7 Team Building Exercises to Engage Your Employees

These Activities Will Help Your Employees' Sense of Teamwork

Looking for team building exercises that will help you make your team building work more effectively? These team building exercises and ice breakers will engage your participants, reinforce your learning concepts, and build the cohesiveness of your team. Use these seven team building exercises to ensure your team's success.

Keys to Team Building Success

Team Building Exercises Engage Employees
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If you want to make your next team building exercise live up to its true potential, you'll want to integrate the team building activities with real-time work goals.

Before you take employees on a team building adventure, you'll want to establish a process for follow-up and workplace integration of the results culled from the team building effort. You need to make the good feelings and positive results last when employees are back on the job.

How to Create Team Norms

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The members of every team and workgroup develop a particular way of interacting with each other over time. This way of interacting is known as team norms.

Effective interpersonal communication among team members and successful communication with managers and coworkers who are external to the team are two critical components of how a team can function well.

You should never leave team interaction to chance because of the impact of these interactions on team success, You need to form team relationship guidelines or team norms early in the game to ensure that your teams are successful. Learn about team norms and the team-building exercise that will create them.

Step-by-Step to Adopt Group Guidelines

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Teams Interact Most Effectively When They Have Developed Group Norms. Cultura RM/Leonora/Collection Mix: Subjects/Getty Images

It's important to adopt communication, interpersonal interaction, and team management guidelines for your team. These implementations will help your team perform more effectively.

Here are step-by-step instructions that will enable your team to adopt team guidelines or norms—with or without a facilitator.

Three Shining Work Moments

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If you are you looking for a winning team building idea that you can use for meetings, training classes, team building sessions, and company events, you should consider the "three shining work moments" team building exercise. This exercise makes group cohesiveness and cooperation a natural extension of sharing during team building sessions. Using this exercise will allow your participants to learn to know and appreciate each others' strengths.

Sharing Management Wisdom

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This simple team-building exercise creates excitement during a regularly scheduled team building or training session. The exercise allows your participants to share their accumulated knowledge and wisdom with the other participants.

During this exercise, the facilitator steps aside and the participants take center stage with their knowledge and expertise.

Your Personal Best

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This exercise takes the team through the process of each team member sharing their personal best moments with the other members of the team. Then, team members share their reactions to hearing the stories of their coworkers. This not only fosters respect among co-workers but boosts the self-esteem of each team member.

Start Out With an Icebreaker

Men use radio controlled cars for team building
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An icebreaker is an activity, game, or event that is used to welcome and warm up the conversation among participants in a meeting, training class, team building session, or another group event. Any event that requires people to comfortably interact with each other and a facilitator is an opportunity to use an icebreaker.

If you use an icebreaker the next time you organize a team building activity, you'll see just how much this simple activity can help participants open up.

The more you facilitate team building activities with your employees and coworkers, the more comfortable you will become leading and organizing sessions for success.

Your employees will appreciate the spirit of camaraderie that results from sharing information with other team members. They will understand each other's strengths and weaknesses—but not get so personal that they experience discomfort.