5 Team Building Events That Teach Real-World Skills

Employees hate boring team building events that add no fun to their work life. A team building event not only requires them to do work – buy a dish or cook – but also promotes forced conversation in a normal environment.

You need to work on a different strategy that gets your employees excited to work together as a team and set team building activities that develop real-world skills. Not only this will benefit your organisation, allowing the employees to learn more about one another and also improve upon how they work together.

Get inspired by the following ideas which range from selling to cooking.

Self Defence Activity

A self-defence activity is a great way to see how employees work together. Self-defence activity is a great team building event as they can learn skills to defend themselves when needed. The key is to find the right instructor, a good instructor will teach you proper style, methodology, attitude and background, but also will see if they fit the culture of your workplace. To find the proper instructor ask for referral from other companies or friends and select on the basis of your company’s specific requirement.

Corporate Cooking Events

Ask your employees what they feel towards cooking, and you are likely to get a response from everyone regarding what they have cooked so far. Broadening their cooking skills in team building events is a great way of learning their potentials and judging how well they work with each other. You can held activities like Salsa Showdown, Just Desserts or Chilli Cook-Off.

During this corporate event, co-workers will not only focus on creating a meal, they will also learn from one another – with managers learning from executives and employees, all working side-by side. This helps in knowing each other and forging a stronger bond as a company.

Solve The Imaginary Problem

This a very simple team building activity that can be done from the comforts of your office. Break your employees into a group and give them a fictional problem that needs to be solved. Have the group solve the problem together, by writing a two to three lines answer on a piece of paper.

Now, comes the exciting part, have each member pass the sheet to the left and then ask them to see the idea and generate a new solution. Continue this pattern for a few rounds and then see what the outcome is. This helps as the teams have to work together, while each team member has the chance to find a better solution than the previous one.

Outdoor Skills Adventure

Survival skills are important for all, no matter whether your employees live in the sprawling suburbia or the big city. Outdoors skills activities is a great way to enhance team building as your employees are not confined to the environment of computers and email.

Wilderness survival skills are important for everyone, whether your employees live in a big city or sprawling suburbia. Outdoors skills classes also serve as a great way to get everyone outside and working together without the confines of computers and email. You can set up scavenger activities or survive in the wild by providing some basic equipment and materials including drink and food for the participants.

 “Sell A Piece From Your Counter”

This is another great activity. To be honest we all are selling in our life, whether we are persuading someone to come for dinner or pitching a new client. The idea is pretty simple, you call everyone to select an item from your desk and then come to the conference room. Next you tell them to improvise the sales pitch for that particular item and make rest of the room willing to buy it from you. Bonus points if they stay inside the limits of the reality.

To work with this team building event, create teams of two to three groups and ask each group to select just one product that needs to be sold together. Format the challenge as a bracket, with the winners moving forward in a championship round. In the final round, the executives will hand over one item to each team, that needs to be sold with an allotted time to prepare the pitch – say 15-30 minutes. Whoever is the most convincing will win the round.

These corporate events not only helps the employees in building a strong bond, but they also give everyone a chance to learn different skills that can be valuable both outside work and at work.