Build-A-Bike uses a series of challenges and activities to encourage team building. The activities are meant to be something of a caricature of behavior we can see in the workplace. The participants had a good time poking fun at themselves and each other as they moved through the exercises together. Kara Schillaci of the learning and development team said “this event was a huge success” “ Thank you for a great event”. The judges in the team building activities were the top leaders in the room and they had such a good time with their team. The group was very interactive, helped one another solve the clues to earn their parts to assemble the bikes.

Much more than a common team building scavenger hunt the Camaraderie Quest is a brainy, challenging, high-tech adventure that is tailor-made to your group and location every single time. No two adventures are the same! The custom course is composed of little known facts about the area, places that your group will need to take a picture of to prove they were there, and movies of the group completing fun tasks that add some comedy to the presentation at the end. Dee the contact person for the group said “I have lived in Dallas 25 years and this is the first time I have seen the Williams Square Mustangs” The Celanese group of auditors, some traveled from Shanghai and Hungary for this week long training were out of the box thinkers, the group was very creative in their answers to the clues. At the end of the event we viewed the pictures, videos and decided the winning team. The group all laughed at each others pictures and videos a quite a few of the participants said “this was crazy fun” and “great to get out of the training room”

Paul Mudlaff the sales Manager along with the sales department was an amazing group of individuals, they came prepared for fun. The charity arranged to pick up the bikes was the Boys & Girls Club of the greater Austin area. Brian, the Director of operations brought four kids with him but didn’t tell them why they were coming and they were so excited when they saw their new bikes. The sales group was so moved to hear that they had just built the first bikes these kids had ever had. One of the team members suggested giving the kids their first lesson around the room. The group all snacked on cookies, exchanged names, took photos and listened to the kids talk about school, home and their new bikes. “This is wonderful”, “what a great thing we just did”, “I loved this event” were some of the comments made by the sales team of Informatica of Austin.

The team building activities imply competition even though we tell them this isn’t a competition it is meant to show the importance of working together, “we build teams by building bikes”. When the group is split up into teams they each created a silo in their own little group and just tried to win. At the end of the event the grouped discussed what they saw, some groups were very competitive and didn’t work together. “this was eye opening and a great way to learn the importance of working together”. The contact person, Scott was involved in a Build-A-Bike team building event before and he wanted this group of plant managers to experience the “WOW” effect he had when the kids came to pick up the bikes, “that made the event”.  The director of the Boys & Girls Club Stafford branch showed up to the event with these very eager kids from the area to receive the bikes that the CSM Bakery Products plants managers built for them. The CSM group also provided snacks for the kids, they made them right there in the plant.

“This is so much fun, and I didn’t expect these women to open up like this. It was amazing.” – Nancy Patel the AAHOA WIHL Chair

Rescue Bear is a workshop that is designed to help people see the importance of matching a person with the right talent for the right role within the company. It helps participants identify the strengths of themselves and others and rely on those strengths when under pressure. As each group acquired different materials needed to build the stuffed animals, they realized that they needed each other to complete the task and the trading began. At the end of the workshop, the 125 stuffed animals that were put together and dressed in adorable outfits were donated to Houston Fire Department to ease the anxiety that children go through in a crisis. The Fire Chief spoke about also taking some of the bears to a local hospital and the police department.

Simple Games to Divide Your Group into Smaller Teams

• Team Building Poker: Just distribute playing cards out individuals and then ask them to make the best seven card stud hand. Don’t worry if many of your group members have no experience with poker or card games, because eventually, a team will need the card that each person is holding, and they will be recruited into a group. To setup the card so that you get an equal number of people on each team, divide the number of people in the entire group by seven and round up. For instance, if you have 30 people, 30 divided by seven is 4.28, so you’ll round that number up to five. Add royal flush sets for this many groups (in this case five groups). So, you’ll create a suited 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace for each team. Then add a nine of the same suits until you get to the total number of people in the whole group. In this case, you’ll add five nines to the stack of cards, because the original Royal Flush cards (five groups of five cards) will total 25 cards, and you have 30 people, you’ll need five additional cards so that every person receives a card. If you have additional people, add eights as well.
• A Numbers Game: This is a simple but effective game to divide up a big group (the bigger the group, the more fun and challenging this activity is). Setup is simple. Just divide the number of people in your group by the number of teams that you want to create and then create a group of numbers for each team and a table for each group to organize around. For instance, if you have 100 people, and you want 20 teams, you’ll have 20 tables, and you’ll create five separate number 1′s, five separate number 2′s, etc. until you have all twenty sets of numbers. Then just distribute a number to each person and ask them to group themselves by their numbers. The trick is to make sure that you don’t put the tables in numerical order. The more random the order and the more groups that you have, the more challenging the activity becomes. By the way, you don’t necessarily have to use numbers. You can use colors or any type of category to divide up the group.
• Barnyard Blitz: I have to admit that I was really resistant to this one until I actually saw it work, but it can be really funny. Similar to the the numbers game, each person will receive a card, but each card will have a specific barnyard animal on it like pig, rooster, goat, etc. Give the instructions for the group to divide themselves into teams based on the item on their card, but they have to do so without talking to each other and without showing anyone their card. Of course, the individuals will begin to make sounds and actions to describe their animal, and there will be lots of laughter throughout the room. Within just a few minutes, your group will lose all inhibition and begin to do crazy things to attract the attention of their team members. In fact, the less responsive the other team members are, the more aggressive and outgoing to individuals will become. This one is very funny!

Ice Breaker Games to Get the Group Moving

• Column Like You See ‘Em: Tie a series of ropes to a circular, elastic form like an inner-tube or you can also use the elastic workout bands that you have formed into a circle. Space the ropes equidistant apart with the number of ropes equal to the number of people on a team. So, if you have five people on a team, attach five ropes. Ask the teams to stock boxes using only the elastic bands. Teams will need to stretch the band using their ropes to make it big enough to fit over each box, and then slacken up on the ropes to grip the box. Then, the team must work together to stack each box without knocking over previously stacked boxes. You can number the boxes and ask the teams to stack the boxes in numerical order or stack the boxes by size. If you add some weight to each box, you can make moving them more difficult. To make the challenge more difficult, move all of the boxes into one general area and have each team stack their own boxes at the same time others teams are also stacking. Other groups will often try to sabotage each other if the other groups begin to get ahead. Offers good debrief material to what happens in the real world.
• Cheer Contest: A cheer contest is a great way to get the energy up in a room, because the contest uses positive peer pressure to get individuals to really cut loose and have some fun. After the group is divided into smaller groups, have each of them elect a team captain, come up with a team name, design a team flag, and also create a team cheer. Give them a 15 minute time limit and bunch of arts and craft to create their flag and let them go. At the end of the time limit, each group will take turns delivering their cheer. Choose a few finalists and have a “cheer-off”. Let the finalists each do their cheer one more time for the entire group and let the audience decide by applause who the winner is. When most people organizing a meeting come across an activity like this one, their automatic reaction is to think, “Oh, our group is so introverted or conservative that they’d never go for something like this.” That is a big mistake, because the group will actually use positive peer pressure to ramp up each consecutive cheer, because each group wants to outdo the previous groups. The energy builds and builds throughout the activity.
• Have You Ever?: Start by putting place markers of some kind on the ground arranged in a circle or square. Have on fewer place markers than you have people, so if you have 30 people, use 29 place markers. Have everyone start at a different place holder with the extra person in the center of the group asking the first question starting with, “Have you ever…?” The question can be anything that a lot of people in the group will have in common such as, “Have you ever been to the beach?” or “Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket?” When the people stationed at the place markers answer “yes” to the question, they must rush around the outside of the shape until they complete one full rotation, and then they can stand next to any place marker that doesn’t already have someone standing next to it. After every rotation, one person will be without a place holder, and that person will come to the center and ask the next question. This is a great exercise to let participants get to know each other a little better, because with every new rotation, they learn a little more about the experiences of their coworkers and what they have in common with each other.

We’ll add new games to this list every few months, so make sure and check back over and over for an updated list. Regardless of which game you choose, make sure and have some fun at your next meeting!

After the cheer competition, the teams were given envelopes with clues to be solved and redeemed for the bike parts to complete a whole bike. Once again, team cooperation came into play as the groups had no choice but to depend on their team members to be successful. When the bikes were completed, the local military charity brought in the children escorted by uniformed personnel to receive the bikes.

If your company or organization is looking for a fun team building experience with a charitable component, the Build-A-Bike is an exciting event that will satisfy your team building needs.

Alcoa included a Build-A-Bike team building event in their annual Best Practices conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this week. They wanted to give the participants a fun, energetic team building experience that included an element of philanthropy. Alcoa is the world’s leading producer of primary aluminum and fabricated aluminum, as well as the world’s largest miner of bauxite and refiner of alumina. In addition to inventing the modern-day aluminum industry, Alcoa innovation has been behind major milestones in the aerospace, automotive, packaging, building and construction, commercial transportation, consumer electronics, and industrial markets over the past 125 years. Alcoa employs approximately 61,000 people in 30 countries across the world. This group of 250 people gathered from four major business units across the globe.

Build-A-Bike is a series of activities, challenges and exercises that test a group’s ability to share information and resources, as well as their ability to approach problems from different perspectives. This event proved to be a real challenge for some of the more linear thinkers in the group, but once they could see that there is more than one way to solve a problem, they were successful in completely the task. At the end of the event, the group had built 40 bikes and had a great time together.

The bikes were donated to the Sarah Heinz House, which is a Boys and Girls Club in a neighborhood of Pittsburgh to which Alcoa has strong ties. The event was held in the convention center in downtown Pittsburgh, in one of the exhibition halls. As the group was gathered for a group photo and some closing remarks from their CEO, the rolling door at the far end of the hall began to slowly go up, and a school bus with 40 ecstatic kids on it came driving right into the hall! The looks on the kids’ and adults’ faces alike were priceless. The kids didn’t know what they were getting, and the adults had no idea that kids would be there! It was one of the best endings we’ve seen to this event.

In nearly every community across the country, there are kids whose families aren’t able to provide new bikes for them. If you are looking for a powerful way to give your team a really fun experience while giving back to the community, Build-A-Bike is a must-have team building event for your next conference!

Ellen Patnaude is Vice President of Instruction for the Northeast region. She is based in Detroit, Michigan, but she also teaches in Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toronto, Baltimore and other Northeast cities.

Interested in a Team Building Event of Your Own?