Need an idea for a simple 5 minute "team building exercise"

Here’s the deal.

At the company where I work, we have a regular Tuesday morning team meeting. My “team” is spread across 4 different geographic locations, so each section of the team “dials in” to the meeting from their location. Each location also has a projector for screen sharing, allowing all members of the team to look at the same screen.

The boss has introduced a new policy, where he no longer hosts the team meeting. Instead, team members alternate hosting.

No problem, except there’s a catch: The host needs to conclude every meeting with a 5 minute “team building exercise”.

I’m up as host in a week and a half’s time, and I am not sure what to do for the exercise. The challenge is of course to come up with something that involves everyone to some degree, including some people who can only hear you, and see a screen share.

Here’s what some previous hosts have done:

  • Trivia: 10 questions, boys vs girls, buzzing in with our first names, points awarded to our gender’s “team”.
  • Look-a-likes. Images of famous people transposed alongside team members, whom the host thought looked similar.
  • A riddle.

I’m a bit lost for ideas. A good riddle may do the trick, but it would nice to come up with something original. We also have a large team, so I can offer up some of the ideas to my colleagues when it’s their turn as well.

Thanks.

We do something we call “Two Lies and a Truth.” We put 3 “facts” about a person on the team up on screen (usually with funny pictures.) One is true, the others are fabricated (but usually contain a grain of truth…) Everyone else has to guess which one is correct. You find out something interesting about your teammates and usually laugh too.

favourite songs? get everyone to submit a couple of favourites and either play them (if you can) or just read out and see which team is better at matching songs to people

Sounds a lot like “icebreaker” routines that they make me do when doing student teaching/mentoring workshops. A few that were less torturous than the others:

  • give every team an identical list of weird/odd items (such as: empty oatmeal canister, roll of aluminum foil, pack of Fruit Stripe gum, and a toothpick) and give them five minutes to devise an escape/survival technique on a deserted island. The more elaborate and/or ludicrous the answer, the better.

  • what famous person from history would you like to meet, and why?

  • rebuses or other visual puzzles; give everyone a set of some kind of visual puzzle to “decode” and allow teams to work on them as a unit to figure them out.

  • what do these people have in common? Give everyone a list of 3 or 5 really disparate folks; tyrants, heroes, inventors, scientists, politicians, fictional people. Mix the genders, mix the professions, etc. People will labor hard to find commonalities… Frieda Kahlo, Hitler, and Disney… uhh… they all had facial hair! Lindbergh, Julius Caesar, and Wilma Flintstone? They’ve all been characters in movies! At the end, you can reveal the glurgy-yet-team-building-friendly message that the exercise demonstrates that everyone has something in common, despite how dissimilar they all are.

Scavenger Hunt. Abbreviated version.

I’d be willing to bet that your team would feel a lot better if you gave them 5 minutes to themselves instead.

I’m not threadshitting, I’m just 100% convinced than no one likes these so-called team building exercises.

Maybe find a funny 5 minute comedy routine on YouTube and play that.

If your team doesn’t mind touching, there is the game where you stand in a circle and take in your hands the hands of two people not next to you. Then you “untangle”

There is one with small packs of M&Ms. Everyone tears a very small hole in the package of m&ms - small enough to get an m&m out, but without peeking. Sqeeze an m&m out. Depending on what color they get, they tell (and you can change these if you don’t like them):

Red candy: favorite hobbies

Green candy: favorite foods

Yellow candy: favorite movies

Orange candy: favorite places to travel

Brown candy: most memorable or embarrassing moments

Blue candy: wild cards (they can share anyone they choose)

How about the lazy boss attend the meeting so he knows what his people are doing and spend 5 minutes signing bonus checks? :mad:

Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!

Technically, it only lasts four minutes, but after the first three drinks, who’s counting?

Five-minute group hug?

This. The only people who like team building exercises are generally the management who don’t have to endure them.

The only good thing I can say about this particular exercise is that it’s so short.

Here, here’s a suggestion: as your exercise, take an anonymous vote as to whether to include a team building exercise, or leave 5 minutes early, in the future.

Amen!

And what Lynn Bodoni wrote.

Yeah I would adopt the answers of Leaffan and Lynn Bodoni.

Do a little one minute rant about what a load of crap team building exercises are. Then get the team to discuss how badly your rant has fucked your career because of how real life in an organization works.

Should easily kill 5 minutes and will provide much laughter at your expense.

How about doing a five minute brainstorming session to produce ideas for the next people who have to lead the exercise.

Thanks for the responses guys. Not doing the exercise is not an option, unless deliberately defying a direct instruction from the boss, who is likely to be in the meeting, is also considered a good idea.

OK, then instead of voting as to whether to have a team building exercise, then ask everyone to rate them. Something on a scale of 1-10, how do you feel about them? 1 is “hate them, I’d rather get my gums scraped” to 10 “love them, we should have one every day!”

Well, destruction is often a precursor to building, and getting fired would require you boss engage in true team building - so I suppose all this is helpful advice. Besides, you probably wouldn’t get fired - it would just be a CLM…

Have everyone quickly sketch a pig and then interpret the drawings using this rubric http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/print.asp.

See if you can get everyone in the group on the screen in a single window by pointing the camera at their own screen. Or just point the camera in the conference room at the screen and when you get an endless sequence of smaller and smaller pictures, watch the effect of the lag as you wave your hand in front of the image. Or come up with a plan to get even with your boss for making you engage in a waste of time.

The only team builder/ice breaker I ever did was at the beginning of an Improve Your Writing class. We all had to share our middle names. It was mostly pointless, but we had a few laughs, here and there. It required no equipment and no one left in tears. That’s about as good as a team builder can get.