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5-minute team building activities have the potential to improve the productivity of your workforce by helping to promote a strong team culture.
What separates a high-performing, dynamic team from a team with average performance? We believe that a team is only as powerful as the bond between each individual team member. This might sound cheesy, but in a high-pressure workplace environment, a team must be able to easily communicate to overcome challenges and confront obstacles.
A high-performing team is every employer’s dream. The question is, how can you strengthen the bond between individual team members to turn your workforce into a powerhouse that operates harmoniously? Many businesses take their teams on annual day trips to theme parks and golf courses - but this isn’t as effective as it might sound.
When taken at face value, these activities appear exciting and engaging. The problem is, they have a fundamental flaw: they lack repeatability. You need to be running 5-minute team building activities on a weekly basis to consolidate the working relationships that are being formed between team members. This is key to getting more bang for your buck!
In this article, we will explore 5-minute team building activities that you could implement into your team’s working week. Each of these 5-minute team building activities is super easy to set up, removing potential friction reluctance from team members.
At Water Cooler Trivia, we believe that fun and games play a crucial role in uplifting your team’s spirits, bringing everyone closer together, and creating a positive workplace environment. There’s nothing worse than trying to muster up motivation to perform in an environment filled with doom and gloom. It’s practically impossible.
Here area few benefits of introducing 5-minute team building activities into your team’s weekly work calendar:
In 2014, the American Psychological Association estimated that more than $500 billion is siphoned off the US economy as a result of workplace stress. The association also noted that an estimated 550 million working days are lost every year due to stress on-the-job. These staggering statistics emphasize the importance of workplace culture.
Further research has shown that workplace stress leads to a 50% increase in voluntary turnover. High employee turnover can quickly become costly with recruitment and training expenses.
Who doesn’t love a trivia game? You can send our quizzes to your team members at any time during the day and set it up to repeat the process weekly. This is the perfect opportunity for individual team members to put their knowledge to the test on topics that aren’t work-related. If you’ve noticed that your employees are rather slow in the morning, why not drop a quiz in their inbox? This could be exactly what they need to flex the muscles in their brain and prepare them for a productive workday.
With our intuitive tool, you can pick from a wide range of different topic categories to craft a trivia quiz that your team will enjoy. You can also adjust the timing and difficulty of the trivia quizzes for maximum levels of fun! As a team leader, we know that your time is limited. The process of building and sharing a quiz with your co-workers should take less than 60 seconds.
If you’re really looking to build your team’s collaboration culture through team building activities, you can share a link to a quiz with half of your workforce, encouraging the others to pair up with another team member. This will help to get certain team members interacting with each other. Building your team culture is far easier than you think. The secret is consistency.
We will send your team a quiz once a week. Water Cooler Trivia shouldn’t take more than five minutes out of your team’s working day. This investment of time will pay for itself, as you begin to build a strong team culture, improving overall performance over time. The user interface for each quiz is seamless, engaging your team members from the outset.
Is your team interested in something that’s a little more hands-on? During a lunch break, once your team has finished nibbling away at food, you could encourage them to join a videoconference link and attempt to build the tallest marshmallow spaghetti tower at their home office (or in-person when offices are open). As the team leader, you can expense the purchase of spaghetti and marshmallows for participating team members.
People love to unleash their inner competitiveness every once in a while. After all, who doesn’t want to be known in the office for building the tallest marshmallow spaghetti tower? You just need to make sure they don’t eat too many of the marshmallows along the way! This is a fun, lighthearted 5-minute team building activity that everyone can participate in.
This one’s for when your team is back in the office...
In this 5-minute team building activity, participants will be asked to stand in a long line side-by-side. They will then be tasked with rearranging the order of the line based on the dates of their birthdays (based on the month and the date). This all sounds pretty straightforward, but there’s a catch: they cannot talk at all to each other, requiring a lot of creativity.
Team members might resort to sign language, gestures, or even (socially distant?) nudges to try and determine someone’s birthday. This team building activity shouldn’t take longer than 5-minutes. Of course, the duration will depend on how well your team communicates and works as a collective. You could offer a range of prizes that vary depending on how long it takes for them to get in birthday order.
We hope you have enjoyed finding out about a few of our favorite 5-minute team building activities. Our heart belongs to Water Cooler Trivia but there’s value to be found in all three of the activities mentioned. You should try out each team building activity to see which proves to be the most effective in your workplace. Are you ready to start talking about something better than the weather with your co-workers? The best time to start is right during the onboarding process.
Get started with Water Cooler Trivia today!
