The best team building questions

What makes a good team building question?

Almost every company has a team-building exercise in place. Sometimes these are targeted at specific departments or industries, and others might be more general. There are plenty of resources to choose from, but I wanted to share some of my own favourite team building questions. These questions have been proven to be extremely powerful by groups of individuals who have taken them on as part of multitiered teamwork challenges.

The questions on the team-building exercise are extremely useful for facilitating collaboration and communication among coworkers. It’s important that you get your hands dirty by completing this exercise with your team.

Most of these questions specifically focus on the kinds of relationships that will help employees work together. These help team members to work cohesively with one another, facilitating and supporting one another.

There are a few things that you should remember before deciding what questions to ask for team building:

• Team building questions should be inclusive - Please ensure that the questions you choose enables everyone in the team to participate! I have seen a lot of team leaders making common mistakes e.g. having male gender specific questions! This is not just exclusionary, but also sexist. Many team leaders also make the mistake of including inside jokes that new team members would not know. Also stay away from jokes around race, gender and sexual preferences.

• Keep them contextual for current times - The most common employee feedback on team building is that the questions have become boring & repetitive. You should ensure that your library of team building questions is updated every year e.g. this year you can include questions on Covid-19 lockdowns or Zoom calls. 
• They can be both fun & serious - You should keep a fine balance between asking thought provoking questions & funny questions. Use this opportunity to get answers from your team that help your team bond by getting to know each other better!

Best practices to ask team building questions 

You will find a lot of online listings on team building questions, but hardly anything on how to ask them to your team! After working with 300+ remote teams with team building exercises, here are some of my biggest learnings:

• Send the team building questions where work already happens - Is your team already working on Whatsapp groups? Send the questions there! This ensures that the team doesn’t find any friction while answering the questions. 
• Include the questions in team building exercises - While conducting any team building exercise, try to break the ice by asking questions to your team. They will help you break the monotony and also aid in team bonding!
• Start your meetings with team building questions - This is a great way to lighten the mood and generate a good momentum for the rest of the meeting. This puts everyone at ease (especially the introverts!) and everyone starts participating in the meeting
• Use a tool to automate - You shouldn’t have to waste your time manually emailing questions, creating forms and sending reminders! Use tools like Kaapi to automate all this!