How to Build Up Your Team
Team-building events serve critical functions for a professional group, but to see the greatest returns, invest in the most fruitful events.
Leading a team can feel like wrangling a number of loosely connected forces, each of which carries its own distinct personality, skills, interests, beliefs, and career goals. While sometimes complicated to manage, having a team with diverse perspectives and skill sets can be hugely beneficial for your business—you just have to invest in leading them toward a common purpose. The question is, how can you ensure your colleagues communicate clearly, work productively, and help bring your company’s overall goals to fruition?

Invest in culture
Enter team building, a category of workplace tasks that don’t really feel like work at all. Often taking the form of casual games like improvisation scenes or symbolic acts like stacking chairs, these activities offer a surprisingly broad array of benefits to your organization, such as driving recruitment, retention, and overall employee engagement.
The latter is particularly valuable to employers; according to Gallup research, low employee engagement costs the global economy a staggering $8.8 trillion. On the other end of the accounting sheet, teambuilding efforts help motivate your team, boosting their productivity to potentially generate more income.
Of course, these results aren’t guaranteed. As with any other business initiative, you should take time to strategize which team-building investments you choose, weighing their potential costs and dividends. To garner the greatest results within your company culture, arrange some of these effective team-building events.
Trivia games
Invite team members to participate in a live or digital trivia game, which you can either schedule independently or integrate into longer meetings. These games are ideal for multiple types of workplaces because they have universally understood rules and require little equipment—unless you want to work significant fanfare into the event.
Select a Jeopardy!-style format with general knowledge questions, or organize a themed questionnaire that appeals to your business culture. Perhaps a media company’s team members would enjoy TV and movie trivia questions, while a financial advising company may appreciate The Price Is Right-style games about the actual cost of popular goods. For even more engagement, offer prizes to the individual or team with the top score. (Did you know that prizes and awards to employees may be tax-deductible?)
You can arrange your own event or leave the planning and hosting duties to a dedicated service like TriviaHub, which specializes in team building for remote and hybrid workplaces. Its thousands of rave reviews indicate that its catalog of games can do more than just speed up the office clock; they may also help improve team communication and productivity. Its DIY event kits are free, but you can opt to spend money on more engaging activities such as live events with a professional host.
Icebreaker sessions
Icebreakers may seem like trite and contrived imitations of authentic conversation, and they certainly can be—in the wrong hands. If your team rolls their eyes at the prospect of participating in these activities, they may unintentionally cause even more interpersonal barriers. But with the proper approach, this free and fast team-building activity can lay the groundwork for open communication channels within your team.
For clarity’s sake, reconsider what an icebreaker is actually designed to do. By requiring everyone’s input, these conversations aim to shatter any frigid energy within meetings, wake up inattentive team members, help everyone get comfortable with speaking in front of their colleagues, and eventually build a little familiarity among teammates.
To make icebreaker questions effective, engaging, and beneficial, put forethought behind them. For example, start your first session with a simple and casual prompt: “What’s your favorite dessert?” Even your less willing participants can whip up a good response. In the next event or meeting, ask a deeper question: “What was your dream job as a child?” Then continue to escalate even further, asking open-ended questions that require lengthier input, such as “What would you do if you had one day to spend one million dollars?” The point is to spur greater involvement and increased engagement with each session.
Make icebreakers a regular part of recurring meetings so your team can become accustomed to them. Over time, individual responses will illuminate teammates about each other’s personalities, conversation styles, and lifestyles. In this way, these quick team-building activities can lay the groundwork for open conversation and cooperation between colleagues who may not otherwise interact with one another. After all, unless everyone on your team is highly extroverted, unformed connections within it will remain as such until you intervene.
Thankfully, icebreaker sessions are simple and completely free solutions with endless possibilities. If you are short on creative prompts before a meeting, refer to the time-tested FORD method for starting meaningful conversations: ask questions related to everyone’s family, occupation, recreation, and dreams. What was their favorite childhood vacation? How do they decorate their desk and why? What media are they reading or watching this week? Who is one individual they would love to meet? To make live events even more engaging, incorporate a physical activity like passing a ball between participants as they respond. Eventually, your teammates will appreciate the value of getting to know one another—and they may come to enjoy these sessions as well.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives
For a heartwarming take on team building, schedule philanthropic events. Team-building activities with a CSR bent, which contribute to community well-being, can yield a threefold benefit—a stronger company culture, a meaningful impact on individuals in need, and a positive brand awareness in the community. Just ask Alan Ranzer, cofounder and managing partner at Impact 4 Good. “You are not only engaging your teams to connect and build stronger relationships,” he says. “You are also bringing them together to work toward a common cause: one that inspires action and gives them a sense of pride in their company’s values.”
His philanthropic teambuilding organization has helped businesses like Marriott, Dell, and Cisco redefine team building by connecting them with partnered causes, including Habitat for Humanity and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Ranzer has heard multiple firsthand success stories from the charitable team-building efforts Impact 4 Good has helped guide. He recalls a previous attendee who worked to build bikes for children at the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Louisiana: “After the event, the employee approached his VP of sales and shared that in all his professional career, he had never experienced something more impactful. He thanked the VP for allowing him to make a difference during the business agenda.”
CSR initiatives like these may be some of the greatest efforts you take to foster employee engagement, and employees may be genuinely emboldened to participate in them. Plus, if you’re concerned about investing heavily in philanthropy, donating your time can reap numerous rewards.
What not to do
There are nearly infinite possibilities for organizations to guide team building, even within tight fiscal and man-hour restraints. However, it’s important to reflect on which activities are less impactful or potentially even wasteful. As Ranzer suggests, “Team building shouldn’t focus on trendy stunts and activities that don’t consider the corporate culture and the team’s needs.”
In other words, an event that is incompatible with your field, branding, or team’s personality may not do much for your initiatives. For example, mandating participation in a 5K run may not appeal to teams outside of the health and fitness industries. Meanwhile, uncomfortably intimate tasks like trust falls may elicit objections, and low-participation events like mandatory movie screenings may simply apportion time for team members to scroll through their phones. And, needless to say, if you expect your team to actually show up, you probably need to host activities during company time.
How to build enthusiasm
Successful team-building initiatives are creative, engaging, and even lucrative. Considering such potential benefits, leaders should be flexible enough to attempt various activities until they find the most appropriate and advantageous ones for their culture. To help you do so, request employee feedback and suggestions or host polls for the next team-building activity. Your team may initially be hesitant to participate during a busy workday, which is natural. But after some encouragement, they should eventually welcome the regularly scheduled opportunity to loosen their ties and have some business-casual fun.
TAKE ACTION:
Determine which productive bonding events you can integrate into your organization’s schedule based on the time and money you can invest.