In this series of posts on team building I’ll be sharing different ideas I’ve used for team activities with various groups. Some activities work well in the online environment and in-person while others must be done in-person.

My current teams

Currently I use team building activities with 3 groups …

• Work – I am part of a team of 15 distributed across the U.S. All of us work from home. My company uses Microsoft Teams for calls, and individuals can choose to use audio and video or audio only.
• Teens – I teach an in-person Bible study class for young teens, ages 13-15. Some have studied the material in advance, but others have not. I use team activities to create consensus and introduce topics.
• Adults – I also occasionally teach an in-person Bible study class for adults. While most of the other teachers go directly to the study materials, I’ve found that all ages enjoy activities to mix things up a bit.

Survey Guess

The classic show Family Feud has been around since 1976 in 3 separate productions. The basic idea behind the gameshow is that 2 families compete for money by guessing the likely responses to surveys conducted by the show’s producers.

For my team building, I found a survey and asked my teams to guess what percent selected each choice.

The Chapman Survey of American Fears is a survey of 100 fears. I chose different fears for each of my teams. For the work team, I selected cybersecurity-related fears. For the teens, I chose fears that might be of interest to them. For the adults, I picked fears related to death and dying, the topic of the study.

FEARS

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

While writing this post, I found a different survey to demonstrate how easy it is to use this activity. Discover Happy Habits, a productivity blog, included these results on the New Year’s Resolution Statistics page.

• Successful after 1 week – 75%
• Successful after 2 weeks – 71%
• Successful after 1 month – 64%
• Successful after 6 months – 46%
• Participants who had unrealistic goals – 35%
• Participants who didn’t track progress – 33%
• Participants who forgot their resolutions – 23%
• Participants with too many resolutions – 10%

You could use this list to ask your team to guess the response for each item and then provide the actual percentages.

Considerations

I’ve found this activity to generate engage every time I’ve tried it. Teams have to discuss each item to agree on a single answer. People are interested to see the comparisons and often surprised at the results.

You can keep everyone together in a large group or divide into 2-3 smaller groups, where each group discusses quietly and then provides a guess, with or without a justification.