5 Awesome Games to Motivate your Team

Leo Hagan
Monday, 8 August 2022

We all know how important it is to keep your team motivated and enthusiastic at work and there are so many really cool motivational exercises and games that help relieve the stress and assist people to get through a very busy work day/week...hey it's just nice to stop what you are doing, gather as a group and connect by doing some shared activities.

With the time we spend with our co-workers, the benefits of investing time and money in team building cannot be over emphasised. The most obvious benefits of doing team-building initiatives at work include:

Facilitates collaborative and motivated work culture as these activities are seen as a move towards bringing individuals together
Helps in agile problem solving and decision making as many heads/hands contribute in the process
Fosters responsive and meaningful communication as employees come to know personality, desires, strengths and weaknesses of their co-workers
Aids use of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking by moving employees away from the usual job set up that recharges and refreshes them
Creates atmosphere to enhance productivity by identifying and eliminating obstacles or by improving existing ways of working
Boosts employee morale as they feel the company and colleagues are interested in knowing and developing them, a valid reason for employee retention.
Simple games or brain teasers can also keep everyone awake during morning meetings. It helps creative juices flow, which in turn makes your meetings more productive.
Finally, the learning and insights from team-building games can be transferred to the actual work environment resulting in better work equations and organisational performance.

Here's 5 great games we thought we would share with you so you can enjoy them with your team:

1. Team Building Kits

In groups of 3-5 people, teammates try to solve a murder, escape from Mars, or some other incredible problem. Using clues, documents, items, and puzzles, teams need to share info, develop theories, and work together to solve the mystery.

Designed by professional mystery writers and game makers, this game puts you in the story (while staying at the office). It facilitates coworker bonding and engagement while targeting teamwork dynamics like communication, trust, and coordination.

What happens when you mix an escape room, a movie, and a team building into an office game? You get Team Building Kits, an immersive mystery game designed to combine fun and bonding with teamwork productivity.
In groups of 3-5 people, teammates try to solve a murder, escape from Mars, or some other incredible problem. Using clues, documents, items, and puzzles, teams need to share info, develop theories, and work together to solve the mystery.

2. The Mine Field / Watch your step

Select an open area like a parking lot or a park for doing this activity.

Prepare an enclosed area with tape and mark the start point and end point. Along the route place several handheld objects/toys randomly at specific distance. Divide the group into teams of 2 or 4 and blindfold one of the members.

The others stand outside the enclosed area and verbally instruct the blindfolded teammate to navigate across the route, picking up the toys and avoiding stepping on sheets of paper (mines) or outside the enclosed area. This highly engaging game takes about 15-30 minutes and is awesome to convey learning on trust, active listening and communication.

To make it more difficult, create specific routes the blindfolded team members must walk or only allow certain words/clues to be used for guiding.

3. Frostbite

This game tests the teams’ instinct to survive in the worst.

Divide everyone in groups of four or five. The scenario is that the teams are lost in arctic and they need to build a shelter to withstand the cold winds. The team elects a leader who is supposed to be suffering from frostbite, so he cant move physically while other team members are supposed to be struck by snow blindness and must be blindfolded.

The leader instructs the team on how to build the shelter without manual helping and the teammates must do so without being able to see.

4. Penny for your thoughts

Team members are often hesitant to open up with each other and this hampers fluid conversation.

To help loosen up teammates and feel comfortable, the game penny for thoughts is perfect icebreaker. This involves collecting pennies/any other coins with listed year and dumping them in a container or box. The important thing to note here is that any of the coin/year shouldn’t be dated older than the youngest team member.

Next, each of group participants draws out a coin and based on the listed year, the person has to share something significant/memorable/special that happened to them in that year.

This gives interesting insights into the lives of your teammates and makes future interactions stress-free.

5. Memory Wall

Nothing bonds teams better than positive experiences and memories built along the work timeline.

Put up a whiteboard and distribute post-it notes among the group members. Write down work-related themes on the whiteboard like “My First Day”, “Work Travel”, “Team Celebrations”, “Team’s way of working” etc. and let people write down special team memories and accomplishments related to any of the theme written on the whiteboard.

Take group members on a walk down the memory lane by asking everyone to share what they have written and post the same on the whiteboard wall. Teams will be left with nostalgic lingering smiles on their faces for a long time.