Team building ideas

Team building ideas for different occasions

A corporate team building event will be very different depending on the occasion it happens in. The purpose of the intervention, its length and the style it gets run in all depend on that. In general there are three categories of corporate event a team building moment can go into:

• a meeting or a convention
• an incentive trip
• a company party.

Team Building during a meeting

A convention or a corporate meeting, whether inside one company or between several, is an occasion for more than talking about objectives and developing plans for the future. There has to be room for socialising, networking, brainstorming and building new ways of working as a team. Too often, though, people are busy with something else or bored, and those very useful activities get neglected. That’s where a dynamic training activity can help.

A team building intervention can take several shapes:

• icebreaking, to encourage communication and acquaintance between the people at the meeting: relaxed and with some humour in it;
• an energiser, to wake the listeners up between one speaker and the next: short, dynamic and with plenty of physical activity;
• brainstorming: an artistic activity, for instance, that develops visual thinking and creativity;
• a training moment: a problem-solving activity aimed at designing and working out a shared plan of action;
• a moment of play, relaxation and socialising: a culinary activity is perfect here, or one built around cocktails or wine, placed before or after the gala dinner.

Team Building during an Incentive trip

An incentive trip, in the region or abroad, is another occasion where team building fits very effectively. We’ve already given space to the difference between team building and incentive; here we’ll talk about when you can run a team building during an incentive. In this case you have to allow for what’s particular about the destination. It’s worth organising the event so that the participants discover the places they’re visiting, preferably in an original and unusual way. The team building programme can help with that. It might be a treasure hunt through the city or the area being visited, and it might be something more exclusive, like a sailing regatta, a tour in classic cars or even a balloon flight over the dunes.

Be careful not to overload the programme, though. People on an incentive tour often have extremely full days, so the organiser has to plan periods of free time for relaxing and resting the mind as well. Then the participants can:

• visit the places worth seeing in the city;
• socialise and make friends among themselves;
• go shopping (especially for teams arriving from abroad, and in a city like Dubai);
• have cultural experiences: museums, exhibitions, guided visits, theatre, opera and ballet.

Team Building for a company party

A party at the company? Here too you can find a celebratory team building that suits the occasion. Further down we’ll talk about team building for particular holidays, but some characteristics stay the same across every celebratory event, national or corporate.

A celebratory team building doesn’t necessarily carry less weight in terms of reflection, producing ideas and brainstorming. Quite the opposite, in fact: celebrating often means turning round to look at what’s been achieved over the year. Every celebratory event does have to observe the following, though:

• involvement and enjoyment: people take part willingly;
• lightness: it uses the things people associate with a party, food, music, dancing and drinks;
• communication: it lets the participants talk and build relationships they can carry on afterwards;
• memorability: it leaves a pleasant memory that lasts and builds loyalty towards the company.

Before organising a party at the company you always have to work out what messages you want to leave and what atmosphere you want to create. That goes double if there are people from outside, like clients or employees’ families. Families get involved particularly at a Family Day, and in that case the activities for the children have to be designed on purpose. Everything done together with the family contributes in turn to the employee’s loyalty and to the atmosphere inside the company. The activities should then involve the company’s spaces, its products and its logo in an interactive and creative way.

Team building ideas: who are the participants?

Choosing the right team building format doesn’t only depend on the occasion and on what the company needs. A great deal changes according to who the participants are. The meeting planner has to plan the event so that it comes out useful and enjoyable for everybody, whatever their age, their level in the hierarchy, the language they speak or where they come from. Here are some suggestions for choosing the right team building format for each kind of participant.

Team building: inside one company or between several?

The most widespread category is probably an event inside a single company. It involves people who need to work out and improve effective ways of communicating in order to reach shared commercial objectives. They aren’t always people who actually work together in the same team, on shared projects. Let’s go from the greatest closeness to the least.

These are people who work in the same company but on different projects or in different areas, sometimes in offices far apart. In an international group they may even speak different languages and meet only at the annual meeting or on the incentive trip. What will the team building work on?

• communication and getting to know each other;
• developing and sharing common strategies;
• creating a corporate identity.

A team building can involve more than the members of one team or of several company teams, though. The company’s most important clients can be there too, on their own or together with employees. The event then has to be shaped differently. Here the purpose will above all be to:

• build a positive and appealing picture of the company and its products;
• give a creative and striking representation of the company’s mission, vision and values;
• build loyalty.

The number of participants is a deciding factor too. An activity that suits a small, compact group is different from the one you’d recommend for very high numbers. In general the participants get divided into rival teams of similar size, so that no more than ten people or so have to collaborate at any one time. But what if there’s only one team? A low number can be used to create:

• a long activity, running over several days;
• a training path made of several sessions;
• an exclusive, high-end experience.

If too few people signing up can put the organisers in difficulty, a particularly high number does it far more. Making fresh pasta or running a treasure hunt through a small district with two hundred people asks for real skill and experience. An event for a high number of participants has to observe the following:

• let everybody work, with nobody excluded: a team can have a leader and a spokesperson, but everyone has to be able to contribute;
• encourage healthy competition;
• concentrate the group experience into a short time.

This is a group of people who work together daily or frequently, and who share knowledge, projects and results. A common language and culture allows a great variety of formats, including ones aimed at discovering other cultures (learning to prepare something as successful as sushi, for example). Team building inside a single working team can aim to:

• resolve problems of silence or conflict;
• brainstorm to find new ideas and inspiration;
• bring new people into the team after a merger or an acquisition;
• create training and coaching paths.

However used we are to assuming that everybody speaks English by now, communication often isn’t fluid even inside large international groups. If we know our team building will have guests from all over the world and we suspect not everyone will understand each other easily, we’ll choose formats that:

• favour musical or visual language over the verbal kind;
• don’t require the participants to perform in words;
• push people to try communicating with the body and with behaviour;
• introduce people to a culture (Italian culinary traditions, for instance).

Team building ideas by season

Some team building ideas can be run all year round, and typically those are the indoor ones; others are seasonal, and typically those are the outdoor activities. On top of that there are formats particularly suited to festive occasions. Every season has particular things to allow for, like what the participants can physically do and what the weather is doing. In the Gulf the weather is the first question rather than the last, and any event manager worth the name has a plan B.

Summer team building

Organising a team building for the company summer party? From May to September the middle of the day outdoors is out of the question, so summer is the season of the indoor formats and of anything that happens near water once the sun is down. Long walks, especially through a city, are to be avoided. One option is to take the participants to the water: the sea or a pool. In every water-based team building activity, though, there are particulars that can spoil the experience for at least some of the participants if they’re overlooked.

What do you do if somebody can’t swim? You have to find that out before organising a day on the water. And if somebody gets seasick? A sailing regatta will be a fantastic experience for the strong of stomach and not for the others.

With sailing you also have to allow for needing wind to fill the sails: conditions far from ideal can spoil the enjoyment of the experience.

An activity built around cocktails can suit a summer company party perfectly well. Here too there are things to check: people who don’t drink, children, and the religious rules that many participants follow. In the Emirates these activities run only in licensed venues, and a version without alcohol has to be genuinely good rather than an afterthought.

Winter team building

Winter is the good season here, and it’s the opposite of what an event manager in Europe has to plan around. From November to March everything outdoors is possible: the desert, the coast, the mountains and the wadis, a whole day in the open without fighting the heat. January and February are the best months of all. It’s the window everyone wants, which is the one practical problem with it: the good dates go early.

Keep an eye on the forecast all the same. Winter is a beautiful season and it isn’t without risk: a few days of rain turn a wadi into a place you don’t take a group, and wind can lift enough sand to end an outdoor day early.

Conditions can change within a couple of hours, and the event gets scheduled months in advance when no forecast exists yet. That’s why a plan B for moving an activity indoors matters as much here as anywhere.

Team building for the year-end holidays

December is a period of celebration and also the moment when the commercial results of the year get added up. You can think about enjoying yourselves and celebrating, and at the same time produce something that stays as a memory of the year gone and as an inspiration for the next. The ideas that fit best?

• Cooking the year-end lunch or dinner together;
• Writing and singing the company’s own song;
• Shooting a promotional spot in the company’s own spaces;
• Doing something social and charitable.

An end-of-year team building event is useful for more than improving team spirit: it’s also a way to relax and live through something new. And it can be socially useful. One example? Cooking a festive lunch together with children who wouldn’t otherwise have one, with one of the local foundations we work with.

What to watch out for? Where a celebration is a religious one, and especially with international teams, it’s worth a careful look first. Building a Christmas tree may delight one person and leave a colleague from a different tradition indifferent or uncomfortable. In a room like the ones we work in here, where a dozen nationalities and several faiths sit at the same tables, it’s worth finding an activity everyone can agree on.

December is also a holiday period and plenty of employees may be away: it’s worth checking in advance to choose a date that suits everybody. Getting organised early helps for another reason too, because venues in December receive a great many requests and can all turn out to be booked. Event organisers have plenty of work on as well. So get in touch in good time.

Team building for Ramadan and Eid

Ramadan and the Eid holidays are, along with the end of the year, an excellent moment for a social team building that brings the team together and improves how it’s seen inside and outside. Giving is central to the month, which makes the Social family fit it naturally. And a Cake Design or a Choco Making activity works too, especially for something that gets given away: think of preparing sweets and taking them to a school or a nursery.

What’s particular about these dates? They move every year, following the lunar calendar, and the working hours move with them. So the calendar has to be checked carefully and the event adapted to the circumstances each year.

Team building ideas by venue

Another thing that affects the choice and the organisation of a corporate team building is the venue available. It can be looked for specially for the event; it can also already be fixed, for instance when the team building sits inside something more structured. The event manager then chooses the team building on the basis of the venue too.

Team building inside the company

A meeting room or small side rooms, corridors, stairs and secret passages: what do you do if all those company spaces are available? They can be used to get the participating teams working, together or separately, on creative projects of various kinds. Or, where the spaces are particularly interesting and the teams come from outside (clients on an incentive trip, families at a Family Day, a meeting between several offices of an international group), you can even organise a treasure hunt inside the company to discover the spaces enjoyably.

Using the company’s own spaces can be an excellent choice if the budget for the event is particularly low: what you save on renting a venue can go on decent gadgets or on a better coffee break.

Outdoor team building

What do you do if there’s no venue at all? That happens above all with a low budget. In a city you can organise a treasure hunt, enriched if you like with photo and video tools or with technology. Or you can try the outdoor team building exercises, which need no particular space beyond a park or a stretch of open ground.

Outdoor Training is almost team building at its purest, because experiential training was born in exactly this setting. There are a great many exercises you can run, and they have a positive effect on:

• confidence in yourself and in each other
• communication
• collaboration
• integration of the team.

These exercises remain, even now, among the most effective kinds of team building there are. Being an outdoor activity with a certain amount of movement in it, though, even if no sporting preparation is needed, there are particulars to allow for:

• respecting the safety rules and making sure help can reach people easily if it’s needed;
• organising the travel so that it’s comfortable for everybody;
• checking the conditions to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Team building in a hotel

The hotel may have been chosen for the meeting or convention, or it may be hosting visitors on an incentive trip. Either way, a hotel offers spaces that suit team building perfectly well. Some examples of activities? An investigation game along the lines of CSI, and also all the creative activities that involve shooting a film, taking photographs or painting a picture. And if there’s a large meeting room, it can easily be set up for a puzzle contest, a quiz on the company’s own subjects or, after dinner, a playful tasting.

Team building in a restaurant

It can also happen that the running order of the event or of the incentive trip is so tight that the only free moment left is dinner. The meeting planner needn’t despair: the time and the space of a restaurant can be used for a team experience as well. Obviously the most obvious activity is a team cooking in which part of the meal gets prepared, or even everything that then gets eaten together. But there are less demanding options too. Think of a murder mystery dinner, for instance. It’s an electrifying experience that turns a shared meal into an occasion for exercising logical and creative thinking, and communication and interaction between people as well.

Starting from the moment of the year

The year end, Ramadan, the summer, the new season in September, the Family Day: every occasion has the formats that work for it and the traps that come with it. They’re gathered together in occasions.