Top tips for effective team-building exercises

Team-building exercises can be the most essential, demanding and exhilarating aspects of a manager’s job. Without a crew, even an experienced and skilled captain can sink his ship.

Time spent building friendships and learning together will improve efficiency and motivation, as well as creating a healthy office atmosphere.

For any project to be successful, you need to get the best out of your team members. Determing the resources required for a project is covered in any project management course, but this article will instead focus in effective team building exercises.

Calling in the experts

Should you commission an events management company to organise your team-building activities?

That depends entirely on the size of the team, the time and budget constraints, and your willingness to invest your own time in the project.

If you do decide to design and manage your own team-building activities, there are several factors that you must take into account:

• Who are the team members?

Different team-building activities will suit different types of people. White-water rafting is not for everybody, and some people simply do not like obstable courses.

Motivation is central to team-building success. Even if you think that your team ought to enjoy a treasure hunt as much as you, the fact that they don’t could destroy your event.

Asking your team what type of exercises they are (and are not) interested in will ensure that hydrophobics are not taken deep-sea-diving and that people with vertigo are kept away from hot-air balloons.

• What are the objectives of the activities?

Obviously, the objective of team-building games is to build teams. However, the type of activities you run are determined by the type of team that you want to build.

Lateral-thinking puzzles and quizzes

- Simple, cheap and effective ways of encouraging a competitive team spirit.

- Success relies on one team member knowing the answer to a question, encouraging the group to celebrate individual achievements.

- All you need are puzzle or quiz ideas, pens and paper, a score-sheet and a packet of chocolate biscuits.

Physical brain-teasers

- Demonstrate ingenuity, a sense of humour, and the ability to pool ideas, assess contributions and reach compromises – in other words, the ability to function as a team.

- Require more organisation than quizzes, but are far more rewarding and can run on few resources.

Ideas

- Building bridges: Divide the group into teams of 4-7 individuals. Give each team a bundle of newspaper, a pair of scissors and a roll of sticking-tape. They have a set amount of time to design and build a bridge that can hold the weight of the heaviest computer manual you can find.

- Egg-drop: Again, divide the group up into teams and give each team a pack of materials. This pack could include cereal boxes, ribbons, crepe paper, cotton wool. The aim is to design a container in which an egg can be safely dropped from the top of the building.

The team must build the container and then present it to the rest of the group, detailing its specific functions and its advantage over other models.

Teams are given separate marks for the name, design, presentation and success of their egg-drop box.

- Stepping Stones: Each team is made up of six members and has seven sheets of paper. The team must arrange the sheets of paper in a row, and each member must stand on one sheet, as illustrated below:

O O O _ O O O

The aim is for the three team-members on the right to swap places with the three team-members on the left.

Only one team-member can move at a time, and nobody can move backwards. Team-members can “leap-frog” over one other team-member at a time.

The team that manages to switch the two groups in the smallest number of moves wins the game.

Workshops

- Present teams with a scenario from which they must develop and present a plan of action.

- These develop similar qualities to those involved in the physical brain-teasers, but with a purpose more familiar to the business environment.

Scenario Types

- “Survival”: The team is on a luxury cruise, but the captain has just announced that the ship is sinking. The team acquire a lifeboat, but must decide what they will take with them. Set the team a series of tasks and scenarios.

For example: building a shelter, finding food, dealing with lions, attracting the attention of an aeroplane, dealing with a broken leg.

- Business plans: Each team must create a project plan that fulfils a specified need.

Popular ideas include enterprise or development projects for underprivileged communities, off-the-wall television programs and crisis management strategies.

Business plan workshops stretch the creative potential of your team, allowing them the space to come up with and express zany, ridiculous and brilliant ideas.

Developing detailed project plans from these offbeat ideas is excellent practice for the workplace, and demonstrates to your team that when they work together they can make even the most impossible project a success.