You found our list of the best culture building activities for employees.
Culture building activities are ideas and games that promote the values, beliefs, and actions in an organization. Examples of these activities include hosting a vision board party, donating to a non-profit, and offering professional development opportunities. These activities have a significant impact on the culture of an organization and employee sentiment. Culture building activities increase employee involvement and foster brand loyalty as your team expands.
These ideas are strategies to improve company culture, employee engagement activities, and ways to have fun with employees at work, and steps towards creating a positive work environment. These activities are similar to company culture committee ideas.
This article contains:
- culture building activities for remote teams
- team culture building activities
- corporate culture building activities
- office culture building activities
- culture team building activities
Here we go!
List of culture building activities for employees
Corporate culture shapes how the company treats people, how employees communicate with one another, and socialize inside and outside the office. The following are office culture building activities that you may organize. All of the activities are planned with the long-term success of your business in mind, encouraging team members to think strategically, actively participate, and work together.
1. Donation to a Nonprofit
Fostering a culture of giving has several advantages. To begin, making a positive impact is inherently rewarding, and the ripple effects of that satisfaction extend across an organization. Companies that regularly give back to the community tend to have more content workers.
You can make a charitable contribution to an organization of the employee’s choosing. The donation can come from the company budget, or you can do a fundraiser. For example, if you have a workplace with uniforms or a strict dress code, introduce a “casual dress drive” where teammates can pay money towards charity to wear casual clothing to work.
Your staff members may have personal connections to a variety of charities. Participating in this exercise will show them that you value their input and that they are important to the business’s success. Employees are more likely to stay if your efforts to promote a positive culture are intentional.
Here is a list of virtual fundraising ideas.
2. A Fitness Competition
This modern era has seen a dramatic increase in individuals prioritizing health and fitness. One wonderful bonus that may help support employees’ health objectives and promote collaboration is scheduling a fitness competition. You can team up with your workers and set a new monthly fitness or awareness objective. For instance, you might dedicate one month to promoting diabetes education and another to setting and achieving their daily walk steps target. The primary purpose is to have staff members propose a cause or a level of consciousness that is important to them.
Check out these suggestions for team building workouts.
3. A Vision Board Party
A vision board party is an event where participants make and visualize their goals. New Year vision board parties are all the rage. A workplace vision board party is a great approach to combine fun with strategy. You can have workers create their ideal work environment or team. You could have the office close earlier than usual. Your workers will need time and materials to make their own boards, including poster boards, magazines, glue, tape, craft decorations, and markers.
This activity is more than just another culture-building exercise, it is a chance to consider your employee’s desires and preferences at the office. You may tailor your leadership and staff engagement methods to better meet their expectations. After everyone has finished their vision boards, you can display them around the workplace.
Check out this collection of bulletin board ideas for work.
4. Professional Development Opportunities
You can maintain employee engagement and boost morale by providing meaningful professional development training opportunities. Classes, seminars, webinars, lunch-and-learns, and other forms of training are all fair game. You can encourage your staff to suggest potential training sessions and then organize the ones that will be most useful to them. Productivity, dispute resolution, creativity, teamwork, leadership, professionalism, reducing workplace stress, and budgeting are all possible topics.
Here is a guide to professional development opportunities in the workplace.
5. Recognition and Awards for Workers’ Accomplishments
One of your team culture building activities should be recognizing workers for the success they have had in the office and beyond. Your staff members are people with their own lives, families, and passions outside work. Employees will feel a deeper sense of loyalty to the company if their professional and personal successes are celebrated in the workplace.
For example, you can create a bulletin board or newsletter that includes their child’s accomplishments. Another option is to email your team announcing your championship triumph or media mention. While seemingly little, these actions significantly affect employee inclusion and morale.
Check out these employee recognition program ideas.
6. Roses and Thorns
It is not necessary to formally organize and arrange every team-building activity. Roses and Thorns is a daily or weekly culture building activity that does not interrupt workflows. Each teammate talks on the roses, which are the positives, and thorns or the negatives of their career and personal lives. This activity is a great way for groups to maintain communication and understanding with one another with little investment of time or energy.
Roses and Thorns work because it is tough for teams to gel when they do not see each other outside the office. The rose-and-thorn activity encourages participants to discuss their successes and failures, even trivial events such as disastrously making a batch of cookies.
7. Wellbeing Meetings
Keeping stress at bay helps everyone on the team perform better and feel better. As part of your culture building activities for remote teams, it is advisable to provide a secure platform for online team meetings where members may share their experiences dealing with work situations. Your employees will feel less isolated and learn how to deal with their situation by talking about experiences and hearing how others are dealing with the same issues. Despite that this idea may be completely new to your team, their confidence in one another and sense of unity will be strengthened due to this network of support.
8. Among Us
Among us is an online game and one of the best culture building activities for remote teams. While there is some murder involved, this is only for entertainment purposes. Players must navigate a virtual ship and achieve several objectives to progress through Among Us. One of the team members is being falsely accused of being an imposter. The teammate’s objective is to eliminate other players without drawing attention to themselves. Since more players mean more fun, this is a fantastic game to play with a bunch of colleagues. Team members practice using their persuasive abilities more as they attempt to convince their colleagues that they are not the impostor. The game is successful because it is entertaining, allows for player interaction, and requires just basic strategic planning.
9. Survival
The Survival game puts teams of players into a hypothetical scenario and gives them a list of items necessary for survival. The activity is a fun way to exercise the brain and develop novel solutions to problems. Culture team building activities like Survival are a great method to get to know your colleagues and may help new people on the team feel more comfortable talking to one other.
For this activity, you will need 10 to 12 unrelated objects from around the workplace, such as phone, stapler, pen, mug, book or paperclip. The coordinator will let the team know they are lost, perhaps on a desert island or the jungle. The squad will get several unrelated objects and rate these items’ value to their survival. Afterward, teams will explain how they did the ranking.
A fun way to spice up the game is to set a time restriction. You can put the teams in a dire situation, such being adrift on a sinking ship, and give them 20 minutes to prioritize the items. The goal is to create temporary turmoil that compels teams to think carefully about how to prioritize their list of items. Teams that succeed in this setting are the ones that decide to put forth a leader.
10. Jigsaw Chaos
Playing this entertaining game is a great way to practice talking through issues and working together. Each team will get a jigsaw puzzle.
For this game, separate the teams into equal groups. The game works best with four teams. You will combine the contents of many jigsaw puzzle boxes until you have equal puzzle pieces for each group. If your puzzles have 250 pieces, for example, you may switch out 50 for those in a different box. Afterward, instruct the teams to solve the puzzle within 20 to 30 minutes. After groups go to work, they will see that certain parts do not go together. Then, participants will need to collaborate with other teams to solve the puzzles.
A helpful hint is to put teams in areas where they cannot see each other but are yet near enough to talk and share missing pieces. This step will make the game more challenging, but it should also enhance team communication by giving players a centralized spot to leave unwanted pieces and retrieve lost ones. You can make the activity more competitive by offering a prize to the group that finishes their problem first.
11. Lip-Sync Battle
Lip Sync Battle is a lighthearted competition that promotes cooperation and friendship among participants. The activity is modeled after the hit TV program in which participants mime songs and viewers vote for their favorite. You can decide to make the activity competitive. Extroverts are more likely to participate in this activity, so you might want to tailor it for such personalities. You will need music playing and a music streaming service or karaoke app.
You divide team members into small bands and allow them to spend ten minutes practicing lip-syncing to a song of their choosing. Each group will showcase their musical creation in front of the other contestants or a jury. For the fun, you can have one person from each group blindly choose a popular song from a hat containing the titles of the songs. The selecting process’s unpredictability may lead to some really funny shows.
12. Blind Drawing
The outcomes of this game, in which one player teaches another how to draw a simple picture, are often rather amusing. Despite its seeming lack of complexity, blind drawing effectively fosters better communication and stronger bonds amongst participants. The activity is an excellent icebreaker to play at the beginning of a culture team building event.
You will need a paper, pencils, and copies of some easy drawings, like a house, clown, car or pet. The steps involved include:
- Split your teammates into pairs and seat them back-to-back.
- Give one partner in each set a sketch and the other person a pen and paper.
- Have the person with the artwork explain it to the other without revealing its content while the other tries to recreate it on paper.
- Let participants discuss how challenging it is to communicate in this fashion, and compare the outcomes.
This idea shows an example of why good communication at work is important. Team members can also switch places with their partners. Having the drawer use a blindfold introduces a new dimension to the game. Blinding the drawer makes them concentrate more intently on the instructions.
13. Zombies Escape
Players in Zombie Escape must work together to solve challenging puzzles while managing time constraints. Each team must collaborate to complete a series of challenges before being overrun by the undead. The game ends if the zombie gets the team. The fact that teams are against time drives them to work together effectively, highlighting collaboration and communication.
You will need a tight space, rope, and some kind of riddle challenge. A chosen teammate will play the zombie. The zombie’s foot or waist will be bound with a rope to a stationary object in the area. Instead of tying the participant up with rope, you may also use masking tape to tape down marks on the floor.
The group will start working on the problem immediately. They need to know that the zombie’s rope gets slackened by one foot every five minutes. If the group can figure out the clues and flee before the zombie catches up to them, they will have succeeded. If the room can be locked, you can lock the team in and offer the key as a prize to the team that can solve the puzzle or riddles the fastest.
14. Two Truths, One Lie
The game of “Two Truths and A Lie” is a great culture building activity and conversation starter for new groups. The more complex the lie, the more your colleagues will have to use their critical thinking skills to poke holes in your tale, like figuring out whether the timeframe makes sense or if the facts are accurate.
For this activity, have everyone on the team think of three things to say about themselves, of which two should be true and one should be a lie. The participants take turns telling the group the truth and the falsehood. The remainder of the team then debates and ultimately votes on which was the lie. You can have the group discuss the claims by asking questions. The game is a fun approach for team members to learn more about one another.
Here are more fun question games.
15. Scavenger Hunt
A scavenger hunt is another fun culture building activity that encourages collaboration and communication between employees while allowing teammates to connect as a group. The team that completes the search in the allocated time or returns with the most items wins. Team competition, in any case, provides a good touch of rivalry that keeps the game interesting.
You must prepare a list of unusual items that the teams must locate as part of the scavenger hunt. You can separate the members into equal teams. Each group will get a list of items to locate and have them do it as quickly as possible. The squads can use clues to identify hidden objects. Problem-solving skills are important, and the stakes are higher, especially if teams are racing against time.
Here is a list of scavenger hunt activities for adults.
16. Workplace Trivia
Trivia night at the workplace is a great way to get to know your coworkers better and has the added bonus of being a fun competition. It will take some workplace observation, discussion, and cooperation to get the answers right. Typical questions should be related to the workplace, such as “how long has X employee worked here?” and “what is X employee’s role here?”
You can create a list of 20 to 25 questions and hand out sheets to each group. After dividing the teams into smaller groups, call for a volunteer to take notes from each group. Each group will get 15 to 30 seconds to respond to each question. As soon as each group has recorded their responses, they should trade papers to ensure no one is cheating. Whoever has the most correct responses is the victor. A helpful hint is to group similar questions together. You may have a section devoted to the IT division and another to the company’s products.
Here are sample trivia topics and trivia games for adults.
17. Community Volunteering
Doing volunteer work is a wonderful way to improve your mental and emotional health while also uniting your community around a common cause. This culture team-building exercise aims to improve the bonds between employees by encouraging them to work together for the greater good.
Corporate volunteer opportunities may range from helping to renovate community facilities and prepare meals for the homeless to organizing group trash picks in parks. Employees may be able to leverage their professional abilities in areas like writing, marketing, and design by volunteering with a charity organization.
Check out this list of group volunteering ideas.
Conclusion
Whether a fresh group of employees or a seasoned crew looking to forge closer bonds, corporate culture building activities are always a wonderful approach to accomplish both of these goals. These activities may improve morale around the office and lead to greater productivity. Most importantly, culture-building activities allow employees to have fun, laugh, joke, and enjoy one other’s company. A happy team makes for better work atmosphere and culture.
Next, check out these books on company culture and community building activities.
Grace He