A lot of working professionals hate team building day at the office as much as they hated sports or project day at school. Why? Because it pulls them out of their comfort-zone and forces them to confront their strengths and weaknesses in a team setting. For employees who are particularly competitive, insecure or unable to handle criticism, this can be extremely challenging which is why it’s so important to offer team building exercises in your office environment – and if you make them fun, there won’t be any complaints! Here are three team building games designed to nurture the relationships between staff members and develop a better understanding of the areas they might need to improve on an individual or team level.

Office Trivia

Who doesn’t like a little game of Trivia? Now, this game won’t involve any celebrity or sports questions, but that’s OK – all the questions involved in this game are about the office and staff members, so everyone will have a fair chance at winning. Unless you’re the office newcomer, that is. Invite each staff member to come up with five questions related to the office, individual departments, employees and projects you are currently working on. Throw them all together in a hat and pick teams. The team who answers the most questions correctly wins and can pick the next team building exercise – good incentive, right?

Purpose: The goal of this exercise is to test just how observant your office team is.

Show and Tell

If you think Show and Tell, a game we often started our Mondays with at Kindergarten, is just for the kids, think again. This is a perfect exercise to build relationships among your employees and, more importantly, it will help those who are reluctant to talk in front of a small audience to build their presentation skills. Pick a different team member on a bi-weekly basis to Show and Tell during lunch hours – they are free to pick whatever subject they are keen to talk about, whether it be a personal hobby, a project they are currently working on that other team members have little understanding of, or even a board game you can all play together. This will give colleagues the opportunity to get to know their team member better, hence there will always be talking points that will help in making team projects flow smoothly.

Purpose: Motivating team members to build their presentation skills and get to know one another better.

Active Listening

Now this game is quite cheeky, but if your staff is made up of active listeners they should be able to see – or hear – right through it. Call your staff in for what seems to be a regular meeting. Prepare a document jumbled with boring, long-winded sentences about the most tedious subject you can possibly think of and be sure to sprinkle it with plenty of statistics and jargon. Amidst the mind-numbing text, add a few real sentences that actually relate to a project you are currently working on, but remember not to emphasizes them as you read the document out loud in a monotone voice, the kind that will make you want to fall asleep standing. Upon wrapping up the meeting, hand out questionnaires about the content of the meeting to test whether your staff picked up on your trickery.

Purpose: This exercise is designed to test your staff’s active listening skills and verbal and non-verbal communication. Once your staff members have completed the questionnaires you can discuss, as a team, how meetings can be structured so as to keep people focused, and what it was that made them tune it out in the first place.