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Team building
How to plan a team-building event for a design team, with goal-setting, activity ideas built around creative work, and the logistics to run it.
Design teams work under tight deadlines and heavy pressure to meet client expectations, and both can squeeze out communication and creativity. This post covers how to set goals for an event that pushes back on that, which activities suit designers, and how to plan and run the day.
Start with the pressures your team already feels. Tight deadlines lead to stress and burnout. Clients often arrive with specific ideas and requirements, and the push to meet them can leave designers frustrated and short on creativity. When people stop communicating or collaborating, you get mistakes and delays in the final product. Your event should aim at whichever of these is loudest.
Use the event to see who's good at what. Give the team a complex problem that needs brainstorming, problem-solving, and decision-making, and watch who leads on each. That tells you how to assign work later.
Build activities around what the company is trying to do, so people see how their work connects to it. If the objective is more sales, for example, have the team build a sales strategy together.
Give teams a set of materials and ask them to build a tower. It only stands if people listen to each other's ideas and agree on a plan.
Designers do their best work creating together, so lean into it: drawing workshops, brainstorming sessions, or a design challenge where the group gets a problem and has to solve it together. You can also have the team build a design project from scratch, like a website or a product prototype, and let the ideas bounce.
Escape rooms, problem-solving challenges, and puzzles all work. For something closer to the job, pick a real-world design challenge: identify the problem, generate possible solutions, then build the best one together.
Not every activity needs to be work. Hiking or a group fitness class lowers stress. A bigger version is a retreat: a weekend at a nearby resort or retreat center with hiking, yoga, and meditation.
Match the venue to your group size and your activities. Outdoor plans need real outdoor space, and indoor plans need enough room for everyone. Check restrooms, parking, and Wi-Fi.
List every cost: venue rental, activity supplies, food, and transportation. On a limited budget, host at your workplace and choose free or low-cost activities.
Schedule each activity and the breaks between them, leaving enough time for each. Add time for icebreakers if people don't know each other well. Share the timeline with the team before the day.