Hello guys,
This is part 3 of games that you and your team could play in your team building activity time. As you noticed in each part I try to introduce 5 games and explain what are the meaning and idea behind them. These games are not just for passing time, we (as a team) will learn from them and those achievements could help us in our daily tasks and to collaborate with our fellows.
So let’s jump in and have another set of games so we could enjoy them this week.
11- Paper tower
Probably you have heard of spaghetti towers, this is paper one. so the only things you need is paper (lots of paper) and glue, that’s it. Give them half an hour and measure the highest tower in the office.
Remember if you could provide some cup, medal or a token (does not need to be expensive, but it should be exclusive) and give them to the winners team, it helps them to gain more confidence. In one of the companies I have worked with, every team had a “wall of honours” and hung every token they won. It was amazing how much they were proud of their achievements as a team and how they presented it to every new member. It was like telling “Our team is very special, see these achievements, these are the medals we won as a team”.
12 – Budgeting
Budgeting is very important, in almost every project, we have limitations in our budgets, so we should know how to spend it. There are lots of failure samples that people didn’t spend their budget right and that was the reason for their failure.
Now how we can make a game out of it. Simple. Write down every component that is in a “car”, write them on seperate cards and specify a price for each. Tires 100$, wheels 20$, engine 700$, …
Now choose a budget, don’t tell the team what is their budget (it should be approximately little less than half of the total cost of all items) but keep it to yourself.
Now ask the team to build the car, they should do shopping and spend from their mystery budget which they don’t know when it is going to finish.
You should look at the cars that they can build with items they bought within their budget. they are funny.
The point of this game is to spend their budget on vital things that without them a car could not exist. It is like MVP of a car or a vehicle. Then and only after they have a minimum car available, they should add features to it.
As much as you split car items in smaller parts, you will add more fun to this game, because they should buy starter and exhaust separately. It is not that hard, spend little time on the internet and you can find a list and even the actual price of them.
13- Target
This is one of the fun games that there is no meaning hidden behind, it is just teamwork, collaboration, and seeing how a team can achieve its target if all team members work together. See as I said there is no hidden idea behind.
Print a target (you can easily find one on web) and tape it on top of a table (round table preferred) and ask team members to stand around the table, give each of them a stew and put a table tennis ball (ping-pong ball) on the outer bound of this target.
The goal is to direct that ball to the center of the target. Each team has 10 minute, once one ball stays at center, you should add another ball. So the winning team is the one who could manage to have more balls standing on the yellow circle (center of target).
Roles are also simple, no one can use their hand, they can only blow through straws they have and direct the ball. It is all about teamwork and it is very fun.
14- holding card (suck and blow)
** This is straw version, we don’t want accident kiss in office
So the name tells it all. Give each person a straw and ask them to stand in a circle, they should pass a card to each other by sucking and blowing, They have 5 minute to get their best record of how many people that card traveller before falling.
It is fun, it is teamwork, every one failure will cause the whole team to fail, even a single mistake. It is also a good ice-breaking game we played when a new team member joined the team.
15- Team values and identity
This is the last game in this part but definitely not least. I believe this game should get played with all teams around the world. So now you know how important this game is.
Ask the team to write down what are the values in their team. Attitudes like trust, team work, cooperation, being on time, ….. are values in most teams. Ask them and give them time to write down as many as they want.
Now you should set a price for any of these values, attitudes and characteristics, (use a number between 1 to 10 for pricing). Then give the team a budget (1/4 or 1/5 of total cost of all values) and ask them to choose what they want to get. So they should talk about them and only choose the values that are most important to them and without them they cannot stay as a team any more. I called them identity, the vital values that existence and structure of a team has been built based on them.
Does not matter if you make teams based on a product (cross functional team) or based on their job (mobile development team), the only thing that matters is that they feel they are a “TEAM” and each of them respect the values of that team.
I printed those chosen values as an Impartible definition of each team and hung them on the wall. It also helped people to identify what behaviour is against the team values and made giving feedback easier.
So this is the end of part 3, I will be with you with 5 more games in the next part.