Consider These Creative Summer Team Building Ideas
Summer is the perfect time to invigorate your team’s spirit and foster a positive environment, and these fun summer team building activities can help. Between graduations, summer camps, and vacations, it can be especially tough to corral your colleagues for bonding time. But whether you gather the whole group or just a department or small group, you can make these work for your summertime team event.
Office Olympics
Take advantage of the sunny weather and head to the nearest beach or park for a day of friendly competition. Organize various team-based games like sand-castle building, beach volleyball or pickleball tournaments, and relay races. Of course, you can also arrange the Olympics in your office or another blessedly air-conditioned space, just with less volleyball. It’s all about collaboration, teamwork, and a healthy sense of competition in a relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere.
Plan a Pot Luck
This one’s easy to combine with a number of other options on this list. After all, summer team building activities can really work up an appetite! Whether you opt for pot luck or a catered affair, a food-focused outing in the park or a backyard barbecue offers a great chance for co-workers, especially those who have gone hybrid or fully WFH, to catch up and unwind without the pressure of more organized events.
Adventure Time
Unleash your team’s adventurous spirit by planning some sort of outdoor excursion. You might bond on a hiking trail, enjoy the green spaces of a nature preserve, discover the wonders of birding, or brave a ropes course. If you don’t have such options nearby, you can always go indoor rock climbing or axe throwing. Give your colleagues a chance to step outside their comfort zones.
Rooftop Happy Hour
For another unwind-and-socialize activity, organize an outdoor happy hour. You might find a restaurant or museum with a rooftop space, perhaps a beer garden, or even a local winery. As colleagues relax, the boss can give a short speech highlighting recent accomplishments, everyone can do some icebreakers, or you can divide into teams for a quick trivia game about your company. That way you’re doing more than just hanging out, if you want a little more team-building bang for your proverbial buck.
Volunteer for a Good Cause
Give back to the community and strengthen your team’s bonds through a shared purpose. Identify a local charity or non-profit organization and volunteer as a team for a day, or perhaps a weekend. It could be a beach or park clean-up, a community garden project, helping staff a local road race, or assisting at a local shelter. By working together for a meaningful cause, your team will develop empathy, unity, and a sense of fulfillment. (And if this doesn’t sound as “fun,” pair it with another, light-hearted activity as an extra reward for making your community a better place.)
Hit the Water
If you have access and you’re a relatively small group, plan a day of water-based activities. Your team can try kayaking or paddleboarding, rent a pontoon boat and hang out, or embark on a city boat tour. And while it might sound intimidating, you can also find whitewater rafting excursions for a wide range of ages and athletic abilities.
Team Building Games
And then of course there are games. Our many, many team building scavenger hunts and virtual games encourage team collaboration, improve colleagues’ communication skills, and fire up everyone’s creative engines in unique ways. Solve a murder mystery just about anywhere, including at zoos and aquariums. Enjoy all sorts of trivia games either in-person or virtually. Or get inventive on one of our more free-form Grab ‘n’ Go scavenger hunts, available outdoors or in your office.
Find More Fun
Contact us to learn more and start planning your summer team building scavenger hunt or virtual game today.
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Image credits: Lead image via Unsplash; group of four photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash; Volunteering photo by Anna Shvets