5 Office Activities That Will Bring Your Team Closer

Contents · 5 sections

1. 1. Start the week on a positive note
2. 2. Eat lunch together
3. 3. Learn together
4. 4. Meet virtually
5. 5. Create fun challenges

Time at the office isn’t just work, work and more work. For a team to work in sync and handle its tasks with ease, people need to communicate smoothly and effectively with one another.

That takes an investment of time and effort in team building. It doesn’t have to mean planning something elaborate or giving up a weekend. In fact, you can bring your team closer every day without ever leaving the office. Here are five fun, easy office activities you can start using right away.

1. Start the week on a positive note

Mondays tend to be stressful. You have to get up early and dive back into everything you left unfinished on Friday. To lift the mood, make it a habit to open every Monday with a short meeting. Keep it relaxed: talk about how everyone spent the weekend or what new and interesting things are coming up this week. It’s a simple way to build friendlier relationships and get everyone in a good frame of mind before the workday starts. If you have new colleagues, it’s also a great icebreaker that helps them settle in faster.

2. Eat lunch together

Lunch is the perfect time to get to know each other better, swap stories and even trade your favorite healthy recipes. This is another activity you can turn into a ritual. To keep it interesting, try different cuisines: pizza, Indian, Chinese and so on. And if nobody has time to cook, you can always order through the foodpanda app.

3. Learn together

Every employee has knowledge and skills that could help the rest of the team. Build a culture where anyone can give a short presentation or training session on a topic that matters to your work. Your team will keep growing and picking up new skills, which is essential if you want to succeed and grow as a business. You can also share how you stay productive and work toward that goal together.

There’s a bonus, too: everyone gets a closer look at what their colleagues do and the challenges that come with it. When people understand how a coworker gets the job done and how much effort goes into the result, they become more patient and set more realistic expectations about deadlines. That, in turn, cuts down on the conflicts that so often flare up at work.

4. Meet virtually

With the COVID-19 situation escalating, many offices are empty right now and people are working from home. At a time like this, keeping communication effective matters more than ever. Virtual meetings in apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack and others are a great way to make up for the time you’re not spending together, and they’re completely safe. Teams that always work remotely can use them too.

5. Create fun challenges

People work best as a team when they share a goal and have to tackle a challenge together. This is where you can let your imagination run wild and invent all kinds of games and tasks. Keep it simple, like a challenge to make sure everyone drinks enough water during the day. Or hold trivia contests and play board games. Don’t forget to add some physical activity, too. It helps people rest and recharge before they get back to their regular work.

There you have it: five ideas you can easily put into practice in your own office. As you can see, team building can be far more interesting and effective than building spaghetti towers. This list is by no means complete, so get your team together and brainstorm what else you could add.