8 Fun Team-Building Activities to Improve Communication
TL, DR
Effective communication and understanding are the backbone of any team to work successfully. This blog has some practical and fun team-building activities you can engage your team in to improve communication and strengthen team bonds.
These games work on team members’ coordination and cooperation to ensure a healthy work environment. Some entertaining games in this regard involve two truths and a lie, where teammates get to know each other’s attributes and facts about each other.
Games like back-to-back drawing and minefield help improve communication and encourage collaborative efforts. It’s vital to highlight the importance of collaboration in a team, and these games are collaboration boosters.
Moreover, some activities help the team members understand each other’s unique viewpoints about life and ideas about how to deal with real-life problems.
Activities like ideas building blocks and survival scenarios are the best ones to make team members understand the difference in opinions and new ways and ideas given by everyone.
Furthermore, some activities are just mind sharpeners and fun, just as silent line-up, where teams need to silently line up in an order and then check if they guessed the correct order or not.
For effective communication and fun, you can also play the barter puzzle, where teams make strategies and negotiate their pieces with the rival team. These are small, fun games that might seem entertaining but do wonders in improving communication and understanding among the team members.
8 Fun Team-Building Activities to Improve Communication
In modern business, effective communication is the backbone of any successful team. Effective communication ensures cooperation and understanding among the team members through the ethical exchange of words.
However, this understanding is challenging to achieve. When people from different backgrounds and mindsets collaborate as a team, there might be some conflicts. Still, how easier they are to happen, the easier they are to minimise with the help of fun and effective team-building activities.
Engaging in these playful team-building activities enhances communication skills and fosters stronger relationships among colleagues.
They are not just icebreakers but also a gateway to exploring new dynamics and viewpoints of team members and getting a picture of everything from a new angle.
These activities act as a communicating bridge between employees and help them to understand each other in a better way. Here are ten fun activities that can improve communication within your team:
List of 8 Fun Team Building Activities
1. Two Truths and a Lie:
Everyone should know about their co-workers and out-of-work life for a better team understanding. Games and challenges in life, two truths, and a lie make understanding each other enjoyable. This playful get-to-know-you game encourages team members to reveal their truths, and one lies about themselves, which others have to guess.
This helps in getting to know how individuals actually are and what their attributes are, giving hints on how to communicate with a particular team member. It not only works well in breaking the ice but also enhances listening skills, and you can match your vibe with the most relatable person in the team, making a new work best friend.
2. Back-to-Back Drawing:
Understanding and coordination are the pillars of any team. Individuals from different backgrounds, when working together, need to understand each other. The back-to-back drawing challenge is the most considerate way to improve coordination and understanding among team members with the tool of verbal communication. In this game, pairs sit back-to-back, with one person who describes a picture and the other attempting to draw it, relying completely on verbal instructions.
By playing such games, the level of understanding among team members with different psychological backgrounds improves, and they tend to make a better team with better communication. This activity addresses the need for precise communication and the pitfalls of misunderstandings, making it easier for the team to tackle real business problems without getting into arguments.
3. Minefield:
Another fantastic and fun team-building activity is to play minefield. This game improves team coordination and overall focus entertainingly. In this game, objects are placed randomly to create an obstacle course. Pairs are made with one person blindfolded and the second one instructs.
Blindfolded team members have to navigate the ‘minefield’ guided by the instructing team member only with verbal instructions. This activity improves trust among the team members, fostering trust and effective verbal communication. Not only this, but this game also improves an individual’s senses, which helps in tackling business operations on a daily basis.
4. Survivor Scenario:
Surviving in a toxic team environment is a hassle. So, it is better to play some survival games to ensure that your team is not poisonous but an understanding environment where understanding and communication are the keys to survival. Such an activity is a survival scenario in which team members are divided into groups. These groups are given a survival scenario, for instance, surviving on a deserted resort on a weekend.
What’s the challenging survival task is that the group members must work together to rank a list of items that would help each other survive. This activity might seem pointless to some, but it actually brings forward different views of life and encourages discussing different prospects and reaching a consensus. With different mindsets and ways of tackling complex situations, group members understand their co-worker’s abilities to deal with real-time problems.
5. The Barter Puzzle:
Puzzle games and activities are some of the best activities to boost team confidence and communication among team members. The classic jigsaw puzzle can be your best pick for this game. Each team is given different jigsaw puzzles to assemble, but with a twist in the game: some pieces are mixed up with other teams.
To solve the puzzle, teams need to negotiate exchanges of pieces, promoting strategic thinking and effective communication. This helps in aligning different strategies and plans to carry out tasks and improves the bond of co-workers.
6. Silent Line-Up:
Icebreakers are really important in team building. They help team members to know each other in a better way. Talking about a silent line-up game, it is a fun activity which improves the problem solving skills of the team. This entertaining game requires you to challenge your team to line up silently in an order. This order can be of their birthdays, length of employment, or even shoe size.
They have to line up, and after lining up, each member needs to tell their birthdays or whatever order they were in. if everyone cracked this task successfully, give them a harder one to solve. This activity requires non-verbal communication and sharpens observation skills, which helps in understanding each other and coordination abilities,
7. The Marshmallow Challenge:
Helpful team members often encourage everyone in the team and make it easy to communicate within the team. The marshmallow challenge is one of its kind when it comes to boating helpfulness and ideas-sharing abilities among teammates. In this game, teams are given spaghetti sticks, tape, string, and a marshmallow, and they are required to build the tallest free-standing structure that supports the marshmallow at the top.
Team members help each other in creating the structure with verbal instructions and helpful ideas. This exercise boosts collaborative communication and problem-solving skills. In this way team members can rely on each other in the times they need help with some task to be done.
8. Idea Building Blocks:
Ideas are the backbone of any team, which gives birth to brilliant inventions and innovations.to strengthen these ideas building, play team-building games like idea-building blocks, which give rise to understanding each other’s viewpoints on different matters. You can play this game with your teammates by starting with a random word or idea and passing it to each team member to add something to it.
This could be a sentence, a concept, or another word, forming a story or concept as a group. This activity lets everyone be involved in the idea formation. It gives them a chance to give their innovative inputs for any project, which fosters creativity and encourages everyone to participate freely without being nervous or anxious.
Final Thoughts
In the end, teamwork is only possible if you have a cooperative team and all team members are compatible with each other. An uncoordinated team and ignorant team members can not work together. By getting into several icebreaker sessions and engaging your teams in team-building activities, you can make the best time with improved communication and better coordination.
These team-building activities are not only enjoyable but also highly effective at developing more vital communication skills. By regularly incorporating one of these exercises in breaks or after-work sessions, teams can enhance their ability to work together, leading to improved collaboration and productivity in the workplace.