This article is part of our Team Communication Insights Centre.
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Search online and you’ll discover hundreds of exercises, games, icebreakers and challenges promising to improve communication, develop trust or bring teams closer together.

But finding an activity isn’t really the difficult part.

The more important question is:

What makes a good team building activity?

Because a team building activity can be enjoyable without changing anything.

People can laugh, participate enthusiastically and leave saying they had a great time.

Then return to work the following morning and continue communicating, collaborating and behaving exactly as they did before.

A useful team building activity needs to do more than occupy part of a team workshop agenda.

It needs to create something worth talking about.

There is nothing wrong with teams having fun together.

Shared experiences can strengthen relationships, create memories and give people an opportunity to interact outside their normal roles.

But entertainment and development aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A team building activity becomes particularly valuable when the experience reveals something about how the team actually works.

• Perhaps somebody naturally takes control.
• Someone else stands back and observes.
• One person becomes focused on completing the task.
• Another becomes interested in whether everyone is involved.
• Someone challenges the instructions.
• Somebody notices something everyone else has missed.

Suddenly the activity has created material for a conversation.

The facilitator can ask:

What just happened?

That’s often where the learning begins.

Before choosing an activity, ask:

Why are we doing it?

Not:

What activity could we do?

Those questions produce very different workshops.

• If the team needs to improve communication, choose something that exposes communication patterns.
• If trust is the issue, create an opportunity to explore what makes it easier or harder to rely on one another.
• If behavioural differences are creating friction, use an activity that helps people recognise different perspectives.
• If the objective is simply to re-energise a room after lunch, that’s fine too.

The team building activity doesn’t need a profound developmental objective every time.

It simply needs to have a reason for being there.

Purpose before activity.

Some team activities work brilliantly for the loudest, quickest or most confident people in the room.

Everybody else watches.

That can inadvertently reinforce exactly the team dynamics the workshop is supposed to explore.

Good facilitation creates different ways to contribute.

That might involve:

• individual reflection before discussion
• working in pairs
• small-group conversations
• writing ideas before sharing them
• choosing cards or objects
• placing responses visually
• inviting rather than demanding contributions

Participation doesn’t mean everybody has to speak for an equal amount of time.

It means the design doesn’t automatically privilege one particular way of contributing.

If it takes fifteen minutes to explain a ten-minute activity, something has probably gone wrong.

Complex instructions consume energy.

Participants become focused on understanding the rules rather than exploring the subject.

The strongest activities are often surprisingly simple.

Choose three statements.

Arrange these in order.

Discuss where you agree and disagree.

Build something representing the problem.

Choose the question you think the team most needs to answer.

Simple instructions create more space for the interesting part:

the conversation that follows.

Team activities become particularly interesting when different people can legitimately see the same situation differently.

Suppose members of a team are asked to choose statements describing their greatest contribution.

There isn’t necessarily a correct selection.

• The individual has one perspective.
• Their colleagues may have another.
• That difference creates curiosity.

Why did you choose that?

When do we see that behaviour from you?

Which strength do we think you underestimate?

Is there something you believe you contribute that we don’t experience as often?

The activity isn’t testing whether somebody gets the right answer.

It is creating information the team can explore together.

Teams spend a lot of time discussing abstract concepts.

• Communication.
• Trust.
• Leadership.
• Collaboration.
• Accountability.
• But abstract concepts can be difficult to change.

A good team building activity can make them more concrete.

Instead of discussing whether the team communicates effectively, an activity might reveal:

• who speaks first
• who asks questions
• who challenges
• who listens
• who changes direction
• who seeks agreement
• who focuses on completing the task
• whose contributions are easily overlooked

Now the team has something observable to discuss.

Rather than:

“We need better communication.”

the conversation becomes:

“We noticed that three people made most of the decisions. What happens to the rest of us when that occurs at work?”

That’s considerably more useful.

This may be the most important characteristic of all.

A facilitator can run an excellent activity and still miss most of its value by moving immediately onto the next item on the agenda.

The activity creates the experience.

The debrief creates the learning.

Useful questions include:

What did you notice?

What surprised you?

Where did you disagree?

What made that easy or difficult?

Where does this happen in our everyday work?

What does this tell us about the team?

What might we do differently as a result?

Notice that these are mostly open questions.

The facilitator doesn’t need to explain what the activity supposedly demonstrated.

The participants already have the raw material.

Help them examine it.

There can be a temptation to wrap every activity up neatly.

“And what we’ve learned from that is…”

Sometimes that’s appropriate.

But teams are complex.

The more valuable outcome may be a question the team hasn’t finished answering.

Perhaps two colleagues realise they experience the same situation very differently.

Perhaps somebody discovers that a strength they value in themselves isn’t particularly visible to colleagues.

Perhaps the team recognises that it routinely avoids one type of conversation.

Those discoveries don’t necessarily need resolving before the workshop moves on.

A good team building activity can leave people curious.

And curiosity often keeps the conversation alive afterwards.

An exercise can be fascinating in the room and irrelevant by Monday morning.

The bridge back into work therefore matters.

Ask:

Where does this happen in our real work?

If the activity exposed different approaches to decision-making:

• Where do those differences appear in meetings?
• If it revealed communication preferences:
• Where are those preferences helping or hindering collaboration?

If people discovered differences between self-perception and how colleagues experience them:

What might they pay attention to differently?

The objective isn’t merely to understand the activity.

It’s to recognise the pattern outside the activity.

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This is where practical activities become valuable.

Not because people need another profile. But because they need opportunities to talk.

When teams discuss communication regularly:

• Awareness becomes understanding.
• Understanding becomes feedback.
• Feedback becomes action.
• Action becomes improvement.

That is where meaningful change begins.

The most successful team development activities are rarely those that provide the most information.

They are the activities that generate the most meaningful discussion.

• When people exchange observations.
• Share perspectives.
• Challenge assumptions.
• Recognise strengths.
• Acknowledge blind spots.

The conversation becomes more valuable than the model.

The framework simply provides a structure. The workshop facilitator provides the space.

Take a look at our free guide: 7 Questions That Improve Team Communication and learn how to improve team communication without another profile.

If your team has recently completed a profile workshop, the next step is not another profile.

The next step is conversation.

Because communication does not improve when people complete a profile.

Communication improves when people start talking differently to one another.