Have you noticed that your team isn’t thriving? Are they not communicating well? A fun and effective way to get your team back on track is to do some engaging team building activities in Atlanta, Georgia!
With so many cultural and recreational activities for team building in Atlanta, you may feel overwhelmed by the choices. We’ve narrowed down the options for you so you can spend less time searching and more time team building!
Table Of Contents
22 Awesome Atlanta Team Building Activities
- Break Out Of An Escape Room
- Plan An Event With The Escape Game
- Solve A Mystery
- Do A Ropes Course
- Play An Online Game Show
- Do A Scavenger Hunt
- Stir Something Up With A Group Cooking Class
- Try Indoor Skydiving
- Learn Improv For Business
- Go Paintballing
- Give Back To The Community
- Socialize At A Local Performance Venue
- Possibilities
- Human Knot
- Minefield
- Count To Twenty
- Puzzle Pieces
- Back-To-Back Drawings
- Pair Up
- Who Am I?
- Stone Soup
- Show and Tell
22 Awesome Atlanta Team Building Activities
Here’s an array of games, activities, and team building exercises that can be found in Atlanta. Many you can do right in your office. Others are ideal for virtual or hybrid teams. There are options for all budgets as well as teams both big and small!
Activities for Team Building In Atlanta
1. Break out of an escape room
Escape rooms turn team building into an exciting opportunity for your team to practice their team skills in a low-stakes, but exciting, environment. The Escape Game Atlanta offers just that!
At The Escape Game Atlanta, your team will be “locked” in a themed room—they could be breaking out of prison, riding on a time traveling train, or even exploring an underwater laboratory. They have just one hour to escape — or else! Only by working together to decipher clues and solve riddles will they be able to escape!
Escape rooms challenge teams to use creative problem-solving skills. Your team will also practice decision-making and reaching group consensus on decisions throughout the game.
Escape rooms are also an excellent activity to practice collaboration. As team members find clues on their own, they must share what they have discovered with the group so that collectively they can devise a way to escape. Best of all, they will have a blast as their team building skills grow stronger!
The Escape Game has two locations in the Atlanta area: one in The Battery and one at The Interlock. Between both locations, The Escape Game Atlanta has eight different themes to choose from! For companies that are remote or working with a hybrid model, you can play one of The Escape Game’s virtual escape rooms making sure that no one misses out on this amazing team building activity.
Whether your team must solve a mystery from the bottom of the ocean, break out of a cramped 1950s prison cell, or recover a priceless painting, they can take pride in what they accomplish together!
2. Plan An Event With The Escape Game
Alongside escape rooms, The Escape Game specializes in creating fun team building events tailored to meet your company’s needs. They are experts in organizing corporate gatherings, from small teams to large company conventions.
To book, contact The Escape Game through a quick form, even if you don’t know all the details like group size and format. Within one day you will hear back from an event planner.
Your planner will give you personalized attention to design an event that meets your team building goals and will provide everything you need to run your event. With several games and activities to choose from, both in person and virtual, you’ll definitely find something to engage your team.
3. Solve A Mystery
Online mystery games engage your team members from the get-go! Your group, split into teams, must work rapidly to interpret clues found in surveillance footage, psych reports, and other types of evidence to solve the mystery.
Solving a mystery is much more amusing than finding a solution to a perplexing work-related problem. But the time your team spends having fun as sleuths will sharpen their problem-solving power when they are back at their desks.
4. Do A Ropes Course
Ropes courses put your team’s ability to collaborate to overcome a series of physical tasks like balancing the entire team on a see-saw! They are run by a professional company and are a fantastic way for groups to challenge themselves as individuals and as a team.
Treetop Quest Dunwoody in Atlanta offers a team building package that features a facilitator who will work with your team to address specific team dynamics that could use a tune-up.
Your team will be outside enjoying the fresh air while developing team skills like problem-solving and communication. They’ll walk away with a stronger sense of trust and lasting team bonds.
5. Play An Online Game Show
You don’t need to be in a tv studio to be a contestant in a game show! From the comfort of your office (or home, if your team is remote), your crew can get their game on by playing an online game show!
The Escape Game’s online game show is a live, hosted competition in which players compete against each other to solve brain teasers, word puzzles, and secret codes.
Problem-solving and creative thinking will be pushed to the limit! A little bit of healthy competition is just the thing to motivate a team to perform their best!
6. Do A Scavenger Hunt
Scavenger hunts inspire team members to work together as they must interpret clues that lead them to the next location on the designed route. Group decision-making, collaboration, and fast thinking are needed if your team wants to win!
Scavenger hunts foster invaluable team building skills such as creativity and critical thinking. They are an excellent way to encourage long-term thinking, systematic planning, and delegation, all of which are vital for a team’s success.
For teams with a good-sized budget, Operation City Quest offers group scavenger hunts that can accommodate teams from 10 to 500 players! If you have budget constraints, you can make your own free scavenger hunt with GooseChase. Their free version is only for teams of no more than 15 players.
Two very affordable options are Urban Adventure Quest’s small group scavenger hunt and this inexpensive book from Atlanta United’s Clue Town.
If you have a hybrid or remote team, you can still reap the team building benefits of scavenger hunts with these virtual scavenger hunt options!
7. Stir Something Up With A Group Cooking Class
The pleasure of food is universal. By taking a group cooking class, your team will double their pleasure by cooking as a team and then enjoying the fruits of their labor!
Atlanta’s Team Building with Taste offers two cooking classes that are designed specifically for team building. Their Taste of Innovation class focuses on creativity in cooking while their Team Building with Taste class emphasizes trust, collaboration, and problem-solving.
If you are looking for something on the lighter side, try their Cooking Up Camaraderie class, which is light on the team building skills but heavy on the fun!
8. Try Indoor Skydiving
Taking your team to iFLY Atlanta is a unique team building experience. Instructors have team building training and can customize your group outing to fit your group’s needs.
Indoor skydiving can be exhilarating but some team members may be nervous. Supporting one another to take that leap of faith will forge strong bonds that your team is not likely to forget soon!
9. Learn Improv For Business
StageCoach Atlanta offers team building improv classes designed to boost creative thinking abilities by teaching the power of play. As your team works together to keep their improv skit flowing smoothly, they improve their collaboration skills.
Communicating clearly and making quick decisions also come into play when performing improv. The result of taking a team building improv class is that your team will have stronger working relationships.
Doing improv is so fun that your team won’t even notice that they are doing something to better their performance at work!
10. Go Paintballing
Paintball Atlanta’s corporate outing takes this messy, high-octane activity and turns it into a meaningful team building opportunity.
An outing with Paintball Atlanta calls on your group’s strategic planning and decision-making skills. Team cooperation develops and leaders emerge. Better still, it will build camaraderie and trust among your team members!
11. Give Back To The Community
Setting up volunteer opportunities is a great chance to show off your company’s values and ethics while boosting team morale at the same time.
It’s also a great chance to get involved in your local community, which can do much for boosting your company’s image in the communities where you live and work.
To set up some team building volunteer opportunities in Atlanta, check out Hands On Atlanta, Open Hand Atlanta, and Habitat For Humanity.
Like all the best team building efforts, memories made during volunteering with coworkers can last a lifetime. It’s a reminder that work isn’t just about work; it’s about making a difference. Those feelings of kinship and connection can have a huge impact during challenges down the line.
12. Socialize At A Local Performance Venue
Team building doesn’t only happen at the office or during official retreats. It doesn’t even have to involve structured activities at all. Any social gathering will provide an opportunity for your team members to get to know each other better. This will develop camaraderie and a sense of community among your team.
Seeing a live music performance is a great choice as it’s low pressure and offers a chance for your team to blow off, unwind and relax.
There are lots of free or affordable live music shows in various venues around Atlanta. Tickets for shows at The Earl start at $15 per person. At Smith’s Olde Bar, you can choose from music, comedy, open mic nights, and karaoke. Many of these events are free!
Ask your team what they would enjoy doing and go from there. Whether you sing, dance, or laugh together, good company morale will follow!
In-Office Games For Team Building in Atlanta
13. Possibilities
Communication is vital for any successful organization. So is creativity. This game of Possibilities emphasizes both. Plus, it’s fun, which is always a bonus when it comes to in-person events.
The game of Possibilities works a lot like charades with a dash of the board game Taboo to make things more interesting. In Possibilities, one team member gets assigned a common object. Then they have to get their teammates to guess what the object is by acting out what it’s used for.
The guessing team members then have to guess the object by shouting out its name. This simple game emphasizes numerous essential team building skills in some clever ways.
For the person acting out the charades, it requires them to think creatively. It also forces them to think about their particular team members. It makes them think about their teammates’ specific backgrounds, interests, and communication styles.
Thinking along these lines will be invaluable down the line when someone needs to tailor a set of work instructions for individual team members. For those guessing, shouting out their guesses helps them overcome any shyness. It also helps foster participation so that every voice is heard and every perspective is considered.
14. Human Knot
Communication is the lifeblood of any team. Sometimes a particular project might require communicating about some intensely confusing, complicated, or technical discussions.
Other times, some things simply boil down to a difference in opinion. Either way, these situations require communicating about difficult scenarios. A team’s communication must be top-notch to weather these storms gracefully.
In the Human Knot, have all of your team members face the center of a circle. Then each team member grabs someone’s right hand with their right hand. Next, they grab someone’s left hand with their left hand, thus completing the human knot.
What comes next is like a lightning round of Twister mixed with reading a set of technical directions out loud. You set a time limit, and your team has to untangle their human knot in that amount of time without letting go of anybody’s hand.
Not only does the human knot require excellent communication, but it’s also quite a bit of fun!
15. Minefield
Sometimes teams need to break up into smaller groups or pairings. It’s even more vital that these smaller groups work just as well together as they do with the larger group. Team building is even more important for groups of two or three, as more is riding on each member. The scope of their responsibilities tends to be larger, as well.
Minefield is a team building exercise to strengthen smaller groups and build resilience and reliance among pairs. Minefield requires a large and open space and some objects to serve as the mines.
Then each pair goes to the peripheries of the open area where the mines are placed. One team member puts on a blindfold. The other places the mine somewhere in the open space. The non-blindfolded partner then helps their blindfolded teammate cross from one side of the space to the other while avoiding the mines.
The trick is they can only use their words. Physical contact is forbidden in Minefield. One team member must guide their blindfolded teammate across the space using their words.
Minefield is not just an extraordinary exercise for fostering communication abilities. It also strengthens the ability to follow detailed instructions for blindfolded team members. Have both team members take turns leading and being blindfolded if you have time.
This serves two functions. It lets every team member take a turn learning valuable skills that will help them develop their professional career. It also helps to diminish power dynamics and inequality on your team.
In the best teams, everybody takes turns leading and following. All of your team members must cultivate their skills for both positions.
16. Count To Twenty
Here’s a great team building exercise to foster communication and active listening. The premise is simple. You just have to have your team count from one to twenty.
Have your team stand in a circle. Someone starts the count by saying one. Someone else has to follow with two. The exercise proceeds until you get to twenty. The trick is if two people shout a number at the same time, the count returns to one.
The Count to Twenty exercises is great practice for getting your team to pay attention to one another. It will also help encourage those who are more reserved to speak while causing the more extroverted team members to practice patience.
17. Puzzle Pieces
Negotiation and creative problem solving are as important for a team member’s success as communication and leadership abilities. The puzzle piece team building exercise will help your teams cultivate each of these skills that are so necessary for their professional success.
In the puzzle pieces exercise, start by getting a jigsaw puzzle for each team that’s going to be participating. The puzzles can be as large and complicated or small and simple as you like. The puzzles shouldn’t be too large or complicated, though.
The goal of the puzzle pieces exercise is for the team to finish faster than the other teams. The trick is that the pieces are scrambled before the puzzles are distributed. It’s up to you if you care to communicate this fact before the exercise or not.
The team members from different teams will then have to negotiate and barter with one another to get the pieces they need and finish their puzzle first.
The puzzle pieces exercise is an excellent team building exercise for any team involving sales or marketing in any capacity. It’s an invaluable practice in the art of persuasion, communication, and compromise.
18. Back-To-Back Drawings
This is another exercise that’s similar to the Minefield team building game discussed earlier. The back-to-back drawing exercise emphasizes communication and trust. Even better, this team building practice requires less space and time, so it’s a great choice when you’re looking for an activity you can do in a hurry.
In the back-to-back drawing exercise, two team members sit with their backs against one another. One team member is given an object or a drawing. The other is given paper and some sort of drawing implement.
The first team member then has to describe the object or drawing to their teammate. The one guessing attempts to make a drawing of the object based on their teammate’s description. The catch is that the person that’s drawing can’t speak or ask any questions. They just have to listen as carefully as possible, making this another excellent exercise in following instructions.
The back-to-back drawing game emphasizes and helps develop clear, detailed communication and instruction, like a few of the other exercises already on our list. It also helps build a sense of familiarity and trust among the teammates. Even better, the teammates can keep their drawings once the team building exercise is complete.
These collaborations can become a powerful reminder of these early connections. They can also help your team members transcend the job and become friends.
19. Pair Up
Here’s another fun exercise that’s great for strengthening partnerships. Like the back-to-back drawing game, the Pair Up exercise requires minimal equipment or resources. All you need is a bit of paper, ink, tape, time, and imagination.
Have your team members make slips of paper with commonly paired items. Salt and pepper, ketchup and mustard, and Mickey and Minnie are just a few examples of some of the many iconic duos available. Once they’re done, have them mix up all of the slips of paper and then choose one randomly.
Once again, have your team members pair up. Have each team member tape their slip of paper to their partner’s back. Each team member then needs to find their partner. The trick is that they don’t know who they are, let alone their partner’s identity. They can ask questions about their identity to other team members. Once they figure out their own identity, they can find their opposite.
The Pair Up exercise is another game that’s so much fun it doesn’t even feel like a work exercise. It’s a way to let loose and have a bit of fun, which helps to make things more enjoyable and exciting for your team members.
The moment of realization, when the duos find each other, can stay with the team members as well. Those emotions can transfer over to the team, which will be helpful for times when things get tough.
20. Who Am I?
This exercise for building team spirit is very similar to the Pair Up game we mentioned earlier. Crucially, the Who Am I exercise gives everybody more of a chance to participate. It also focuses more on one-on-one interactions, making it another excellent choice for building strong partnerships.
Each player gets a known public figure written on a sheet of paper or Post-It note in the Who Am I game. The sheet of paper is stuck to their forehead. Then they get to ask questions of their teammate to help them guess the secret identity.
The Who Am I game is a great exercise for building strong teams for numerous different reasons. Like a number of the exercises we’ve mentioned on our list, it emphasizes creativity and original thinking. It also requires the teammates to communicate, building strong bonds and crucial habits that are essential in the workplace.
Also like a number of the exercises on our list, guessing your own identity is just fun. It also discourages anyone from taking themselves too seriously, which helps to create a more democratic and egalitarian workplace!
21. Stone Soup
Here’s another kid’s activity that is effective for building team morale. It’s another exercise that encourages creativity, collaboration, and thinking outside of the box.
The Stone Soup exercise is based on a popular children’s book of the same name. In the story, a village is starving and desperate. Undismayed, an optimistic chef tells the village he will teach them to make a delicious, hearty, nourishing soup using only one stone.
The chef places the stone in the pot and then asks everyone in the village to contribute one ingredient to match, no matter how insignificant it may be. The village residents scrape some modest morsels from their bare cupboards and meager gardens.
Someone brings a carrot. Someone else brings two potatoes. Before the village knows what’s happened, they’ve got a brimming cauldron full of delicious, nutritious food that they all cooked together.
The Stone Soup team building exercise is brilliant for its origin story alone. You can deliver the children’s story like a fable, with the built-in punchline “look what’s possible when we work together.” You can also get some tasty results from the experiment!
If you’re doing a team building weekend, perhaps you can make the Stone Soup game responsible for dinner one night. You don’t have to limit yourself to bare cupboards or garden scrapings, either.
Instead, you could source delicious ingredients ahead of time that are likely to work together. You can still let your team members choose their own ingredients, though. You can also leave it to the participants to discuss how they want to combine the ingredients and in what form.
It doesn’t have to be Stone Soup, after all! It could just as easily be Stone Shepherd’s Pie, Stone Stir Fry, or anything else that lets you combine a bunch of ingredients in a novel and creative way.
22. Show and Tell
You might be noticing that a number of the items we include on our list of activities to boost a team mentality originate from children. Maybe that’s because, for many of us, we first encountered these games and activities during school. What is a class, after all, but a team?
It’s time to admit our teachers were onto something with a lot of the simple and innocent games and activities played by school children. While seemingly mundane, the simple activity of Show and Tell can have numerous team building benefits.
First and most importantly, it lets your employees and team members showcase a bit of their personality while on the clock. After all, no one wants to feel like a cog in a machine. We must remember that a cog is easily replaced, which is not the message we’re trying to send to our valuable and highly valued workers.
Doing Show and Tell as a team building exercise fulfills a similar function to someone having pictures of their family, hobbies, or other interests around their workspace. If you have any doubts about the effectiveness of this approach, observe someone with signs of their life during their workday compared to someone working in a bare cubicle.
Seeing some personal detail of one of your teammates drives home the fact that they’re full, complete human beings. They’ve got their own dreams and desires, drives and fears, just like everybody. Little touches like this are integral to fostering a sense of empathy and kinship among your team members. It also helps everybody to get to know one another on a deeper level.
One of the prime objectives of team building activities is to determine each team member’s strengths while offering every team member a chance to cultivate new skills and gain valuable experience. Something as simple as storytelling can help you do both in some surprising and entertaining ways.
Telling a story to a group of your coworkers offers team members a vital opportunity to practice or present their public speaking abilities. As a team leader, you must have a solid understanding of each team member’s abilities in this regard.
When it comes to working with big-ticket clients or presentations with a lot riding on them, you need to choose your strongest public speakers for these roles.
Telling a story involves a lot more than standing in front of a bunch of people and talking, though. You can even configure the storytelling exercise to emphasize the traits and characteristics you’re hoping to cultivate among your team members.
You might have team members tell a collaborative story, for instance. One person might start it off then it’s passed along at an undetermined point.
For one, this approach fosters creativity and imagination among your team members. It also requires each member to listen carefully, as they need to pick up where the previous storyteller left off.
This approach can be effective in helping team members approach each other’s work sensitively and considerately. They’re more likely to treat their work during office hours with the same care and consideration when they’re in the habit and seeing each other in that light.
How To Plan A Team Building Exercise In Atlanta
It’s important when you’re team building that it doesn’t feel like work. Making your team building exercises interesting and exciting is the difference between eye-rolls and passionate participation.
Here are some tips to help you achieve passionate participation among your team members to help you hold successful team building activities.
Think Outside The Basket
The best team building gets you and your employees outside of daily work and life routines. You want to get your team members thinking creatively while feeling seen and appreciated for their contributions to the greater whole.
With this in mind, it’s a good idea to avoid stereotypical company activities that might have the baggage of associations. So while the company picnic is a much-loved tradition, it might not be the absolute best for building the strong bonds you need for a flourishing team.
Coming up and participating in more unusual team building activities will get your team thinking in brand new ways. New and novel activities make meaningful, lasting relationships.
If you’re putting together team building activities that you want to succeed, think less potato salad and more rock climbing wall. Less local happy hours and more trying spinach paneer together for the first time.
Decide On A Timeline
The amount of time you have for preparation will play a huge role in the sort of team building event you’re able to pull off. Even the most extensive company retreats would be possible if you have weeks or months.
If you do have a bit more time to work with, you can even make the preparations part of the team building process. For example, you might create different teams responsible for different aspects of the outing. One team might plan all of the food and refreshments for the outing. This can be a great opportunity to practice delegating tasks.
One team member might be picked as the team leader. They can then assign individual responsibilities to specific team members. Even a simple task like this can yield some useful skills to help your team succeed. Delegating tasks over some time is excellent training for project management.
In today’s decentralized world, being able to organize teams all over the world is required for a company’s success. It’s also vital for teams as well as individual team members to be able to stay organized and focused on larger goals, as well.
Determine Your Goals
Not all team building exercises and activities are interchangeable. Before you set out on your team building outing, it’s important you spend some time reflecting on what you’re hoping to accomplish during the exercise.
For instance, maybe you’re hoping to encourage reliance among different teams of your organization. You’d like for your sales and marketing teams to work together towards common goals instead of having an adversarial relationship.
Once you know what you’re hoping to accomplish, you can pick out specific team building activities to help you realize those goals. Games, exercises, and activities that help emphasize and encourage trust would be a great fit to help you increase interdependence in your office.
On the other hand, maybe you’re trying to introduce a new HR management team. Introducing new team members is challenging at the best of times. It can become trickier when the team members you’re introducing can have some sort of influence over the existing employees.
For an outing like this, exercises that help increase knowledge and familiarity are an excellent choice. Simple games like Show & Tell that we discuss below can help increase empathy among different teams, helping to humanize the different teams.
Deciding on the goals you’re hoping to accomplish ahead of time is one of the most crucial steps toward having a successful team building outing.