My Top 4 Warm-Up Exercises For Team Building
Improving Connection & Cohesion in the Team
How you start a meeting sets the tone for the rest. Do you dive right into it? Does your group need time to warm up? Do you use that time for team building?
For me, as my teams are working in a hybrid setting, when we have a larger team meeting (like a retrospective or a workshop), I always try to bring some team-building aspect into it.
This fits most naturally into the beginning of the meeting, to double as the warm-up activity, but it doesn’t have to.
And only you can decide if your meeting really needs a warm-up or team-building exercise at all. Maybe you can go straight to the topic, maybe there are too many new faces and you need to spend time on an introduction round.
In my case, I’m rarely doing icebreakers, defined as:
“a game or joke that makes people who do not know each other feel more relaxed together.”
Simply because most meetings I organize nowadays are with teams that have been meeting together for some time.
But, just because they’ve been meeting together, doesn’t mean they really know each other. To improve how teams collaborate I always bring some small element of team building into the day.
This pays dividends if you do it consistently.
I want to share some of my most frequently used and successful exercises — from the extremely simple that anyone can do with minimal effort, to ones requiring a bit of pre-work. We’ll build towards my all-time favorite.
4. Asking a question
Time: 5 minutes
Group size: 3–5 people
How it works
The simplest and easiest one I use is just to ask a question and get everyone’s answer.
For example:
“What’s your favorite holiday?”
“What’s your favorite type of music?”
Why I like it
Everyone starts to warm up as they have to speak. It’s also an interesting conversation because the questions are non-work related so there’s not a lot of pressure to the answers.
It’s a fast activity — just one question and we move on. Yet this provides some talking points so that the team might be able to find things in common to discuss later on and helps me personally to get to know my team better.
3. Common ground
Time: 5–10 minutes
Group size: Perfect for a small group of 3–4 people, and if you have a bigger group — just split into smaller groups of that size.
How it works
You go around in a circle and have to mention one thing you have in common with the other team members in your group, starting with the word “I”.
Everyone has to agree that the phrase is indeed something they share in common. If not, the person needs to think of something else.
For example, as I’m currently in the marketing team it tends to start with:
“I work in marketing”
And we tend to go through a round or two of the basics:
“I have brown hair”
“I am wearing black shoes today”
Eventually, we get to actually interesting things in common like hobbies.
If you have multiple groups, but not too many, you can also merge the groups for a final round afterward.
Why I like it
It’s fast, easy and quick for people to understand. It gets everyone on their feet to move into the groups and after a few minutes of the basic rounds, there’s always a bit of laughter.
It’s also repeatable — because you can mix up the groups or give them a theme to find common ground about.
2. Find someone who…
Time: 20–30 minutes
Group size: Up to 50
How it works
Everyone has a list and has to find one person in the room that meets that trait.
For example:
Find someone who…
- Has 2 children
- Has a dog
- Works out of building XYZ
The person who finishes their list first comes to find me (as people will have been walking around the room) and we do a check of the questions and who meets each one. They then also win a small (token) prize.
So you see, I mix the list of things to find up a bit — between work and personal. If it’s a group that I know well, I think about the questions to make sure there will be someone who fits each one.
The normal rule is that only one person can fit each trait, so they have to really search for people who could fit different answers.
If it’s a large group, then you can set different rules such as maybe they can use up to 3 answer slots for the same person. Because otherwise, nobody would be able to finish. You could also simply time the game and call time and whoever has the most answers at that time wins.
For this activity, I have to prepare & print in advance a one-page Word document and bring pens. The document simply has the words “Find someone who…” and underneath, a table with 2 columns: one for a trait and the other a space for where people will write names.
Why I like it
It gets everyone up and moving around. They really need to talk to a number of people to be able to complete the exercise.
As we have a mix of personal and work-related questions, I always use the chance to educate about a few initiatives.
For example, when I did this activity at the monthly Director’s meeting of my company, I deliberately chose things we had talked about in past meetings.
- Knows what project XYZ is about
- Knows what this acronym stands for
As not everyone knew the answers, this allowed us to very quickly refresh a couple of topics.
We also had a group there of around 50 people and it was incredible how many people sit in that meeting every month without knowing what names or departments the other people they see each month work for.
I originally did this exercise just in my team, thinking it would be best for team building in a small or medium-sized group, but it worked even better for the large group.
1. Kudos cards
Time: 10 minutes (+15–20 minutes pre-work)
Group size: Under 10
How it works
Everyone attending the workshop has to think of one way to praise each of the other members attending the workshop.
They can write more than one for people, but they have to write at least one for everybody.
They submit this praise anonymously on Kudos cards (or just any piece of paper if you don’t have the cards) to me at the beginning of the meeting.
I then read out the cards publicly to everyone at the beginning of the meeting, and give everyone the cards they received for them to keep.
Why I like this
The best thing about this exercise is it starts the workshop with super positive energy. Everyone is excited to receive their feedback — and as everyone is going to get a reasonable number everyone is happy.
It really brings the team together and they feel appreciated by their peers. The feeling is not just something for one day but extends throughout the week.
The main reason this activity should be limited to ten people or under is just because it takes time to read through all the praise.
I’ve done this activity in 2 ways: one when the praise writing was done during workshop time and the other when it was done in advance, and it really works better as pre-work.
If you give the task a few weeks in advance, then everyone has the opportunity to properly think about it and give more meaningful feedback.
Unless your team is a team of managers, they might not be in the habit of giving positive feedback so directly to other people. Even though it’s anonymous, it can be intimidating.
So if you’re considering doing everything together in the workshop as I did the first time, trust me, do it in advance.
This activity is another repeatable one because people love getting praise. If they do it often and know they might have to think of some examples, they’ll get better at finding the words. So you actually improve the feedback culture along the way.
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