TEAM BUILDING - Team Building Activities Focusing on Communication

by Sherrie Scott, Demand Media

Effective communication is an integral part of an organization and can be achieved through a variety of team building exercises. Team building activities encourage trust, cooperation and communication within a group. Team building activities that focus on improving communication enhance how workers interact with one another. The activities generally focus on verbal, nonverbal and visual forms of communication.

Ice Breakers

An icebreaker is a brief team building activity designed to warm workers up to one another. These activities gets employees talking and working with each other cooperatively. Ice breakers can be about almost any topic.

An example of an ice breaker activity could be to go around the room and ask participants to explain one characteristic about themselves that most people would not know. A variation of this could be to go around the room and ask participants to describe the proudest moment they have ever experienced. Participants will not only get to know each other better but they will also feel good about themselves as well.

Verbal Communication

Team building activities that focus on verbal communication require workers to cover their eyes or perform an activity in which they cannot see what they are doing. An example of a verbal communication team building activity could be to have workers line up according to a particular characteristic or trait. Blindfolded or with eyes closed, employees can attempt to line up by date of birth, by height or hair color; lightest to darkest for instance. The purpose of the activity is to get employees to communicate as best they can about a characteristic without relying on eyesight.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication team building activities enhance employees' ability to communicate without speaking. With some activities, a select individual or group may speak while other may not. Charades is an ideal example of a nonverbal communication activity because one person must communicate by using body language only. A variation of this could be to break up in teams and have each teams act out a clue at the same time. The team who correctly guesses the clue first wins.

Written Communication

The purpose of written communication team building activities is to improve the way workers communicate in interoffice memos and emails. A written communication activity could be to give workers a simple "how to" problem and have them write out instructions on how to solve the problem in a limited number of steps. An example could be "how to tie a shoe" or "how to sharpen a pencil." The individual or group must effectively write down the instructions in five steps or less.