Team Building in the New Year

Team-Building Activities to Reconnect in the New Year

21 November 2022

With the team spending the holiday season apart it can sometimes be difficult to get back into the swing of things once the new year rolls around. Team-building activities are a great way to get everyone on the same page whilst boosting company morale and getting your team motivated for the new year

Maintaining team cohesion is crucial to maintaining a functioning workplace. According to Teamstage “75% of staff say teamwork and collaboration are crucial to corporate success.” But even if your team gelled perfectly prior to the new year, the time away from the office can often strain your team’s communication skills and cause them to lose sight of your company’s goals. That’s where team-building activities come in. Not only are they a great way to make sure team members still get along after the break, but they can also be used to raise morale and give your team a sense of momentum moving into the new year.

Types of Activity

Team-building activities can be divided into four distinct categories based on the aspects of teamwork they’re designed to reinforce. These categories are communication, problem-solving (also referred to as decision-making), adaptability, and trust-building.

Communication

As the name suggests, communication activities are held with the goal of reinforcing your team’s communication skills. These activities should put your team in scenarios that require them to come up with solutions through clear, productive conversation and by listening to one another’s points of view.

One of our favourite communication-based team-building events is called The Desert Island Game. Colleagues are divided into teams that are told to imagine they’ve been stranded on a desert island. Each team are handed an identical list of twenty items of varying usefulness and are given the task of selecting only five of the listed items for them to take to the aforementioned island with the goal of either surviving for as long as possible or escaping the island and returning to civilisation using their chosen items. They then reconvene with the other teams and present their five items, justifying their choices. Participants would then vote on which team they think would be the most likely to survive on the island. The communication element comes from both the discussion-making process and the presentation of the team’s decision. A successful Desert Island Game should compel participants to pitch their ideas around some of the items on the list to the rest of their team, and the rest of the team should in turn communicate their opinions on their teammates’ decisions whilst justifying their own.

Problem Solving

All problem-solving activities are built on the same premise: present a group with a problem or a series of problems which they must solve together. Problem-solving is our favourite category of team-building activity because they’re easy to structure whilst also providing a wide variety of options. We’ve found that these kinds of activities are generally more successful when companies take the time to organise a full-scale event for them. For example, Escape Rooms, where participants are placed in a room with a series of puzzles and challenges to be completed against the clock. Escape Rooms are very commonly utilised by businesses in part because they’re proven to improve a team’s problem-solving, communication, and productivity, but primarily because they’re just plain fun and serve as a wonderful morale-boosting break from the day-to-day.

Adaptability

These activities are designed to help teams improve their planning skills as well as test how well they, as a group, can adapt to new situations, making them ideal for companies that work in particularly fast-paced industries that are prone to frequent and sudden change. The structure of these activities reflects this nature as well, putting teams in situations in which they must implement some combination of effective planning and flexibility. Oddly enough, many playground games work as very effective means of practising a team’s adaptability skills, such as Musical Chairs and Simon Says, which also have the added benefit of boosting office morale and being great fun.

Trust Building

This final category’s rather self-explanatory: these are activities that help build trust between team members. You can implement a lot of these kinds of activities with little more than a blindfold and objects around the office. Take for example Blind Obstacle Course: this activity involves setting up an obstacle course and dividing your team into pairs, one to wear the blindfold and one to direct their now blindfolded partner through it. If that’s not your company’s style, many of our clients looking to build trust between their team members ask us to organise experiences around new challenges, such as cooking, cocktail making or crafting. These kinds of experiences give your team the opportunity to build and develop a new skill together, as well as create shared memories which all contribute to them knowing each other better as people and thus easier to trust.