-based team building activity. It helps companies to improve their internal communication and boost morale. With the help of these games, you should be able to find one that works for your organisation and employees.
However, it is important to remember that games should augment activities like team building rather than replace them. While running a Scavenger Hunt, you might generate a lot of excitement and energy among your employees. However, you still need to address fundamental people related issues like employee retention and engagement if you want to keep them happy. Hopefully, this article motivates you to think outside of the box and come up with new games that your employees will enjoy.
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