A timeless classic that works in any situation, location or team size. You can run the scavenger hunt indoors or outdoors, keep it short or even a day-long, run it with just a few people or involve an entire department – it’s all up to you.
Along the way, your team will learn to appreciate collaboration, communication, leadership and the sheer value of having fun!
Number of participants: Any
Duration: Open
Objective: Inspire collaboration, problem solving and teamwork
How to play
1. Clarify the purpose of the scavenger hunt. Your choice of activities and participants will vary accordingly. For instance, if you want sales and marketing teams to work better together, you can design activities that force them to collaborate. If you want to ice break new employees, get them to pair up with senior employees, and so on.
2. Create a list of activities. Again, align these with the purpose of the hunt. If you want people to just have a good time, pick activities that are less serious and competitive. If you want people to work well together (especially across departments/teams that don’t get along), pick team-focused activities. Use sample activities from sites like TeamBonding for inspiration. You can assign different points to each activity based on its difficulty.
3. Setup the activities, then divide your group into equally-sized teams, taking care to select the right partners based on your target objective.
4. Set aside 20-30 minutes to debrief each team. Leave 60-90 minutes for the actual hunt (change according to the size of the play area).
5. Once the time is up, evaluate which team has the highest points.
Strategy
Running a scavenger hunt requires a lot of preparation but the payoff can be big. A good scavenger hunt involves everyone and can force people/teams who don’t get along otherwise to work closely. For team-building, few activities come close.
