7 indoor team-building activities for 2023

With the rise of remote and hybrid working, it’s more essential than ever to pencil in some time for employees to have the opportunity to meet face-to-face and get to know each other. That’s where team-building exercises come into play.

A great indoor team-building activity is like having a delicious potluck dinner. Just as everyone brings their own unique dish to the table, team members bring their own unique skills and personalities to the activity.

With that in mind, let’s introduce Basejam—a marketplace to help businesses to find their perfect retreat. Instead of spending hours Googling places to hold your team-building events, Basejam provides a huge range of options in one single place.

Are you looking for some indoor team-building activity inspiration? Then read on…

What is indoor team-building?

Indoor team-building involves designing and participating in activities that encourage working as a team, often to achieve a common goal. These activities encourage collaboration, communication, and problem-solving. They can also help colleagues get to know each other better and appreciate each other's strengths and skills.

For instance, Atlassian is known for their unique approach to team-building, which includes a quarterly program called "ShipIt Day". During ShipIt Day, teams are given 24 hours to work on any project they want, as long as it is related to the company's products or services. The goal is to encourage creativity, collaboration, and innovation among employees.

Why should you organise team-building activities?

Indoor team-building activities have lots of benefits. Here are three that best describe their importance:

Improve relationships at work

Indoor team-building activities help to improve work relationships. Working together, employees will be encouraged to socialise and collaborate, typically with people they don’t have much contact with in their daily routines. These events allow colleagues to discover what they might have in common.

Reduce stress

According to a survey by Ciphr, 79% of adults in the UK feel stressed one or more times per month. The same survey shows that for 23% of these stressed-out adults, work was the biggest factor. Team-building activities can ease this stress and help employees associate work with fun and adventure instead.

Humanise your workforce

During work environments, it can be easy to forget that colleagues are people too. This is particularly true for large companies. Employees have their own lives, families, hobbies, and ambitions that are often entirely separate from work. Indoor team-building activities help employees view their co-workers as the complex, multi-faceted individuals they are.

Top considerations for choosing indoor team building activities

If you’re now gripped with excitement for planning your indoor team-building activities, that’s fantastic. But before jumping head-on into the process, take a look at these top considerations:

• Budget: Team-building events vary greatly in cost. Work out your budget first and plan around it.
• Participation: Offer employees several dates for the event and see which one is most convenient.
• Feedback: Prepare a feedback survey before your event for participants to answer afterwards. This can help you gauge its success.

7 effective indoor team building activities

If you’re ready to plan your team-building event, your first port-of-call is to determine the location. Recent studies show that location is important when it comes to team-building days or weekends. In a survey, 13% of respondents said that an exciting location is their top priority for such events.

Whether you want a cosy cabin in Cornwall or a well-being retreat in a Sussex nature reserve, Basejam can provide the perfect destination for your team-building activities.

Browse stunning destinations and tailor your package to your company’s event goals. Now, we’re going to look at seven fun and effective team-building activities:

1. ‘What’s My Name?’

Great for breaking the ice, ‘What’s My Name?’ is a simple but fun game that gets people talking. The only things you need are sticky notes, pens, and people.

Here’s how you play:

1. Everyone writes a name on a sticky note. This can be anyone that players are likely to know; from a famous actor to a TV chef, or even a colleague.
2. Each person then sticks the note on someone else’s back. Everyone should be able to see the name, except for the person whose back it’s stuck to.
3. The players spend time mingling with each other. They will ask each other “yes” or “no” questions to find out the name of the person on their back.
4. When they’ve guessed correctly, they may remove the sticky note.

2. ‘Count to 20’

This is a challenging one. With ‘Count to 20’, participants are sorted into small groups of around five or six, depending on how many of you there are. Everybody closes their eyes and puts their head down. The team must then count to 20.

Sounds simple, right? Not really!

The twist in this game is that only one person can say a number at a time. If two or more people say a number, the team has to start again at “1”. This can be tricky because you don’t know who is going to speak or when. Eventually after a bit of trial and error, a winning team will emerge.

3. Office trivia

This office trivia game is brilliant because the office is the one thing you know you all have in common.

Here’s how the game works:

1. Write a list of office-related questions on cards with their corresponding answers. For example, “How many people work in HR?” or “How much does a cheese sandwich cost in the cafeteria?”
2. Split people into even teams.
3. Have a big scoreboard with the name of each team on it.
4. Ask each question out loud and give teams a little time to discuss the answer.
5. Whichever team shouts the answer out first is awarded a point.
6. The team with the most points at the end wins the game.

Book a venue with a large screen for scorekeeping to make the game feel more like a game show!

4. ‘Big Foot’

Big Foot can be tricky, but it’s well worth the effort

All participants are blindfolded. Then, ask them to arrange themselves in a line, with the people with the smallest feet first and the biggest feet last. The catch here is that participants are not allowed to share their shoe sizes. They’ll need to come up with inventive ways to work together to get it right!

5. ‘Zombie Escape’

Zombie Escape games are all the rage right now. Here is a team-building activity to incorporate the thrilling concept into your work even

One person is appointed to be the ‘zombie’. Everyone else is locked in a room with them. Tie the zombie to a rope on one side of the room and tell them to stretch out their arms in true zombie fashion.

The rest of the group is given a set of clues, puzzles, and riddles. Each answer they get right gets them one step closer to receiving the key to escape the room. However, as every 5 minutes goes by, the zombie will be given another foot of rope to get closer to the group of survivalists.

6. ‘Minefield’

Minefield is an indoor game that needs a little more space than most of the previous activities. However, it is a fun game that requires players to give instructions to (and follow instructions from) their colleagues.

Here are the instructions:

1. In a large, empty room, place various objects on the floor. These can be anything; shoes, for example. These objects will be the ‘mines’.
2. Pair participants up, with one member of each pair blindfolded.
3. The other person must shout instructions for the blindfolded participant to make their way across the room, avoiding the destructive mines. The person blindfolded is not allowed to talk at all until they make their way across.
4. Time for each team to determine the winner. The team that takes the least amount of time to make it across wins.

7. Dinner at a restaurant

Finally, what better way to get to know each other than going to dinner at a restaurant? To make it more impactful, have a set plan arranged so that everyone sits next to someone from a different department. Give participants a challenge to learn five new things about the person sitting to their right by the end of dinner.

Conclusion

Team-building activities are always a hit with employees. They offer ample opportunity for people to get to know each other and learn collaboration skills. Take your time devising the activity list, and don’t be afraid to get some input from different people within the company. Create lots of hype about it before you go to encourage as many attendees as possible.

Thinking of where to host your company team-building event? Basejam has lots of exciting destinations available. Sign up to explore your options for free!