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 and workplace traditions.
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. Mix n’ Mingle (Highly Rated)
Mix n’ Mingle offers a series of engaging activities to foster meaningful connections. Teams will boost their networking skills, which helps build company culture.
Mix n’ Mingle features the following:
- a 90-minute session led by an experienced host
- icebreakers that create a warm atmosphere and start conversations
- creative exercises that strengthen bonds
- group challenges and discussions that boost teamwork and cooperation
Further, we will bring all the necessary materials for an effortless experience. To improve relationships with your team, look no further than Mix n’ Mingle!
Learn more about Mix n’ Mingle.
2. Desk Swap Day
Desk Swap Day is a fun way to break the monotony of the traditional workspace. Team members temporarily trade their workstations, showing a fresh perspective on each other’s daily routines and challenges. Plus, rearranging the office means that colleagues who do not normally interact get to sit together. This activity encourages empathy and can lead to improved collaboration. Colleagues gain a deeper understanding of each other’s needs and preferences. The exercise can also spark creative solutions to common workplace issues and foster a more cooperative work environment.
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3. Skill-Sharing Workshop
Skill-sharing workshops are an excellent way for team members to connect on a personal and professional level. During these sessions, individuals can teach their colleagues something unique or valuable, whether a hobby like painting or a professional skill like coding. These workshops promote continuous learning, team bonding, and the recognition of each team member’s individual talents. Additionally, these events contribute to a culture of growth and collaboration. Team members may become more comfortable exchanging knowledge and expertise.
4. Reverse Roles Day
Reverse Roles Day is a lighthearted yet insightful activity where team members temporarily switch job roles within the organization. This experience offers a fresh perspective on the challenges and responsibilities of colleagues in different positions. This activity fosters empathy and appreciation for the diverse roles within the team, leading to better understanding and improved teamwork. Additionally, this experience can uncover hidden talents and provide opportunities for cross-training, strengthening the team’s abilities.
5. Travelogue Lunches
Travelogue lunches are a fun and easy way to send team members to different parts of the world through storytelling. During these lunches, team members take turns sharing their travel adventures, complete with photos, stories, and cultural insights. This activity allows colleagues to get to know each other personally, broadens their horizons, and fosters a sense of curiosity within the team. These lunches can spark conversations about diverse cultures and inspire future travel plans, creating a more globally aware and culturally enriched team.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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 these collections of bulletin board ideas for work and virtual vision board workshop ideas.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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 another’s company. A happy team makes for a better work atmosphere and culture.
Next, check out these books on company culture and community building activities.
Grace He