C R E A T I V E T E A M B U I L D I N G A C T I V I T I E S F O R W O R K
Playful, facilitated activities that use art, sound, movement, and storytelling to make a lasting impact on team culture.
Make Believe Works facilitates remote and in-person corporate team building workshops that help coworkers build trust, strengthen collaboration, and connect in more meaningful ways.
Our activities typically last 60-90 minutes and can easily be customized for groups of 5 to 500 people, full-day or multi-day offsites, retreats, leadership meetings, and company gatherings.
“This was phenomenal. It’s difficult to get deep at work without it feeling cheesy, but this felt really authentic. Thank you!”
—Participant feedback, Netflix
Fun.
But more than fun.
Instead of:
Competition
Inherently divides people and pits them against each other. Most people lose.
Passivity
People don’t contribute to the experience. Doesn’t matter who’s in class.
Old News
The loud get loud, the quiet get quiet, the cliques stick together. Nothing new.
We deliver:
Connection
People get comfortable lowering their guard, being vulnerable and building trust.
Participation
Everyone contributes without feeling forced. People feel valued and necessary.
New Insight
Everyone leaves with new insights into their colleagues.
Our Team Building Activities
Make Believe Works is a creative team-building company that designs and facilitates creative, non-competitive team-building workshops for organizations. We have a deep library of corporate team building activities designed not just for fun (though they are), but to help teams build trust, strengthen collaboration, break down silos, increase psychological safety, and create lasting improvements in how people work together.
On our first call we’ll discuss your particular goals, recommend specific activities, and plan how we’ll customize them to your company values and occasion. We regularly update our activity library and only offer activities that receive 98% rating or better.
All of our activities follow this format:
1. A facilitated introduction that sets the tone to get everyone into a more thoughtful and collaborative mindset.
2. A playful, creative activity designed to open up opportunities for more personal connections.
3. A structured share back designed for all participants to have the chance to be heard and recognized for their insights.
4. A debrief of what participants are taking away from the experience that they want to apply to their lives and relationships going forward.
StoryLine: A Creative Drawing & Storytelling Activity for Team Bonding
Perfect for: Breaking the ice, team bonding, creative confidence, psychological safety
StoryLine is a facilitated drawing and storytelling activity designed to quiet perfectionism and make small interpersonal risks feel safe. Participants create deliberately imperfect drawings and use them as openings for sharing stories and discovering unexpected things about one another.
Your team is great at what they do. But, useful as perfectionism can be, it can also limit vision, discourage risk taking, and inhibit new ideas. This drawing activity is not only a laugh-filled way to calm the inner perfectionist and quiet fear of failure, but it’s also excellent at connecting people in unexpectedly meaningful ways. The twist: everyone fails. The magic: everyone loves it.
Nobody needs to be good at drawing. In fact, getting it “wrong” is part of the point. The result is an unusually easy way for colleagues to laugh together, lower their guard, and become more comfortable contributing without needing to perform.
EmbleMottos: A Hands-On Team Activity for Building Trust and Breaking Down Silos
Perfect for: Building trust, bridging silos, personal connection, introverts and extroverts
EmbleMottos is a hands-on creative activity designed to help colleagues see one another as people, not just the professional roles they perform.
Using everyone’s personal goals for the year ahead as material, each participant creates a gift for another that brings that person’s objectives to life in a fun, creative, and meaningful way. The activity provides an opportunity for people to comfortably share insights about themselves, hear about their colleagues’ values, and surface the group’s priorities.
“I just really appreciated seeing the way my mind works versus someone else's. Sometimes it even felt therapeutic in the best sense.”
— Meg D., Creative Director
Google Labs
Super Secret: A Connection Activity for Building Empathy Across Distance and Difference
Perfect for: Building empathy, connecting across differences, strengthening relationships
Super Secret is a remote activity designed to create meaningful connections between people who may not know one another well. Through a structured, low-pressure exchange, participants discover common ground and learn about one another based on character and experience rather than surface-level characteristics.
Though deliberately simple, Super Secret is anchored in psychological research and human-centered design, and can be applied to any two people, regardless of differences or similarities. It is especially useful for teams seeking stronger relationships, greater empathy, and more meaningful connection across roles, backgrounds, or groups.
Hidden Joys: A Creative Values Activity for Personal Connection
Perfect for: Getting to know colleagues, sharing values, team bonding, inspiration
A two-step opportunity to celebrate the little things that bring us joy. First through a simple sculpting activity that helps everyone share their values with the group, and then with the playful task of hiding their creation in plain sight to bring joy to someone else.
Living through screens has made it much trickier to get to know each other on a more personal level. We only see each other on purpose and for a purpose. This is a chance for participants to be inspired by what brings their colleagues joy, and a playful a reminder to make time for what brings they themselves joy.
Blobviously: A Perspective-Taking Activity for Collaboration and Problem-Solving
Perfect for: Collaboration, perspective-taking, appreciating different thinking styles
An activity that uses inkbots and anonymity to highlight both the power of collaboration and the value of individuality. Everyone shares and compares their individual interpretations of images that have no specific truth.
There's a reason that collaboration has value. We all may see the same challenge, but we interpret it our own way. When there’s space for us all to speak our individual visions clearly, the team is able to problem-solve with a multidimensional lens.
Dance of Inspiration: A Movement-Based Activity for Understanding Working Styles
Perfect for: Communication, working styles, creative confidence, team insight
This activity is a chance to externalize our own specific internal process of problem solving by translating it into physical movements. It feels silly and fun, but does the important work of giving colleagues a key insight into what’s going on beneath each other’s surfaces.
“You’re going beyond the coffee machine or the lunch table, bringing people together in a meaningful way. It’s low pressure. You know you’re going to have fun. There’s a joyful sentiment. And you feel like you’ve accomplished something at the end of the session.”
Selma Durand
Senior Industrial Designer
Google
“Make Believe Works impacted my sense of belonging. It made me realize I had a place there. Creating things together gets rid of this feeling of competitiveness. In those sessions we were all equal.”
— Hanna Pincus
Business Operations Lead , IDEO
Hour Gift to You: A Trust-Building Activity Based on Generosity and Self-Care
Perfect for: Trust, empathy, generosity, deeper connection
Everyone designs an hour for someone else that is based on your personal loves. An hour of things you love to replenish their fuel tanks. An hour with clear instructions that will take all decisions off the shoulder of the recipient and lead them along 60 minutes of surprise, relaxation, observation, or whatever.
Our days can become locked into patterns and schedules. This is a chance to mix up our routines and swap perspectives. It is an hour built on trust (putting oneself in someone else's hands and trusting them to care for us), generosity (the feeling of excitement that comes when giving someone something meaningful), vulnerability (revealing our weak spots and how we tend to them), and curiosity (openness to try something new and unfamiliar).
“You leave feeling more inspired, lighter, because you’ve laughed a lot. Your body feels looser and you feel more connected to your colleagues.”
Mollie West
Manager of Org. Dev.
Rally
Sound Bath Bubbles: A Creative Activity for Understanding Working Styles
Perfect for: Collaboration, communication, working styles, team insight
Personal working styles are more nuanced than most of us realize. To help get the most out of each other, we have everyone translate their inner processes into sounds using found instruments. It’s fun and silly but gives colleagues key insights into what’s going on beneath the surface.
“Self-expression is not something that I would have thought I wanted or needed. But I really did love the way everyone manifested things differently. It has stuck with me.”
- Partnerships Lead, IDEO. org
"I usually dread team building activities, but this was different. The facilitation was magical and made all the difference. I sincerely enjoyed the process and learning so many new things about my colleagues. Thanks for pushing me out of my comfort zone.
Absolutely want more of these."
— Participant Feedback
Design Manager, Spotify
Towering Inspiration: A Team-Building Activity for Purpose and Connection
Perfect for: Reigniting purpose, inspiration, belonging, personal connection
Everyone can use a little help staying excited and committed day in, day out. This activity does that by celebrating the people whose inspiration was crucial to the person you grew into. Participants share their stories on a giant card which connects to everyone else’s card to create a stunning collective structure of all the magic and meaning that fuels the people we work with day-to-day.
“Play has a deep connection to executive function and benefits people of all ages. Make Believe Works is a strategy for learning. It unlocks truths, capabilities, and things that make you a better human.”
Greg Perez
Chief Creative Officer
Children’s Museum of Manhattan
Homemade Homage: A Music-Based Team-Bonding Activity
Perfect for: Team bonding, personal connection, getting to know colleagues
For this activity we work with the music that spoke to people’s hearts when they were coming of age. The albums that brought them joy, solace, hope, that got them through breakups, bus rides, that they sang along with, that helped make them who they are. We challenge them recreate those albums….with themselves as the star.
This is a great way to get to know colleagues a layer deeper - not just by sharing music and imagery that means something to them, but in the way they talk about it and the story behind its meaning. It’s an opportunity for the kind of low stakes but highly personal sharing that builds community bonds.
Why creative team-building activities work
The point isn't to get coworkers to make art, dance, tell stories, or play with strange materials. Those are the tools.
Thoughtfully designed creative experiences give people opportunities to take small interpersonal risks, contribute without competing, discover unexpected things about one another, and practice trust in a low-stakes environment.
Our approach to team building is rooted in a specific point of view about what actually makes team building effective. We emphasize connection over competition and participation over performance.
Not sure which activity fits your team?
Tell us about your group, your occasion, and what you hope will be different afterward. We’ll recommend activities that fit your goals and customize the experience for your team.
Contact Us
We’d love to help your team connect and thrive. Tell us about your event or goals and let’s make a plan.
Reach us at: hello@makebelieveworks.com
What Participants Are Saying:
Make Believe Works reinvents connection and development with its unique, fun, engaging and highly impactful workshops. Most recently, their ‘Super-Secret’ activation facilitated what our team called ‘the most meaningful & fun’ virtual get-to-know you’s they’ve ever participated in. We can’t wait to work with them again!
— Naomi G., Director, Business Planning & Strategy, American Express
"I usually dread team building activities, but this was different. The facilitation was magical and made all the difference. I sincerely enjoyed the process and learning so many new things about my colleagues. Thanks for pushing me out of my comfort zone. Absolutely want more of these."
— Amy O., Design Manager, Spotify