T E A M B U I L D I N G A C T I V I T I E S
Playful activities that use art, sound, movement, and storytelling to make a lasting impact on team culture.
We facilitate remote and in-person corporate team building workshops for groups of 10 to 1000 people.
Our activities typically last 60-90 minutes, and can easily be customized for full-day or multi-day sessions.
“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
Our Team Building Activities
We have a deep library of corporate team building activities designed to help teams with collaboration, building trust, bridging silos, creating psychological safety, sparking creativity, celebrating differences, and just having fun 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 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.
Unblinking Line
Perfect for: Breaking Ice, Team Bonding
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 a laugh-filled way to calm the inner perfectionist and quiet fear of failure. The twist: everyone fails. The magic: everyone loves it.
EmbleMottos
Perfect for: Bridging Silos, Building Trust, Connecting Introverts & Extroverts
Colleagues are more than just the professional roles they perform. This activity is a playful way to help colleagues understand each other as people so that they are able to connect, collaborate, and get the best from each other.
Using everyone’s personal goals for the year ahead as material, each participants 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 colleague’s values, and surface the group’s priorities.
Super Secret
Perfect For: Building Empathy, Celebrating Diversity, Creating Lasting Connections
There is an urgent need for empathy and compassion in the workplace, community, and classroom. Super Secret cultivates that culture of connection. A simple yet powerful twist on the pen-pal relationship, Super Secret builds meaningful bridges between people who appear different; it creates connections based on character rather than 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. Participants walk away with the emotional skills to see the world through a more diverse lens. In a professional setting, this can lead to the sort of trust, collaboration, and creative confidence that makes for strong, innovative teams.
“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
Hidden Joys
Surprising sparks of 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
Deepening perspectives
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
Physicalizing emotions
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
Experiencing someone else’s joy
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
Perfect for: Fueling collaboration & 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
Towering Inspiration
Perfect for: Reigniting Purpose & Refueling Inspiration
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
Creativity within constraints
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.
"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
Make Believe with us today.
What We Offer
U.S. employee engagement is the lowest in almost a decade. Gallup found that “Quiet Quitters” make up over half of the U.S. workforce. Turnover costs $1 Trillion annually. People are hungry for a renewed sense of purpose and community at work.
Our programs are a powerful tool for leaders looking to bridge silos, educators looking to build a growth mindset, creatives looking to build new muscles, and individuals looking to rediscover joy and purpose.
Stand-Alone Workshops
Injections of inspiration and insight to disrupt the everyday, revive creative energy, or boost innovative thinking.
Multi-Session Series
Custom-designed arc of workshops that activate new behaviors and build new mindsets. (Typically six or twelve sessions, hosted bi-weekly or monthly.)