Creative Team Building
When the answer isn’t obvious, you find out who thinks sideways
What it looks like
Thirty-eight seconds of Creative: hands at work, and what comes out at the end.
One of the hardest jobs a manager has is getting the company’s values and principles across to the team. In theory it sounds simple. In practice people struggle to take on a corporate philosophy, and they struggle most in the difficult stretches. Creative gathers the formats that ask the team to produce something instead: a short film, a perfume, a structure, a painting, the solution to a case. There’s always an output, a thing that exists at the end of the day and didn’t exist before, and the values end up inside it where everyone can see them.
That changes the register compared with the more physical families. Here the competition matters less than the result, and people who fall behind in a race often turn out to be central. Even the ones who swear they can’t draw surprise themselves once the room is on their side. It’s why we suggest Creative for teams where the informal hierarchy has set a little hard: it reshuffles the cards in a different way from an Action format.
There’s a side effect too, one that surprised us the first time and that we now count on: making something together lowers the pressure in the room. A creative activity puts to work the parts of the brain that the working day leaves idle, and lets the overworked ones rest, so people go back to the office lighter than they left it. The day after, a fraction of that creativity turns up in an ordinary problem, which is the part that pays for the day.
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well if
- you want an artefact to be left behind, a video, a painting, a song, something to show
- the theme of the day is company values or identity: Creative is the family that makes them visible without anyone having to recite them
- the group is coming off a demanding stretch and you want something that releases rather than adds
- there are people who aren’t comfortable with physical activities
It works less well if
- you have less than three hours: creative formats need an idea phase that doesn’t compress
- the group is very large and you want everyone doing the same thing at the same moment
- the goal is to lift the energy quickly at the end of a convention, which is what Action or Music are for
The formats
Movie Making
Teams write, shoot and edit a real video spot in a day, with an original script, dialogue, music and effects. The most requested creative format we have.
Dinner with Murder
A mystery to solve at the table, where every guest is both investigator and suspect.
Lego
Representing the company, its mission or a process by building it out of bricks.
Engineering & Construction
Catapults, bridges, Leonardo’s machines, structures built out of dry pasta: complex builds as a metaphor for the organisation. Teams challenge the Romans by making a trebuchet that actually throws.
Action Painting
One large canvas painted by everyone. After a short introduction even the people convinced they can’t draw produce something worth keeping, and the company’s vision ends up materialised in a single painting.
Perfume Creation
Composing a fragrance, naming it, presenting it and selling it. The newest format in the catalogue.
Super Quiz
Buzzer rounds, with a physical side to them too. High tempo, no preparation required.
The Crossword
An enormous crossword to solve together, where nobody can possibly know all the answers.
Heroes Day
Coming into the office every day and getting through the problems can feel like a mission impossible, and by Friday everybody feels they deserve a cape. Make-up, costumes and special effects: for one day the team becomes a squad of superheroes.
Team Radio
Building the company radio station and putting it on air to follow and comment on a corporate event: a running order, tasks to coordinate, gags to write, music to choose and special guests to invite. Then the broadcast goes live.
Fashion
Needle, thread and the design of a garment, with a catwalk at the end. A format that takes apart the usual assumptions about who does what.
Laughter Yoga
Laughing together as a structured exercise: it drops people’s defences in ten minutes and asks nothing of anyone.
Sparkathlon
Timed creative challenges released by an app, with the leaderboard updating at every submission. Indoors, no physical effort.
When what surfaces deserves an afterwards
An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.
Discover Team Coaching →
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae