Ditch cringeworthy exercises for low-pressure activities that build rapport and genuine workplace friendships.
Patrick Evenden
Head of Thought Leadership, EMEA
Workday
Team-building activities don’t have to feel like another calendar obligation. With the right team engagement ideas, they can give employees something to actually look forward to.
Team engagement activities help employees get to know one another, break up the usual routine of the work day, and build stronger connections across teams. There’s a business case for getting your engagement strategy right, too: Gallup reports that highly engaged teams are 23% more profitable and up to 18% more productive.
Great team engagement doesn’t need a complex playbook. It just needs to be effortless to join, flexible to run and rooted in who your team already is.
Highly engaged teams are 23% more profitable and up to 18% more productive.
Report
Team engagement is the level of connection and commitment employees feel towards their team and its long-term goals. It shows whether people feel invested in the team’s success, comfortable sharing their ideas, and motivated to work well with the people around them.
Managers have a major influence on those conditions. According to Gallup, managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement, which means they can actively shape it and improve it with the right strategies.
Team engagement activities are one way to boost engagement. They create dedicated opportunities for employees to build relationships, contribute outside their usual responsibilities, and simply enjoy being part of the team.
The best activities reinforce the company culture managers are already building every day and bring it to life in a shared, low-pressure environment.
There’s no single activity that will engage every team. Use these ideas as a starting point, then adapt them to your employees, working environment and goals.
Here are 12 reliable team engagement ideas you can implement in your business:
Set aside a few minutes each week or month for employees to share wins and recognise one another. Keep the definition of a “win” broad. A breakthrough on a difficult project counts, but so does helping a colleague get unstuck or making steady progress on something challenging.
Keep the ritual simple enough to sustain. Over time, it can make peer recognition a more consistent part of the team culture and give good work more visibility. A little friendly competition can go a long way to making a team feel more cohesive.
Give team members 15 to 20 minutes to host an informal “show and tell”. The key is flexibility: topics can range from practical workplace skills (like mastering advanced Excel macros) to personal passions (like the art of pickling or homemade brewing).
Let employees choose what they want to share and keep the format informal. These sessions give colleagues a chance to learn from one another while spotlighting interests and sparking conversations that might not otherwise come up at work.
Rally your team around a low-stakes challenge that sits outside their daily deliverables – like streamlining an outdated workflow or testing an unconventional fix for a chronic pain point.
Set a clear goal, then let the team decide how they’ll tackle it. Working towards something new together can create fresh energy and give employees a different way to collaborate.
Stepping into an experimental space breaks up routine fatigue, unlocks hidden leadership, and gives colleagues a fresh environment to build creative momentum together.
Pair employees who don’t usually work together for a casual 20-minute conversation. Rotate the pairings so people have opportunities to build relationships beyond immediate collaborators.
Keep it informal and optional, rather than prescribing what people should discuss. For hybrid and remote teams especially, these conversations can recreate some of the spontaneous connection that happens more naturally when people share a workplace.
Create a recurring “ask me anything” session with a manager or senior leader. Let employees submit questions ahead of time, including anonymously if that makes it easier to raise sensitive topics.
The value comes from making leadership more accessible and giving employees a direct way to ask about the decisions that affect them the most. Managers should also follow up when a question can’t be fully answered in the moment.
Turn professional development into a team sport by having employees collectively select one skill to master over a focused, multi-week sprint. Whether it’s mastering data visualisation or refining active listening, the team curates resources, tests new techniques in real time, and gathers weekly to trade insights.
Hyper-focusing on a single capability grounds theoretical learning in daily work, transforming routine skill-building into an energising, shared experiment.
Give one employee a few minutes during a regular team meeting to take colleagues behind the scenes of their work.
The spotlight could focus on a project, a challenge they recently worked through, or an aspect of their role colleagues don’t know about. Rotating through the team gives employees greater visibility while helping everyone understand how their colleagues contribute to shared goals.
Ask the team a simple question: What’s one thing we could make better?
Choose an issue the team can realistically influence, then work together on an improvement. Keep the scope manageable enough that employees can see something happen as a result of the conversation.
That follow-through is what makes the exercise engaging as well as building trust. Employees get a meaningful voice in improving their own team experience and can see the impact of contributing.
When the team reaches an important goal, spend some time talking about how they got there rather than immediately moving on to the next priority.
Call attention to work that may not have been highly visible and recognise the people who helped move things forward. Sharing the story behind the result makes employee recognition more specific and gives the team a chance to reflect on what worked.
Set aside time for a team activity, but give employees options for how they participate. Some might prefer a social activity, while others would rather use the time to learn something or contribute to a cause.
Giving employees a choice makes the activity easier to adapt to different personalities and interests. It also gives the team some ownership over how they spend the time.
Pair employees from different roles or functions and have them spend an hour learning how the other person works. This could be a short job shadow or simply a walkthrough of a typical project.
The goal is to give employees a clearer view of what happens beyond their own role. That perspective can make it easier to understand colleagues’ needs and identify ways to work together more effectively.
Sometimes the easiest way to find an engaging activity is to ask employees what they’d actually like to do.
Give the team realistic parameters, such as a budget or amount of time, and invite employees to suggest and choose an option. Check in periodically about existing activities, too.
Giving employees a say helps managers spend time on things the team genuinely values rather than maintaining traditions no one particularly enjoys.
Team engagement activities don’t have to mean elaborate events or traditional team-building exercises; they can happen in small moments.
Team engagement activities don’t have to mean elaborate events or traditional team building. As these ideas show, engagement can happen in small moments: recognising a contribution during a team meeting, giving employees a chance to share what they know, or creating an opportunity for colleagues who rarely interact to connect.
The common thread is that each activity gives employees a meaningful way to participate in the team beyond completing their individual work. Some build stronger relationships. Others create opportunities for learning, recognition or employee input.
That gives managers plenty of room to experiment. The right mix will depend on the team, but the goal stays the same: create more opportunities for employees to feel connected to the people they work with and invested in what they accomplish together.
Report
A gap between effort and impact is the real ROI problem. Discover the solution.