Matt Vaadi walks through team-building activities for in-person, remote, or hybrid teams: paper airplane contests, trivia, scavenger hunts, board games, Jackbox, Office Olympics, art lessons, escape rooms, axe throwing, and bowling. He explains how these boost culture, engagement, creativity, and retention.
Let's face it, work's not all sunshine and rainbows. Today I'm gonna share some awesome games you can play with your team to develop collaboration, to have a little bit of fun, and to give you an opportunity to get to know your team on a deeper level. These team building games can be deployed whether in-person, remote, or hybrid. We've got options on here ranging from free to paid and offsite. So stay tuned and I'm gonna walk you through some great options for team building exercises for you and your team to improve your culture, engagement and retention. Thanks for tuning in. All right, so let's walk through some games options. There's a ton of different things you can do. If you search this, you're going to find 500 games. I've narrowed it down to a few that we've done with our team that I found to be really, really fun and engaging. First off, I love an old paper airplane contest. I'm going to put a link in the description to this particular contest. So it's very simple. You partner up, you create and then have a contest of throwing a paper airplane with a couple of things that they can use: a piece of tape, a paperclip, and a piece of paper. And just watching how everyone comes together. I've deployed this across dozens of clients, have been on site when they've done it. People get competitive, they have a ton of fun, and it's just a unique opportunity to hang with your team and get some great quality time in. Paper airplane contest is highly recommended. Next up, we look at movie quote or even just general trivia. If you do a quick Google search, you can find online trivia tools for free, or you can do trivia with your team. Simply take 30 minutes, do a Zoom call, do it in person, do trivia, grade folks, and have a prize for the winner. And just watch your team start to share some of their random knowledge that they've accumulated over the years, that we all have that treasure trove of useless facts and statistics stored away that you'll start to learn about out once you do some team trivia. Next up, a great idea is a scavenger hunt. So you could create a scavenger hunt. We do an employee onboarding scavenger hunt that you can check out on our website, or if you just search that term, it should pop right up on the first page of Google. Or you can do a scavenger hunt in your city. So if you Google your city like I do, Columbia, South Carolina scavenger hunt, you'll be surprised by the number of folks that have already put together scavenger hunts some free, some paid that you can use to help your team to have a great time for a day or a half day tooling around the city and having some fun. Next up, very easy to deploy board games. So bringing in a board game to play in the conference room or using an online version of a board game like a Jackbox Games, which is a series of online games you can play as a team, is a great way to get people engaged. And as you know, these games can be as simple as one-on-one or all the way through to 5, 10, 15 people. And they provide a great opportunity for folks to have a little bit of fun, blow off some steam together as a team. Next up, the virtual Office Olympics made famous by the show The Office. Having a multi-day Office Olympics celebration can be just the type of fun people need to get excited and come up with great ideas along there with a quick Google search to help you to expand and grow on the Office Olympics or just go rewatch watch that episode because it's a classic episode of The Office. Next up, online art lessons. So this one's fun. We've done this once before. We gave everybody a YouTube art lesson. We did a duck because one of our core values, we talk about simplifying things for our clients. We want them to see the duck above the water, not the duck below the water where the feet are paddling like heck. We want them to see the calm, cool demeanor and know that we've taken care of everything for them. So we had our team draw ducks and then we got on a Zoom and shared them after the fact. And it was a ton of fun to see. Some people were wildly more artistic than we thought, others not so much. All in all, we had a bunch of great laughs looking at each other's ducks and checking them out. And it boosts your creativity and your brainpower by just taking that little creative break as well. Finally, a great option is an escape room. You can go visit a local escape room. There's one in every city now. It's a great way to get out of the office and go together as a team. Enjoy an adult beverage, whatever you want to do, have some fun. You can also do another great thing that people have been doing lately. We haven't done this as a team, but the axe throwing is very popular right now as well. So go out, have a great time, do it in the evening, and really just give folks away. I would add bowling, arcades, you know, the Dave Buster's type thing into that mix. We've got a little place right up the road we go to called Stars and Strikes. Team loves it. There's bowling and arcade. We can get a package where we can get both a ticket to the arcade and a few rounds of bowling for one price, along with some food and drinks. Everybody always has a blast and we get to know each other with that great time where we just kind of let our hair down. No pun intended. I hope some of these games are helpful to you and your team. I can't overemphasize how beneficial it is to spend this time together and to just get to know each other on a little bit deeper level outside of work. While also having some fun. It'll boost your creativity, it'll boost your engagement, and ultimately will boost the retention of your team. And that's the most important thing, is to take care of our number one asset and make sure they keep coming back in that door every morning because they want to be here and they want to fulfill our mission. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. Please make sure you subscribe and let me know other topics you'd like to see in the comments so we can help you to improve your culture and create the type of place that people come and want to work every day. Thanks.
