Team health is an important part to the long term success of your company. To make sure that a team stays healthy, its members need to actively contribute toward that end. There are many ways to build health in a team.. These activities will help you build trust among team members, encourage communication, and increase collaboration in your team. This, in turn, will result in a more effective and engaged team, providing a boost to your productivity.

Here are some concrete ways that team building exercises will help you company

Trust

Trust is anchored by understanding. It can be difficult to put your trust in a teammate if you do not understand how they assess problems or how they apply their solutions. Acquiring those understandings can be incorrectly overlooked by teams that are trying to move quickly. In the long term, this can create pain due to unresolved assumptions around work styles. Avoid this pain by doing team building exercises focused on trust. By doing so you can resolve issues and accelerate the building of trust. An activity can condense the process of building trust from weeks/months into a few hours. This new level of trust will create stronger collaboration amongst employees, in turn increasing their morale.

Back to Back:

Have your team form groups of 2. Then have the pairs sit back-to-back. One teammate has a blank paper and pencil, while the other is given a picture with an obscure shape on it. The teammate with the prompt must instruct the person with the paper what to draw. 

Creativity

When you are dealing with a new problem, or have a new feature to design, team building activities focused on creativity can unlock some very interesting new ideas. By putting people in a new arena of thinking and promoting their creative muscles you can find solutions to problems you wouldn't normally find. Doing this also gives your team a break from their routine helping them tackle problems with a fresh mind.

Unique Solutions:

Pick 3 objects that are very different from each other. Split your participants into even teams. Describe to them a scenario where each team has to solve a problem using only those objects. Let each team come up with scenarios separately and rank them.

Teamwork

In the modern workforce, groups of people work together to achieve large goals. Co-workers depend on one other working in concert, and doing it well, in order to reach these goals. Failure to do so will lead to misalignment, poor assessment of velocity, and poor communication. Each of which magnify any existing problems in the organization. On the other hand, when teamwork is a focus for the organization, your teams will end up both more efficient and innovative. Teamwork building activities are a great way to bring your team together and for people to learn each other's work styles and how to get the best out of each other's strengths and how to avoid/cover the weaknesses. 

Blind tent:

Break your team into groups of 5. Identify 1 member of the team as the leader and 4 others as the workers. Blindfold the workers and have the unblindfolded leader guide them in putting together a tent.

Celebrating

Celebrating your team and their work is an important part of employee happiness. When running a team it can be easy to put your head down and get lost in the day to day work. However, it is important to take time to celebrate key achievements and milestones. Recognition often motivates us to work harder and feel more invested in the work itself. This directly leads to success in business. Failure to celebrate successes, and only talk about failures, leads to a negative mindset amongst your team, which leads to increased employee turnover and poor work. Happy employees that feel like their work is valuable, and who are celebrated, are motivated and feel attached to your company. Take the time to celebrate your successes and have fun with your team. This will reinforce a positive workplace and provide something for the team to look forward to during hard times. Set goals for your team and individuals, when they complete them celebrate the fact.

Paper Plate Awards

Celebrating doesn't have to be expensive. Take some time near the end of a project and write up at least 2-3 fun “awards” for each member of the team. These can be anything from “most tickets closed” to “funniest commit message”. Be silly with them. 

By investing in team building activities focused on these aspects you will likely end up with a team that is more productive and happier at work.