Team Building Games

 

Since the advent of team building for businesses and organisations myriad styles of team building games have been designed.

 

These range from purely fun and rather childish formats (Beach Olympics, Amazing Races / Treasure Hunts etc) to highly sophisticated business games and simulations (table top games of high complexity that mirror behavioural and business processes).

 

In its simplest form the creation of a team building game can simply copy or parody schoolyard ball games, tag and potted sports formats.

 

In the middle of the range sits simple problem solving tasks, often nicknamed “string and bucket games” that require teams to recover objects from marked off areas using strings and hooks, or pass through spider webs etc. 

 

The duration of low and middle level team building games tends to be 5 minutes to 15 minutes or so.

 

At the higher end of the spectrum sit more sophisticated and project based approaches that have been carefully designed to draw out behavioural interactions and / or business messages and processes.  These are typically far longer in duration (2 hours to full day) and have larger price tags to match. 

 

This is a reflection of the higher levels of R&D, design and tailoring that goes into creating a truly effective team building game that can do more than deliver just fun and interaction.

 

The word game implies fun, and the most successful team building games are unapologetically enjoyable.

 

There is a fine line to walk though between unjustifiable indulgence at an off-site or conference, and justifiable investment in a team building session that will sue the right activity to achieve behavioural and / or business outcomes.

 

In a nutshell team building games can take many forms…

 

• Simple schoolyard style games

• Problem solving / initiative tasks

• Complex project based games

• Table top business games

• Themed team building games (e.g. military, art, fashion, movie making, history etc)

• Behavioural role playing games

 

When selecting the right approach a company like Sabre can really assist you to match the correct format to the nature of your team and desired outcomes.

 

Some games are deployed as stand-alone activities at an off-site, conference or training session to have fun or re-enforce simple messages whilst others are carefully interwoven into longer-term strategic initiatives. 

 

The latter obviously has far greater impact in achieving real outcomes.