It’s hard to find great team building ideas for large teams. There are lots of choices available for small groups. But when you begin to look for a team building event that keeps everyone together in a large session, it’s hard to find programs that engage, that are fun and offer meaningful experience. The most common of team building ideas for large teams is the scavenger hunt. But I’m not a big fan. There’s often too little structure and not enough substance. If you’re going to invest time and resources in team building; it should be engaging, interactive and meaningful for the majority of your large group.
Effective Team Building Ideas For Large Teams
When I’m on the phone with a client, perhaps planning a team building program for five hundred people, they’ll ask if everyone will be engaged in the activity. The honest answer is no! You can’t promise engagement for everyone on the same level – this is true whether you have a team of 15 or 500. But the good news is, there are programs that are fun, engaging and really do payoff.
A few years ago, I developed a new program in response to the requests we kept getting for team building ideas for large teams. The program now constitutes about 50% of the work we do – so to say it’s working is an understatement. This large group music team building program is fun and effective with groups from 100 to 2,000. Music evokes emotion and passion in all of us and is a great way to experience collaboration and innovative thinking. We enable large groups to act as one, creating their organizational story through song. The sessions are high energy and genuinely interactive.
Drumming can be a good team building activity for large groups. You can have a drum circle with a thousand people. But for this program to be real team building, it has to have context for your company. Make sure to choose a team building facilitator who will provide context, metaphor and relatedness to your organization’s goals.
Think With Your Hands is a variation of Lego team building. I’ve helped facilitate this with large groups and it’s quite scalable since you can have many tables of eight or ten people. Each table group will be engaged while experiencing small group interaction. Yet the take-aways can be shared in debrief with the larger group of attendees.
Yes, it’s hard to find great team building ideas for large teams. So take time to investigate and check references to make sure that the program you choose really delivers.