Let’s face it. For years, “team building” was a dreaded phrase. It conjured images of ridiculous activities that made people feel silly rather than connected.

But the days of the trust fall are over. Experts have developed an enormous amount of activities you can do to improve team cohesion and communication without embarrassing anybody.

We’ve assembled some of the best team building workshops below — no cringing guaranteed.

Two Truths and a Lie

This is one of the best icebreaker games. In a circle, participants take turns making three statements about themselves, two being true and one being a lie.

The group then tries to guess which one is the lie.

It never fails to warm people up to more activities and open themselves to bonding. It is a light and easy way to encourage people to speak to the group, engage their creativity, and share things about their lives.

Solve a Mystery

We are living in a golden age of products that give you evidence, detailed reports, and testimony — all to see if you and your team can solve a murder.

The options online are enormous right now, with many offering up hours and hours of complex sleuthing and others needing only a few eureka moments to get to the end. There’s something for virtually any team.

If you get a very difficult one, you can extend this into sessions over time, building up an ongoing dynamic that can reinforce your teamwork.

The Spectrum

In this activity, everybody lines up on a wall. The facilitator makes statements about workplace attitudes, like:

I prefer guidance on a project.
I feel I’m in the right position at work.
I like giving presentations.

When a statement is made, the participants sort themselves — all the way on the left side is a strong no, all the way on the right side is a strong yes. And people are encouraged to stand somewhere in the middle if they are conflicted or don’t feel strongly about the topic.

This activity immediately lets people express feelings they have about their work without having to start the conversation. By looking around at how people sort themselves on the spectrum from a strong yes to a strong no, we can learn a lot about our teammates and how to best support them.

Laser Tag

Laser tag is a great way to get people working in teams in an exciting, competitive atmosphere.

The situations that arise provide unpredictable and highly kinetic experiences. And the bonding happens almost immediately. You can always rent out a laser tag center, or you can find your own gear and host your own event.

Plus, it’s a lot less clean up than Nerf guns and way less of a mess compared to paintball.

Cross the Circle

This activity begins with everyone making a circle. The first player will make a statement starting with “Cross the circle if…” For example:

Cross the circle if you played sports as a kid.
Cross the circle if you have children.
Cross the circle if you hate flying.

As you’d expect, team members cross to the other side of the circle if the statement fits them. Then, it’s the next person’s turn to make a statement.

Here, getting to know coworkers opens up to a more well rounded view of who people are. The statements can range from funny to profound. With everyone getting a chance to ask about the group, you never know what might happen.

Escape Rooms

These have popped up in cities all over the world in the last five years, and there’s a good reason for it. The mixture of theatrical design and problem solving creates a fun and immersive environment, with all kinds of themes now available.

What makes this especially good for many teams is the high level of access escape rooms provide.

Dear Future Me

This is a contemplative activity that works really well if you are going into a big project. It requires a few materials: pencils, paper, and envelopes.

The actual process is simple. Take time for everyone to write a letter to themselves in the future. Encourage people to write out their feelings about what’s coming and how they plan on handling it.

Have everyone seal the letters in envelopes and write their name on them. Once the next big project is over, or some set amount of time has passed, hand out the letters to the team. This moment of reading a letter from your past self can be an empowering and transformative experience.

While it is more private, it bonds people to the team in an introspective way.

Fake Tarot Cards

For this one, all you need are pieces of paper cut in the size of cards. Everyone on the team gets a few of these, and they draw images on them.

When everyone is done, shuffle these into a pile and then do “tarot” readings with them. You can put a lot into making the setting match the activity — every little bit counts here.

The result is like an art project mixed with performance and visual madlibs. It’s fun, engaging, and sometimes spooky.

Classroom

Continuing adult education doesn’t just have to be work related. In fact, it can be a lot of fun when it's about something entirely new and off the beaten path.

Take your team to a class on baking, or basic car maintenance, or improv, or mixology, or painting. These can add real value to people’s lives, awaken unknown talents, and get teammates in a room exploring new topics.

It’s especially great if you find a topic that everyone is a relative novice at. This allows everyone to be peers in the class, learning from each other and the teacher.

Sandcastles

Sandcastles — that transient art where you build something knowing full well it will not last a day, facing the eternal truth of impermanence head on. Also, a great team building exercise!

Building sandcastles with a team of adults gets your creativity and engineering skills a workout. And it’s also a great excuse to visit a beach.

Top 10 Team Building Workshops