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Like many of you, I have some strong opinions about team engagement activities.
Every conversation with a manager eventually ends up around the same place.
"We've tried a bunch of different activities. A few of them kind of worked, but most didn’t. We can’t really figure out the pattern.”
Of course, there’s obviously a pattern. I think you’re going to be pretty surprised, though. It’s not what most people would expect.
Managers seem to fall in love with all of these super-duper expensive formats because it makes these people feel like they’re making serious investments in culture.
I’ve never really bought into this. What tends to work is usually smaller and easy-going.
I’ll whittle through 10 of the most common team engagement activities I’m hearing people talk about at the moment.
If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, I think the short version of this is that consistency beats spectacle all the time.
Going into this, I want you to know two things…
You’ll find out what I mean by “maximally” shortly.
I know this sounds weird, but I don’t actually care all that much about the format of the team engagement activity.
There I said it.
But in all seriousness, I’m way more interested in the frequency.
How often are you really going to do this?
I’ve seen a lot of teams try rather elaborate offsites and expensive retreats.
The engagement scores end up drifting all the way back down inside a month.
And then on the flipside of that, I’ve watched teams run a five-minute weekly ritual and see engagement climb steadily for pretty much the whole year.
I think you could see what I’m trying to say.
Great team engagement activities show up on a schedule people can rely on.
What you want to do is give introverts and extroverts a way to participate without either feeling like they’re out of place.
I’m obviously not looking for team engagement activities that require a project manager to run.
The one thing I'd flag is that great activities for team engagement feel optional even when they're not.
If you have to remind people to show up, I feel like the format is fighting an uphill battle.
The rituals really working generate their own pull and I think that’ll always be the case.
I've grouped these into 10 team engagement activities and tools I see recommended online.
Brace yourself because I’ve just had a cup of coffee and I have strong opinions about each one.
Look, some people love a drink after work. I also know plenty of others resent every minute of it.
I can’t honestly say that I’m overly into it.
Mandatory happy hours skew heavily toward the extroverts and drinkers on your team.
Everyone else counts down until they can leave without looking rude.
If you're going to do drinks, I would suggest making them "opt-in" (and scheduling them during the workday).
Better yet, replace them with something that doesn't assume drinking is the default social lubricant.
I don't know a single person who's fallen backward into a colleague's arms and come out the other side more engaged with their work.
This team engagement activity is really just about shock value, let’s be honest.
The only way physical exercises land is when the team already knows each other well and treats the whole thing as a joke. I think that’s a very high bar to clear.
Skip for now.
You've been to one of these before. Probably a ton of them. Hopefully not.
A hotel conference room, a motivational speaker who peaked in 2011, some mediocre coffee, and a lunch buffet.
The energy peaks around 11am and it’s all gone by 2pm.
If you're going to do an offsite, you need to keep it short and lean on people from inside your own company to lead sessions.
Don’t worry about the motivational speakers; I’m sure they can find other gigs.
An escape room is super fun for the four people who love puzzles. The problem is, the other six are usually left standing around and watching them solve it.
It goes back to the introvert/extrovert thing I mentioned earlier.
You don’t want people feeling sidelined because that’ll just build resentment.
Only do them if the request came from your team.
Sure, send them if you want, but I’ve never seen these lead to much change.
What you get is a pile of data that you have to sort through.
If you need this data for whatever reason, I’d suggest short pulse surveys with clear follow-through.
Three questions asked monthly is fine. I would just avoid 50 questions in December that aren’t revisited until the same time next year.
Alright, now we're getting into the type of things I really do like.
An #book-club channel, a #dogs-of-the-team channel, a #cooking channel... these give people who wouldn't otherwise talk a low-pressure reason to interact.
The bar for participation is zero and that’s the whole point here.
I would just make sure someone is nudging conversation along in the first few weeks.
Interest channels die very fast if the first three posts get no reaction, so expect a bit of legwork early on.
Interestingly enough, there’s a team I know that’s kept the same #book-club channel active for years now, with people rotating in and out as their interests change over time.
It goes without saying that this type of longevity is super rare in any team engagement format.
For sure possible, though!
Team engagement tools really start to pay for themselves if they’re delivering on peer recognition.
I like Bonusly and Nectar. Those are tools that let team members give small shout-outs and micro-bonuses to each other without needing manager approval every time.
The magic is in the frequency (we know that small daily recognition totally crushes one big year-end review by a mile).
But I should warn you that peer recognition tools need to be modeled by leadership in the first month.
If the people at the top aren't using it, why would anyone else? It just becomes another HR checkbox.
It’s kind of timeless at this point.
A show-and-tell format where team members share something they're working on or excited about is one of the most underrated team engagement activities I've seen leaders use.
What you’ll find is that async works best.
You can get somebody to post a two-minute Loom and the rest of the team can react in the thread.
Just try to keep it all pretty broad. I don’t think making it strictly about work is a good idea.
If you let people share side projects and weird hobbies, you get the version of this game that stands a pretty good chance of building up culture and having some sort of lasting impact.
A learning circle is a small group that picks a topic and discusses it every two weeks or so.
The topics are almost never work-related.
Actually, some of the best ones I've seen have been about photography and video game design.
The reason this works is that people connect over shared learning way faster than they warm up to forced fun.
In one office that I worked in, I ended up watching two colleagues (who barely knew each other) end up close friends after six months in the same learning circle.
You can’t fake that kind of connection with an offsite.
This is the big one, folks. Yes, it’s really no secret that I’m very biased here, but I’m constantly seeing this outperform almost every other team engagement activity in workplaces.
Water Cooler Trivia sends a weekly trivia quiz to your team by email or Slack.
Everyone answers on their own time; results get shared the next day.
That's the whole thing. There isn’t any more to it than that.
You’re not having to think about scheduling or forced attendance.
This is actually a really good one for introverts and extroverts.
You’ll see what I mean when you give it a go.
I like how new hires tend to see personalities emerge before they’ve met people in person.
It’s pretty satisfying to see teams staying engaged with the same weekly quiz for years.
(Just to be clear, our trivia nerds mix up the questions and topics week in, week out!)
Let’s be honest, it’s almost unheard of for teams to be so engaged with a tool in this category.
Watch the quiz become a shared reference point. I hear about this all the time from teams.
People compare answers at lunch and start looking forward to Mondays.
I really think you should give this a shot if you want a good low-lift ritual to build up team culture.
You have to start small with any ritual.
We know from experience that the rollout matters as much as the choice of activity.
Botching the launch is the last thing you want to do, especially if you’ve got a rather good activity up your sleeve.
You also need to give people permission to opt out without judgment. A team engagement tool no one enjoys is honestly worse than no tool at all.
You want somebody on the team who's buzzing with excitement about the format. I guess you could probably call them an “advocate” for the activity or something like that.
This champion role is going to matter to you more than you realize (I've seen a lot of programs at companies live or die on one enthusiastic person).
The problem is, without that person, you’ll find that most engagement rituals fade by around week four or five.
I want you to put all of the big events and expensive vendors to one side and really think about what you need from a team engagement activity.
When it boils down to what is actually working on the ground, there’s not much spectacle going on. Leaders are way more interested in activities that are easy enough to be consistent with.
That’s the right approach to this as far as I’m concerned.
Big fan of Water Cooler Trivia and I’m not alone by any means. We’ve got over 1,200 groups playing this game every week right now.
Get a four week free trial with no credit card down and you can see what all the fuss is about for yourself.
