Well, my turn is up. Each week, one of our team members is supposed to to a team building or safety exercise that can be done by a team of 8 in on office setting in about 5-10 minutes. Anyone have any ideas?
Previous things have been pick a folded up personal question it and share the answer with the group, or look at a cartoon picture and identify the safety violations. Last time I divided the group up based on our myer-Briggs personality types and had each group do brain teasers, to see if there was a difference in the way the different types approached problems. It wasn’t a hit - most people besides me aren’t fans of brainteasers.
I had an accidentally successful team building exercise once when the facilities guy was out sick and the admins had to put together an office chair. Generally I like physical stuff rather than mental because the high fives are more fun.
Prepare to head out to a bar. Should take 15 minutes in the office to get everyone together. Then celebrate the successful, timely organizing by drinking some beer. Bonus points if you do this Friday at 4:45PM.
8 people, 5-10 minutes. Improv Encyclopedia to the rescue! They even have a whole category of Icebreaker games. You can do a group game or rotate through short solo games. They have active ones, silly ones, gibberish ones, etc.
Pin the tail on the donkey. Bonus points if you can manage to substitute the donkey’s head for the head of the idiot who decided that team building exercises are a good idea. Especially on a Monday morning.
Here’s one that I actually liked, but it was for way more than 8 people, and we needed more like an hour. Maybe you can taylor it to suit your situation.
We were split into teams of 4 or 5. Each team got an empty paper box. Inside was a big sheet of paper (like from those easels), 3 coffee stirrers, a roll of tape, a pair of scissors, and three paper plates. Or something like that. Each team had an hour to build a free-standing tower using nothing but the contents of the box. The box itself couldn’t be used. The team that built the tallest tower won some sort of prize.
I recall seeing where some Japanese firms make their executives strip down to their underwear, and immerse themselves in a local river.
Is this a myth? Sounds starnge to me.
Here’s one that could be fun, but it’s more a party game than team building. It’s called Killer.
Shuffle a number of cards equal to the number of participants, and deal them out. One of them will be the Killer card. It could be the ace of spades, or a joker, or whatever you want. Everyone looks at their card discreetly. Then everyone has to look everyone else in the eyes.
The person with the killer card tries to “kill” people by winking at them. The “victim” has to wait a couple of seconds, then declare “I’m dead” – or better yet, really ham up a death scene.
You can accuse someone of being the killer. That person must reveal his card. If you are right, you win. If you are wrong, you die.
Dead people are out of the game. If the Killer kills everyone, he wins.
Actually, it’s kind of a morbid game. But people really get laughing.
Teaches the importance of nonverbal communication and can stretch out for an hour or be a quick teambuilder in 10-15 minutes.
Have your group pair up. (This takes a bit of advance prep.) Each pair will sit back-to-back and must have a bit of table in front of them. Each person gets a little manilla envelope into which you have placed 5 or 6 oddly shaped pieces of paper. You can use plain old office paper out of the recycling bin or whatever is handy. One person in each partnership is instructed to arrange their “puzzle” pieces in whatever fashion they wish. The assignment is, using only words, the first person must describe to the other person how to make the exact same arrangement of their bits of paper. (Obviously, the shapes are the same for each pair. I made the shapes all the same for everyone, it was just easier that way.) Nobody can turn around and look to check on progress. The first person who made the puzzle arrangement cannot number shapes. After 5-10 minutes, the second person turns around to see how well they did. Switch roles and now the assembler has to be the describer. This tests your descriptive verbal communication skills as well as your listening skills and reminds people how important specificity, clarity, and nonverbal communication is.
When I did this as a team builder, I was the arranger who was to describe to the guy at my back how my pieces were arranged. First question I asked him, “Did you take Geometry in high school?” “Yep!” So I said, “Okay take the perfect cube and set it in front of you. See the obtuse triangle? Place that on top to make a little roof, like a house, with the long side touching the top of the cube.” We used very specific geometry terms so he ended up getting my arrangement perfectly.
This is a fun game but if you have anyone who has a hearing disability or who is completely deaf, they won’t be able to participate, so you can’t do it.
That’s a form of ceremonial purification called misogi harai which is frequently used in Shinto, Japanese Buddhism, and local folk religions. In recent years it’s become a bit trendier since several celebrities have done it for shows. I haven’t heard an explicit story of an office using it as a team-building exercise, but since working as a team to overcome an obstacle and collectively undergoing a common challenge or hardship to build fellowship are fairly common themes in team building here, it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility.
Another one is to find a simple picture (really simple - like shapes, or a kindergarten drawing of a meadow, two trees, a sun, bird and some clouds). Have one person leave the room for just a few minutes, everyone else studies the picture. Bring the person back in and - without saying what it is - try to get them to draw the picture on the whiteboard.
With eight people, you will likely get one person drawing while seven people yell directions…until they figure out that management style doesn’t work.