Hellobee Boards

I think a scavenger hunt would be fun. The concerns that come to mind are how much in advance planning/work you would have to do to set it up (unless it’s like “find the Coach store” or organized around mall fixtures already in place) and whether the mall management would be ok with a scavenger hunt taking place.

I recently had to organize team building activities and also partook in some organized by someone else and the best ones were going to an escape room (although that holds about 8 people max so you would need to further divide into teams and go into different rooms of the escape room place), and also doing team volunteering.

The best volunteering one I organized were to a local soup kitchen (where we both made the food and then served) and to assemble “snack packs” for a local elementary school, which is basically a gallon sized ziplock bag filled with a variety of nonperishable snacks for children facing food insecurity. Additionally the bags all contain a notecard with some kind of uplifting phrase on it like “keep up the good work!”, or “we care about you!”. The cards sound silly but apparently mean A LOT to the kids, and making them provided a creative outlet for the team. Both of these were pretty minimal advance work to set up.

For smaller-scale team building activities that are not too lame, something as easy as dividing into smaller teams and coming up with (at least) 10 things you all have in common outside of work-related things is fun. It forces you to share about yourself and learn about others. It’s a good ice breaker activity.

Our team also did Jeopardy with fun random facts about different team members. That was definitely more work to put together but people had a lot of fun with it.

I would totally look into an escape room place! You'd have to break into small groups but if you have enough time to plan in advance you could probably just book all their rooms at the same time. It's an AWESOME team building experience.

I hosted one for my group at a local sports place, they had an actual program.

I haven't done it for work, but my family has done them as part of Christmas parties. We usually spend the night in different small towns nearby. The hunts are pretty generic (find a used ticket stub, a license plate from X state, get a video of you pumping someone's gas, find a promotional pen). Usually actual objects are worth two points, a photo is worth one (photos are easier to get)

We've done them specifically holiday themed, and themed to the location we're in. They haven't been super disruptive because there's only 5 or 6 of us, and one time we did it, there was actually a huge group of teenagers doing their own scavenger hunt.

If you want sort of ice breaker type games, you could look up minute to win it games on pinterest. (like Erin's second suggestion). We also do a day camp for the younger girls in our family and do games like that and some are team based. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to throw pom poms and catch them in a solo cup!

I saw a mall scavenger hunt taking place recently and it looked like they were taking pics of themselves at various locations, which made me think a good way to prevent prepping the locations might be that each team texts you a pic when they get to the right spot and you text back the next clue. Then you could put up all the pics in a slideshow or on a noticeboard and maybe even have prizes for silliest or most creative pics?

We did a fun and successful team building activity during my school district's opening day last year. Teams competed to build the tallest free standing structure out of only straws and masking tape. People got pretty into it.

@Mommy Finger: When I was in college I was in a group that did a photo scavenger hunt. So fun and you don't have to get any physical objects. And you can do a slideshow of the pictures of all the groups.

I'm sure there are ideas online. The only ones I remember were a photo of a group member at the library reading an embarrassing book, your group members eating a snack, and a human pyramid.