What is the best team building task you have done?
Posted by kuddlekup@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 72 comments
I'm running a team event next week, criteria is that it must be inside, for about 8 people and not cost too much to do (I need to buy any materials), thinking about some kind of "making" task - like longer bridge out of spaghetti, that sort of thing. Would love ideas, things that worked well?
EugeneHartke@reddit
After reading your comments.
You've got 8 people for one hour in a meeting room in the office and budget of £5 per person.
This is a team demoralising exercise.
Just don't it; everyone will hate it.
Puzzleheaded_Drink76@reddit
Do a quiz, play a game, have some lunch. It's fine!
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
That's a very pessimistic view.
EugeneHartke@reddit
Okay. Everyone will feel undervalued by it for obvious reasons.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
They all have the option to participate or not, no one is being held hostage.
Fwoggie2@reddit
"pub quiz" night with custom rounds designed to improve people's knowledge of one another. Divide the group into two teams to encourage collaboration. Ask questions such as who has visited the most countries or whose first car was a fiesta. It helps people find out fun harmless facts about one another in a safe way.
Build a tower from spaghetti that can support a marshmallow. Two teams again. All you need is some marshmallows, lots of dried spaghetti, two rolls of masking tape plus some string. It helps the teams gel and deal with disappointment when their tower inevitably collapses.
Buy an escape room game and get everyone to collaborate. These require multiple skill sets so everyone gets to shine. Look at Exit: the game or Unlock! Usually they are around £15
Puzzleheaded_Drink76@reddit
Add a quiz round on things about the company/office. How many loo rolls did we buy last year? What's the CEO's dog called?
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
I'm think the spaghetti / jelly baby / egg tower is a winner - I may even boil the eggs!
AHKieran@reddit
Print and Play 'Blood on the Clocktower'.
insertitherenow@reddit
Paintball
terryjuicelawson@reddit
The best ones are just put us in a room with food and especially drinks. It is natural then. The worst are where they deliberately mix up teams to get to know each other, forced fun, challenges etc. I only ever recall wishing they would just end.
ambadawn@reddit
Went to Brussels and brewed put own beer, whilst having an open bar to drink as many of the breweries beers as we wanted. Followed by a dinner. Then collecting the beer some months later and having a bbq while drinking it.
davis10runner@reddit
get a few cheap puzzles and split into teams. first team to complete wins. make the focus of the exercise on communication and how the strategize to work as a team. the twist: swap 1 piece from every puzzle (addresses cross team collaboration too)
helpnxt@reddit
Drinking
mattjimf@reddit
Find two Nintendo switches with Mario kart and 8 controllers (see if any colleagues have one), have a tournament, use the cash to buy some prizes.
Fq_Psyc@reddit
Introverts worst nightmare
Queeflet@reddit
I’m not even an introvert and I hate team building, instead of sitting there quietly and hating it, I’ll be very vocal about it. Unproductive nonsense that makes senior managers feel good about themselves.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
Yep - although there is a choice, someone else is running the outdoors activity and the indoor contingent are mainly my own team so we all know each other well, the third option is not doing anything - no one is being held hostage ......ooohhhh escape room could be fun!
Timely_Egg_6827@reddit
During covid, we did an online escape room with chocolates to be sent out to members of winning team. That was teams of 6-8. You just need a computer or two to huddle around. https://thepanicroomonline.net/collections/online-escape-rooms
Mu99az@reddit
Not what you’re looking for, but the best one I was ever sent on was to live with some hippies for a week building yurts and drinking cider round the camp fire every night. Learning about leadership apparently.
tykeoldboy@reddit
I once had an evening karting which was a team building event. Great fun
TheWarmestHugz@reddit
In college we all got put into small groups from our class, all people we don’t usually work with. We had a Dragon’s Den type challenge to design a new product for a charity, the winner had their item turned into an actual product for the charity.
Our group ended up coming second out of the whole college. We worked out exact costs for making the product vs how much they could realistically sell it for.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
Sounds fun, but probably a bit out of our reach.
TheWarmestHugz@reddit
Could always do the old fashioned “stick a piece of paper to everyone’s forehead and they have to ask questions to each other to work out who’s who.”
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
Possibility
WhyN0tToast@reddit
Best one was a boot camp, did 2 days with 2 ex squadies who were surprisingly tame. It was a combination of exercises and then problem solving tasks.
It was good because it wasn't just 'sit down and do this task' or the whole forced fun ordeal.
So I would recommend something to get peoples blood pumping.
Lazy-University-4839@reddit
I suspect no one in your team wants to do any shite team building task
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
That's why I'm seeking non shite options.
lost-in-midgard@reddit
Go Ape.
But that's not £40 for a group of 8, so I'd suggest a quiz, Mario Kart tournament if you have a projector and someone has a suitable Nintendo, or a murder mystery night (people bring/improvise their own costumes).
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
That's not a bad idea - wonder if I can connect the Switch to the massive screens we have.
Junior_Tradition7958@reddit
None. Absolutely hate forced fun.
iamparky@reddit
Try doing a script read-through?
Find a fun script that you think everyone will like from the BBC script library, or buy a bunch of copies of the Harry Potter play script, or find something else light-hearted.
Give everyone a part and start reading it/acting it as a group. Every so often pause and reassign characters so that nobody ends up just playing a bit part all the time.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
Thanks, never seen anything done like this before - a good comedy may work really well for my team.
WinkyNurdo@reddit
Pub.
cloudstrifeuk@reddit
Where are you based? What's your budget?
If I am forced to do team building - feed me, supply drinks and don't make me do forced fun.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
The base will be within our office, I have access to two large rooms (sit about 20 people), so fairly big. Won't be able to do anything that would leave too much mess. Budget is around £30-40 - and we have about an hour to do it in.
Lunch is provided - I agree people should be fed on days like this.
cloudstrifeuk@reddit
I like my team, but I'd much prefer the free time off.
I'd soon remember a boss saying "fuck this, go enjoy yourselves" than sat in an office building paper towers.
NotoriousP_U_G@reddit
Is that 30-40 per person? Or 30-40 for 8 people, meaning £3.57 - £5 per person?
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
In total
NotoriousP_U_G@reddit
In that case, save your money and do something such as a quiz, a version of the traitors, a puzzle based task
Suspicious_Banana255@reddit
Our team did traitors and everyone seemed to enjoy it, so much so that it was requested and done again at the next team building thing. You could use the money as a prize, perhaps with a small token for everyone else, just a chocolate bar or something.
Iwantedalbino@reddit
The task master book would work well for this.
hidingbehindyoursofa@reddit
Spaghetti, marshmallows and sellotape structure building 👷♀️ is good fun
Odd-Loan-5704@reddit
A straight forward quiz using something like Kahoot. You 'host' the quiz on your laptop, and they join via their mobiles. It's clean, gets people engaging with each other without going too far out their comfort zone.
Avoid anything that involves role play unless your working in a drama studio.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
Good idea on how to do a quiz - we usually don't do it with tech so this may be a nice option, thank you
Special_Artichoke@reddit
Make questions about the colleagues. Could get them to submit facts anonymously, so it's like who got fired from their waitressing job, who was student council president or whatever. Cos then when people are wrong it's still fun! Oh I can't believe you thought I would ever be fired, etc. I don't care when the battle of Trafalgar was... Also have rounds where you make things, like paper airplane competition.
gummibear853@reddit
Challenges based on the TV show Taskmaster
Timely_Egg_6827@reddit
Best one was probably painting - split into 2 team of about 4 and given canvas and acrylic paints. The leader has a painting which each team has to copy but only one person per team is allowed to see it. They then have to go back and describe it to rest of team to draw. It's got a clear outcome and purpose of thinking about communication styles and it gives something funny to hang on the office wall later.
The second best one was making a TikTok advert on a work theme. Given access to a editing tool, each team were given a different topic. Also done similar concept but making a AI poster.
The sphagetti and egg-tossing ones don't really work - we have people who can do it in their sleep as done so often.
We have done ax throwing at the after event do - main problem is it is a lot of sitting around and not everyone wants to join in.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
Thank you for these ideas, I like the idea of painting, but maybe with crayons.
Timely_Egg_6827@reddit
You get acrylic paint pens. Where I work did a big chance of focus when they surveyed the staff and it was basically don't treat us like five year olds. Crayons risk that perception depending on how bolshie your staff is. We tend to have multiple a year so resigned to our fates and don't want the poor suckers who have been left organising it to get upset so generally try and get into the spirit, Also a senior manager had the rule if you complained too much, you had to arrange the next one.
ExhaustedSquad@reddit
I did a Lego challenge last year. I built my own random models of houses and buildings took loads of pictures broke them down and put them in plastic bags with some random extra bricks. Teams then had to recreate them. But only one person could look at the picture ( architect) who could then tell the project manager the design ideas and scope, who could then tell the builder what to build, they were the only person who could actually touch the bricks. Then randomly half way through the challenge I threw in a required change for each building.
We have also run taskmaster challenges themed around our industry. We also run a testing lab in our business so we challenged all the non lab staff to follow an SOP that had missing instructions to perform an analysis it was super chaotic and very funny
mralistair@reddit
went to the pub
Signal-Ad2674@reddit
Do something utterly revolutionary. Give your team meaningful work, be clear about their objective, the timescales to execute and set your behavioural expectations. Then give them a clear organisational structure to work within, and then provide the space, autonomy and freedom to deliver.
Thats the only way to build a team.
Everything else is corporate bs to fill pages in HR monthly jazz rags.
Cariad_rae@reddit
We played the traitors at a team dinner once, it was really fun. There's another similar game called assassin, it can be played in a night or over a longer period. My sister won best kill as she called her targets wife and found out where he was on the weekend!
Comcernedthrowaway@reddit
Chopsticks and m&ms Give each team a pile of m&ms, a pair of chopsticks each(the type you get in restaurants that are stuck together) and tell them to move the sweets as a team. Whoever is fastest wins.
Hulls hoop. Teams must pass a hula hoop over their heads and down to their feet (or vice versa). The first team where every player has passed their entire body through the hoop completely wins. The group record in our session was 6.4 seconds. Give 15 minutes to discuss tactics and practice then have the teams take turns to complete the challenge, each team has 2 chances to beat their opponents times.
TommyCheckers976@reddit
Post-work drinks always worked. Group activities and team building events were always seen as very cringey where I used to work and nobody wanted to to them
sharkkallis@reddit
Three bottles of vodka and a Twister board.
The_Geralt_Of_Trivia@reddit
Drinks and food. That's it. If it's outside, then that's great too.
Apart from that, I found escape rooms to be really bonding, if you've had a few drinks first.
I think there's a theme...
Agitated_Parsnip_178@reddit
Spaghetti and marshmallows and an egg. Lots of nice food, not overpriced Dominos crap.
Hogmaloo25@reddit
Two small teams, each team build a small lego set.
Everyone stands in a line, Balloon between the knees passed through until it reaches the last person in the line.
moreglumthanplum@reddit
If you want to keep it cheap, simple and indoors, then spaghetti and jelly baby tower building is an easy win
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
I like this, thank you
TwoPlyDreams@reddit
Tallest paper (only) tower.
Decide who to sacrifice and push out the bunker in a post apocalyptic world.
They were both fun.
No-Salt6819@reddit
I like escape rooms, or similar problem solving tasks. You can find loads online or buy physical escape puzzles, two teams of four could race each other.
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
Thank you
jcollywobble@reddit
Going to the pub
kuddlekup@reddit (OP)
That's the 4 pm slot!
Chocolategirl1234@reddit
Escape room
rewindanddeny@reddit
Russian roulette is always a team-building hit.
The_Pink_Hardcase@reddit
Best team building task I ever did was quitting. Hate that drivel.
Sir_Colby_Tit@reddit
Axe throwing
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