Decorate the office and provide a cake with the names of all the people celebrating their birthday on it. Host an office-wide pumpkin carving competition during the autumn season. People can carve anything of their choice, though you can give bonus points for office-themed carvings. Have people share two truthful facts and a lie about themselves. The other people must guess which of the three statements is the lie. Hand out a roll of toilet paper, instructing your people to take as many pieces as they think they will need.
When everyone has taken some toilet paper, inform the group that they must share one fact about themselves for each piece of toilet paper they took. Break the team into several partnerships. Each group of partners sits back to back while drawing what their partner is dictating to them. In this activity, people stand in a line waiting for a message from the person standing to their left.
The first person in line picks a message to whisper down the line. This goes on until the message reaches the last person, who then says the message out loud. The goal is to communicate the message clearly so that the message isn't convoluted by the time it reaches the end of the line. Put together a team for a local fun run or marathon.
Choose someone to champion the project and recruit coworkers. The team can train together at lunchtime. Print our several pictures and words, both positive and negative. Set aside space for people to collaborate and let their creative juices flow. This space can be used when brainstorming new ideas or when working on group projects. Break the people up into teams.
Each team needs one small bucket, one larger bucket, and several tennis balls. The objective is to put as many tennis balls as possible in the larger bucket without touching the balls with your hands or arms in the time allotted.
Set up a whiteboard or chalkboard in an accessible area of the office. This board is an open suggestion and idea board. People can leave anonymous or signed ideas and suggestions on the board.
Personalize your Jenga set to be used in the workplace; on each Jenga piece, write out a workplace scenario that your people could potentially encounter. Each employee will pick a piece out of the assembled tower and tell the group how they would handle the scenario written on their piece.
Each month, department representatives will meet and create a newsletter detailing what has been taking place in their respective departments in the past month.
This newsletter will be emailed out to all people, keeping them informed on what their colleagues have been up to. Supply teams with various objects such as newspaper, popsicle sticks, toothpicks, glue, tape, and marshmallows.
The team that can create the largest tower in the allotted time is the winner of the competition. On Earth Day, have each department plant a tree or break up into small groups and discuss ways that the office can reduce waste.
Break the office up into two varied groups, lining each group in front of the other. When each person and directly in front of another the activity can begin. Allow each pair to talk for minutes, before calling out "switch". When the switch is called, have only the innermost line move to its right so everyone has a new partner to converse with. Repeat until everyone has had an opportunity to talk to everybody else. The objective of this activity is to get your entire team from one side of the room to the other without having touched the floor.
In order to achieve this goal, the group will only have access to two sheets of paper. At the beginning of each year, buy a number of plain, white ceramic mugs. Each month, a department will decorate the mugs with motivational messages and fill the mugs with treats and snacks and gift them to another department. This will continue until each department has received a mug with their surprise. Hire a certified yoga instructor to come into the office every two weeks, giving your people the opportunity to unwind and relax during a stressful business day.
Break the team off into groups of two, providing each pair with two paper plates and an uncooked string of spaghetti. The goal of this activity is for each pair to balance the pasta between them only using the paper plates, without breaking the pasta. Place one small trash can at the end of a room and have everyone line up right in front of it.
Start shooting the paper ball as close to the bin as possible. All who make the shot continue on to the next round where everyone has taken one step away from the bin. Continue this until only one person is left. Set aside a table in the office that is filled with various coloring books, pens, pencils, and markers. Allow people to take coloring breaks when they need to reset their minds.
Have an office-wide Bingo night, providing your people something fun and light-hearted to do. The winner of each round gets a special office-themed prize. At the start of each season, hold a desk decorating challenge. Each season will be judged by a different set of people.
The winner of each challenge will receive a small gift. The goal of this activity is to have all people line up in order of how long they have been with the company, without talking.
People will have to nonverbally communicate with each other in order to successfully complete the challenge.
A fun outdoor activity for a hot day. Perhaps recommend people bring a change of clothes. Break your team up into groups of two, providing each pair with a water balloon. Have each person stand ten steps away from their partner. If anyone drops or pops their balloon they are eliminated. Continue until only one pair is left.
Organize an office-wide tug-of-war tournament for all to participate in. This can be department versus department or you can break the office up into teams of your choice.
Have each department decide on the project they are the proudest of for the year. You will then have an office show and tell where each department shares what they are most proud of with other departments. For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Here are the instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser. Your browser is out of date. Our website is built to provide a faster, more engaging experience. Your browser may not support all of our features.
Please update to the latest version of Microsoft Edge or contact your network administrator. Skip to main content. You can do this however you like, but our favourite method is to place two markers, a couple of feet apart. The bridge must stand alone from one marker to the next. The bridge which can hold the most weight without collapsing, will win the prize. Similar to the Bridge Building game, this game requires your teams to work on a construction together.
Only this time, the goal is for the device to hold a raw egg, which can stay in-tact after being dropped from a certain height. If more than one invention safely prevents the egg from breaking, then the winner should be the team with the device that weighs the least. But we prefer the US game of the same name, Broken Telephone. This is one of our favourite games to play at work, because it encourages very careful communication — and can have some hilarious results! Get everybody to stand in a long line, or even a circle.
The starting player must think of a short sentence — or you can provide them with one. They must then whisper this sentence into the ear of the person on their left. The last player must announce the sentence they believe was whispered into their ear.
This is another great game to encourage communication between team members. And there are lots of versions of this game, but the one we like the best, is the one where you split your group into pairs. Each pair sits back to back. Give one person a picture, and give the other person a pencil and paper. Then, get the person with the picture to describe what they can see to their partner — who must attempt to draw a replica of the picture, as best they can. But some might surprise you.
And either way, your team members will be learning to improve their communication skills in the process. Not all games need to be focused on something like team building or team bonding. In fact, playing games during break time is a great way to recharge your batteries and get ready for the next half of your shift.
So we have decided to include a few of our favourite tabletop games that can generally be played in under an hour. Chess is probably the most popular two-player board game in the world. And not only is it a great way to pass some time, but it hones skills such as strategic planning and forward-thinking. As with many board games, Chess is now very easy to play online — either against a friend, or against a stranger. Werewolves is such a fun game of social deduction and trickery, that we think it deserves more than one mention.
In a game of Werewolves, players are secretly assigned roles. The werewolves must attempt to convince the villagers that they are innocent, while the villagers must attempt to lynch the secret werewolves amongst them.
There is a print version of the game you can buy, or you can print your own copy and learn the rules here. Alternatively, you can just play the game online at Board Game Arena , which makes remote play possible. Another game of social cues and bluffing, in a game of Coup you rely on your individual ability to smuggle lies past the other players on the table.
Or, if you are brave, you can win this game by telling bare-faced truths the whole way through! In a game of Coup, you are attempting to eliminate all other players, through a combination of robbery, taxation and assasination. There is a physical version of this game, but if you are part of a remote working team, you can play this game online at Board Game Arena.
Code Names is a wonderful game for two teams, all about communication and clues. You must attempt to pass clues to your own team, without giving away clues to the opposing team.
Code Names is a physical board game, but if you already know the rules then you can play it online here. In a game of Cards Against Humanity, somebody will draw half of a sentence from the card deck. You must then use your own personal stash of cards to complete the sentence. If your solution is voted as the funniest, you win the round. You can print a free copy of this game from the Cards Against Humanity website , as long as you promise not to use it to make money.
We believe you should encourage your teams to be physically active where possible. Not only this, but sports can encourage healthy competition, which can be good for motivating your employees to perform better at their jobs. Here are some ideas for making sports and physical activities an important part of your working environment. Organising a sports tournament between teams is a great way to encourage a little bit of healthy competition, and get the blood pumping.
Outdoor or field sports lend themselves well to tournaments — think about sports like soccer, volleyball or even extreme frisbee! Instead of organising a competition between teams, one great idea is to organise a challenge between other businesses or organisations. The reason we believe organising a challenge between other businesses works so well, is because it can really encourage that team spirit and make your teams even closer to each other than before. Ping pong, or table tennis, is the classic indoor sport for office spaces.
It only needs a small amount of space, and it provides a great workout at the same time. These can break, so make sure you have plenty spare. If you have a ping pong table, then a great game to try at work, if you want to include multiple people at once, is a big game of run-around. The game works best with around 8 people, but can be fine to play with How a game of run-around works, is everybody stands in a circle around the table, holding a bat. The two players at opposite ends of the table will start — one will serve the ball to the other.
However, upon hitting the ball, each player will begin making their way to the next side of the table, leaving the player behind them to return the next shot.
Each time a player misses a shot, they sit out, until eventually only 2 people remain. You can declare these joint winners, or have a play-off to determine the champion. If you want something a little more gentle, which takes up even less space, then a foosball table is a good alternative for sport. While it is not particularly physically active, it is suitable for players at a time, and can lend itself well to tournaments and leagues.
In fact, a one-hour session of yoga probably produces enough sweat to fill a bucket. But seriously, yoga can be a great way to help your team focus their minds and bodies. Not only does it boost concentration and energy levels, but it helps you keep your employees physically healthy.
These games are exceptionally fun, and encourage your employees to really think outside the box, and get their creative juices flowing. In the story game, players sit in a big circle. Each player takes a blank piece of paper, and writes the first sentence of a story. Once done, everybody passes their paper to the person on their left. The next person reads the previous sentences, then writes the next sentence. However, before passing this on, they fold the previous sentence over so that it cannot be seen.
This way, each player is only ever following on from the very last sentence in the story. This can make the stories disjointed, surprising, and most of all, hilarious. Once the bottom of the page is reached, the story ends. And everybody reads out the end result to the rest of the group. Similar to the story game, players sit in a circle and each take a piece of blank paper.
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