Employee engagement is essential for company culture and employee retention. Team-building activities are all part of a successful employee engagement strategy – but how can you keep your team-building activities fresh and engaging? Everyone is familiar with traditional office events like trivia or happy hours, but as they say variety is the spice of life. Try one of these unique activities that you may have never heard of to keep your employees engaged and interested. Learning new things together is proven to help improve team dynamics like collaboration and communication, and to encourage bonding among groups of people. If you’re interested in planning a unique and exciting team-building event for your organization, read on to hear some tips from our culture and event-planning experts.
1. Ping Pong Tournament: Whether your office boasts a ping-pong table or not, your team will be excited to participate in a professionally facilitated ping pong tournament! Bringing out the competitive edge in your employees is a great way to get them very engaged and create opportunities for the kind of organic cross-team connection that forms the cornerstone of an excellent engagement and culture-building strategy. A ping pong tournament features a strong social component, since ping pong is a social activity that many employees will have participated in. It would be a great option to replace (or compliment) a company happy hour, or a fun activity for a team that has just completed a big project or busy scene and wants to relax and reconnect.
2. Collaborative Murals: Nothing says team building quite like a collaborative art projects. In this facilitated activity, your team can work together on a paint-by-numbers style project (so no need for everyone to be a brilliant artist to participate) that comes together at the end to reveal a surprising and beautiful piece. In addition to being a great team building activity, this event will result in a piece of original artwork, created by your team, to be displayed in your office. Collaborative events like this are great team building exercises because they flex all the muscles a team needs – cooperation, communication, problem solving, and creativity. Having a piece to display at the end means that your team will remember this event for years to come. Mural painting is a great event for welcoming your team back to the office, or to celebrate a specific holiday or cultural event.
3. Robot Battles: If your team loves an intellectual challenge, or if they get excited about science and math then they are sure to be thrilled at the opportunity to participate in a robot battle. In this event, teams of 5 to 10 people will work together to battle each other in robot combat (if you’ve seen the TV show “BattleBots”, this follows a similar format). This event is sure to be unforgettable for any team – while it’s an obvious pick for engineering teams or other STEM-focused groups, with professional facilitation and in-person instruction, anyone can enjoy the highs and lows of an epic robot battle! This event works great as a year-end celebration or celebration of achievement, such as the culmination of an internship program.
4. Laughter Yoga: While yoga has become a fairly common wellness practice for both individuals and organizations working towards goals in the area of health and wellness, laughter yoga might be a new concept, even to experienced yoga practitioners. Laughter Yoga combines the physical practices of yoga, such as guided movement and intentional breathing techniques with chanting, improv exercises, and laughter to help reduce stress and create an instant mood boost to your team members. Along with the noted relaxation and stress-releasing benefits of traditional yoga, laughter is known to lower stress hormones and strengthen the immune system (it is the best medicine, after all!) In addition to these wellness benefits, laughter yoga inspires creativity and positive connections between participants. This event will work great for wellness-focused teams, for organizations looking to develop or build a health and wellness program, or teams who just want to get silly together and have fun!
5. Lego master challenge: The lego master challenge is a very unique event, lead by a lego expert and contestant from Fox’s “Lego Masters” TV show. Participants in this event will use legos and guidance from the expert to construct impressive projects out of everyone’s favorite building blocks. The lego challenge is unique and memorable – how many people can say they got to play with legos at work – but it is also a great teambuilding activity, since participants will work in groups and will need to learn and master new skills and techniques together to accomplish their task. It’s proven that learning a new skill in groups fosters a sense of trust as well as improving collaboration and communication skills, and making people feel closer. So your team members will be improving in a variety of useful ways, while simply having fun building projects out of lego! This is a great event for teams who want to improve communication skills, teams that are growing or newly established, and any teams focused on creative or STEM-based work.
If you are responsible for planning events for your organization, you know just how important it can be to have events that are new to your team. Hosting unique team building events can help create excitement and interest among your employees and improve the overall sense of engagement. Planning unique events can be a challenge, but with some creativity (and a little help from the experts at Garden Streets), you can plan special, successful team building events perfectly suited to your team’s unique needs. Beyond these fun and out-of-the-box examples, there are lots of really exciting and creative new options for team building events and onsite activities. If you’re looking for more options, reach out for a free consultation at Garden Streets.
