Taking your employees or team members on a team-building outing is a good way to build camaraderie and improve the overall effectiveness of the event. There are so many options available for inviting your team out for a social event or a structured team-building activity that you can be assured that the right activity is waiting for you.
Benefits of Team Outings
Team outings can be excellent group activities and team-building events because they bring people together in a shared space outside of the office or virtual workspace. These events can be pleasurable activities designed to build camaraderie among team members or they can be more focused skill-building workshops (or they can serve both functions). These events can also serve as a good way to provide your team and employees with much-needed rest and relaxation after a long week of work or as part of a celebration of a milestone or accomplishment. Regardless of what you are aiming for, a team-building activity or group event is a great way to bring the members of your team together.
Team outings, in particular, are beneficial because they offer the opportunity to get employees working together, socializing and getting to know each other outside of the workplace, which can be great for building cohesion and developing bonds between team members. There is something freeing about getting together outside of the office to meet up and participate in a shared activity that makes these events more effective at building bonds and creating a more sociable and pleasant work environment. Team outings can also show your team that more thought and energy went into planning an event, particularly if it is a celebration of an accomplishment. These team outings are excellent ways to encourage team members to view themselves as colleagues and co-contributors rather than people they just happen to share an office with.
A Fancy Dinner
If you are aiming for simplicity, there are few options better for a social team outing than an evening at a nice restaurant enjoying a meal as a collective group. These events are incredibly low-stress ways to bring team members together and because no one really has to do anything, they are free to focus on their time together. Since a meal is only going to involve sitting around a table and enjoying one another’s company, these are great events to serve as team celebrations, as rewards for a job well done or as an opportunity for members of your team to get to know one another in a low-stakes, sociable environment. Since it comes with a meal, it also encourages greater participation and attendance, which can sometimes be difficult to achieve when planning an outside-of-work activity. The drawback to these outings is that they are only really useful as social events and the structure of a restaurant might not be conducive for large teams. Still, if you are looking for an easy and effective way to celebrate your teams, get people socializing and improve workplace morale, a simple dinner outing can be a great way to go.
Bar Trivia
Trips to the bar for happy hour is a tried and true way for co-workers to socialize with one another, and for small teams, this can be an ideal way to spend time together having fun outside of the context of work. More and more locations are regularly hosting trivia events, which can serve as a way to provide structure to an otherwise pleasant evening activity. Bar trivia provides a fun and competitive atmosphere while remaining a low-stress space for getting to know one another and starting to work better as a team. Trivia can also be a great way to learn new things about your team members, like discovering someone’s eclectic knowledge of film or music, which can, in turn, create even more opportunities for socializing. Plus, since the event is low-stakes, it is a great chance to spend time with other people in a bar, having drinks and treating coworkers as colleagues and friends. These events are a bit unstructured and they require you to find a suitable venue (and since these events tend to run on weeknights at bars, some employees might not feel all that keen about going), but these events can also become fixtures of employees’ weeks, which has solid long-term benefits.
Escape Rooms
If you are considering a trivia-like event but are looking for something with a bit more structure (and less reliance on random knowledge of the history of the 1970s, for instance), you may want to see if any local businesses in your area run escape rooms. An escape room is a kind of puzzle-solving game wherein small teams enter a room filled with puzzles, riddles and other small games that they will need to discover and complete in sequence to unlock the door and escape the room in a fixed time limit. Increasingly, escape rooms are becoming popular places to bring team members and employees because they are simultaneously enjoyable activities and encourage people to communicate and think laterally about ways to solve problems and overcome challenges. This means that escape rooms can be fun bonding activities that also serve to help participants hone their skills and work better as a team. The structure of these events may seem intimidating at first (since it is an elaborate game event), but on the whole, escape rooms are a good compromise for organizers looking for a team outing that is both fun and practical.Â
Local Attractions
While it may seem a bit simplistic, sometimes, if you are looking for a fun team outing, you should consider some of the local attractions often cited as things to visit when visiting your company. This is obviously going to vary depending on where you are located, but if you are centered in a major American city, there are likely a lot of local attractions that are worth visiting with your team. Most cities have a wide variety of museums, aquariums, gardens and historical landmarks that are worth visiting, and a day trip to any of these locations can be a good way to give your team a chance to socialize with one another, build connections and just appreciate their city and their employers a bit more. These are also easily repeatable events since there are likely to be many different attractions you can visit. These events do tend to involve a bit more planning and logistics than some others since many employees won’t live all that close to these attractions (particularly in a big city like NYC, LA or Chicago) and sometimes, they can be fairly crowded, but these are still activities worth considering, especially if you are looking for something more family-friendly.
City Tour
If you want to cut out a lot of the process of planning and organizing a visit to a local attraction, you may be able to contract a company that runs city tours. These events, which can be walking tours or are often offered by bus or boat, will take your employees on a guided tour of local attractions and sights. These tours are a great way to allow your employees to visit and explore the city, which can be a boon for new teams, and they are broadly welcoming for just about everyone since they aren’t competitive, require minimal planning and aren’t held someplace like a bar or a particular restaurant. They are also a great way to take in local culture and history and provide a shared experience for employees. The drawback is that these can be fairly restrictive in terms of providers and plans depending on the size of your team and the city you plan on touring. This isn’t to suggest that these aren’t excellent team-building activities, but more so than other events, you’ll need to be judicious in exploring your options and shopping around to find the right tour for you and your team.
Fitness Courses
Another option for planning a fun team-building event is to schedule a fitness or exercise event at a gym or a dedicated facility for team-building fitness activities (like a rope course). These activities combine the benefits of a group team-building event and a refreshing and rejuvenating fitness experience all in one, making them a good way to accomplish two goals simultaneously. For regular fitness events, you may want to consider something like a guided stretching or yoga course or another low-impact exercise activity designed to give your employees a light workout focused on the kinds of stretching and physical activity that will improve health and productivity. More focused providers offer outdoor fitness events like rope courses or climbing activities that encourage teamwork and communication while getting them involved in a day of physical fitness and activity. The drawback is that these events can be a bit more intimidating than other team-building events, and they aren’t as easily scheduled around the workday without cutting into business hours (though not impossible).
Team-Building Weekends
Sometimes, you want to go all out on a workplace outing and a team-building weekend (or other few days during the week) can be a great way to do it. In these events, participants will travel to a dedicated facility, usually somewhere scenic and out of the way, and they will spend a weekend participating in team-building activities, socializing with their coworkers and generally building meaningful relationships and work skills within the office. These weekends can be fairly structured, with events and workshops happening regularly or more freeform, allowing individuals to enjoy the location on their own or socialize with their colleagues as they see fit. These can be among the most expensive and time-consuming team outings to plan and organize, but they can also be among the most productive for your team, especially if those teams are small and will be working closely together for an extended period of time. They can also be a good way to get team members to know one another if they are just starting up on a major project. While this isn't the perfect solution for all teams, it is definitely one to consider if you are looking for an outing that will pay long-term dividends.
Workplace Retreat
It can be a bit straightforward, but sometimes, it can be productive simply to move aspects of the workday out of the office and into another well-equipped space. Workplace retreats are often a good way to accomplish this by letting you move your office temporarily into a well-designed and crafted space intended for this purpose. Oftentimes, these retreats take place a the same natural locations built with team-building weekends in mind, and they offer a wonderful space to do regular employee training activities, hold important conferences and meetings or otherwise give employees a change of scenery. This may seem simple, but your employees may find this a revitalizing and re-invigorating way to spend a few days working, particularly if it is in a scenic locale or an interesting part of the country. These retreats tend to be more time-consuming to run and organize (and may not be suitable for all employees depending on their family situations and other factors), but if the planning is achievable, these events can be a good way to hold a team outing without breaking workflow.
Scavenger Hunts
Scavenger hunts can be fun games to add a bit of structure and competitive edge to a team outing, be it to the city, a local attraction, or just letting your employees manage the scavenger hunt independently. This kind of activity encourages communication, problem-solving skills and teamwork, all of which are skills your employees will benefit from developing. These kinds of activities are easy to organize and add interest and fun to virtually any other outing your team participates in. Scavenger hunts can also help structure team outings to unfamiliar places, like during a work retreat or weekend trip. Scavenger hunts can also be designed to allow for more creative problem-solving and open interpretation in terms of the items collected (or places visited or photos taken), and this kind of structure can help encourage creative thinking and make the event all the more enjoyable for participants.
Nature Excursions
Finally, you can opt to bypass a great deal of the complicated planning or event organizing and just take your team on a nature excursion, be it a hike, a visit to a park or a trip to a lake (or some other nature site). These kinds of nature outings are a good, low-stakes environment for all kinds of team-building activities, and they blend some of the best features of other common team outings, like the physical exertion of a group workout (if you are going on a hike) or the thrill of visiting a new place for the first time (if you are, say, visiting a national park). There are a lot of ways to appreciate nature, and almost all of them make for excellent team outings that can be easy to organize. The downside is that being outside in nature, these outings are more subject to weather conditions, and by and large, your options for things like hikes or visits to parks will be limited based on where you are located.
What About Virtual Teams?
While the idea of a team outing can be incredibly fun, there are often significant logistical hurdles to clear and wrangling your team can be somewhat challenging, especially if the event requires them to do more than just show up at a local restaurant or bar. CourseHorse understands this and aims to take some of the difficulty out of planning and organizing an event with their virtual team-building workshops and events. These events replicate the feel of a team outing without requiring your employees to leave their homes for the workshop, and CourseHorse is on hand to organize all of the major aspects of the event and handle the logistics of operating it. If the workshop requires materials or ingredients CourseHorse will ship them directly to participants, and if the event requires a host, a CourseHorse expert facilitator or instructor will be there to lead the workshop.
If you are looking for a fun, competitive event to replicate the feel of bar trivia or an escape room, CourseHorse has a wide variety of different Virtual Trivia events and Virtual Escape Rooms. These fun team-building activities will test participants' knowledge and problem-solving skills and can get members of your team working together. In the Virtual trivia events, teams will compete to answer trivia questions about various topics. This is a customizable event, and you can have the emcee focus on general knowledge trivia or more specialized topics, like movie trivia, music trivia, or sports trivia. Virtual escape rooms take the structure of the escape room, wherein participants solve a series of puzzles to escape the proverbial room in which they are trapped. These games are a good way to get teams working together on complex tasks that require lateral thinking and problem-solving skills, and they are fun in their own right. CourseHorse offers a variety of different virtual escape rooms, ranging from a Virtual Escape Room: Murder Mystery event that sees participants piecing together clues to solve a crime before the murderer strikes again to nostalgic a pair of Escape the 90s and an Escape the 2000s events where participants will be rewarded for their knowledge of those two decades.
If you want a team-building experience that doubles as a practical skills lesson to help bring your team into the fold, consider a Coursehorse cooking or mixology event. In these courses, professional chefs will help your team learn how to make pies, pastas, pizzas and a whole slew of cocktails depending on the course you choose for your team. In all of these events, packages of ingredients and supplies will be shipped directly to your participants to ensure that the event runs smoothly. Participants tend to enjoy these kinds of events because they learn practical skills that they can apply to other cooking or drink-mixing activities, and they end the class with a dessert, meal or drink to enjoy. If you want to replicate a team outing to a restaurant or a bar in the virtual space, these workshops are a great place to look.
Creative group workshops are also very popular ways to unite teams and help them bond over shared activities. CourseHorse offers a range of creative and artistic workshops, including a Virtual Paint and Sip Party, a Virtual Terrarium Making Workshop, and a Virtual Clay Hand Building Workshop. In these programs, participants will be shipped a box of supplies and receive guided instruction in the process of creating a work of art that reflects their personal styles and can be displayed in their home or office. In the Virtual Terrarium Workshop, participants will combine rocks, succulents and mosses together to create a living work of art and in the Virtual Clay Hand Building Workshop, participants will make their own desk jar or bowl using air drying clay. The Virtual Paint and Sip Party is an easily customizable event that will see participants enjoying an evening of drinking wine and painting on a pre-sketched canvas (that you can choose from a collection of images or provide your own photo to be painted). All of these events come with the supplies shipped directly to your participants and all of the packages can include a bottle of wine added for an additional fee.
Finally, CourseHorse offers a Virtual Icebreaker Event for helping teams get to know each other and being working together as coworkers and colleagues. These events, which can also include things like a Virtual Scavenger Hunt and Virtual Game Show Bingo are fun and accessible events in which members of your team can get together and start interacting with each other in a sociable environment. These programs offer teams the chance to get to know each other in a fun and lightly competitive environment and all of the games are easily done from the comfort of your participants’ homes. An experienced CourseHorse facilitator will be on hand to run the event, ensuring that your participants are involved in the game and that you don’t need to handle any of the mechanics of running the icebreaker games. If you can’t manage to get your team together to travel outside of the office for a teambuilding icebreaker meeting, this is a wonderful opportunity to achieve the same goals in a virtual setting.