Simple team-building activities are a great way to develop a stronger, more collaborative team, without being too challenging.
Team-building activities put a group’s teamwork skills to the test, with the end goal of producing a more collaborative and united team.
Unlike ice-breakers or energisers, team-building activities are typically more suited to groups who are already somewhat familiar with each other and ready to understand, develop and strengthen their relationship. A team-building activity challenges the group to explore their team dynamics and test their ability to communicate in an engaging and non-threatening way.
Team-building activities are not the same as a training scenario. Instead of focusing on learning or developing new or existing functional skills, they instead focus on strengthening the more strategic and interpersonal skill-set of a group, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, leadership or teamwork.
Essential Characteristics of a Simple Team-Building Activity
A simple activity will typically include the following features:
- uncomplicated, easy-to-follow directions
- physical or verbal interaction between group members
- some degree of difficulty or challenge
- opportunity for group members to exercise leadership, trust and cooperation
- scope to reflect on the process adopted by the team, the roles assumed by each member and the lessons learnt throughout the process.
The main benefit of opting for a simple activity is its ability to achieve similar outcomes to more complex activities while keeping things light and unintimidating. This can be particularly beneficial if you’re limited by time or you want to create a ‘fun and friendly‘ atmosphere without it being too challenging.
How to Select the Best Activity
Some team-building activities will be more effective at achieving the desired outcome than others, so it’s important you select an activity that will be well-received by the group while still focusing on the skills and dynamics you want participants to explore.
When selecting, it’s important to consider things such as:
- The size of the group: some activities that will work well for smaller groups simply won’t work in a larger group setting.
- The age bracket of participants: children, teenagers and adults are at varying mental, physical and emotional stages of their life and will require a different approach.
- Their relationship: whether they’re schoolmates, colleagues, friends or have some other association, the way the group knows each other will influence the dynamics among group members.
- The setting: some activities can be conducted in a small or confined area, while others will require a larger outdoor space.
- What you want to achieve: consider whether your aim is to encourage teamwork and collaboration, develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, understand team dynamics or simply have fun!
Simple Team-Building Activity Ideas
Take a look at the links below for some of our favourite activity ideas.
If you’re on the hunt for some more challenging activities, have a look at our other team-building and problem-solving activities or you could browse through our comprehensive activity database for more great ideas!
If you haven’t already, you can also become a playmeo member so you can be one of the first to unlock hundreds of other great group games and activities for simple team building events.
