teamwork task list

Work Life is Atlassian’s flagship publication dedicated to unleashing the potential of every team through real-life advice, inspiring stories, and thoughtful perspectives from leaders around the world.

Kelli María Korducki

Contributing Writer

Dominic Price

Work Futurist

Dr. Mahreen Khan

Senior Quantitative Researcher, People Insights

Kat Boogaard

Principal Writer

Hands completing tasks signifying teamwork skills

Master these 7 essential skills to level-up your teamwork game

Use these strategies to align expectations, streamline communication, and crush your goals.

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5-second summary

  • Building “soft skills,” such as effective communication and collaboration skills, are vital components of a team’s success. 
  • Making sure everyone is aligned on goals and responsibilities may seem like a no-brainer, but research shows that team members do not always have the clarity that leadership assumes they do. 
  • Using formal procedures to make decisions and solve problems can help ensure that teams don’t get sidetracked by predictable bottlenecks. 

Teamwork is powerful. You can tap into people’s individual strengths, collect diverse perspectives and ideas, and get projects across the finish line more efficiently.

Here’s the catch: those perks only pan out if your team works together effectively. And as a leader, you’ve probably seen firsthand that successful teamwork doesn’t just happen . 

It requires that you make strategic decisions, encourage positive behaviors, and cultivate an environment where people can get their best work done – not just individually, but as a unit.

That all starts with ensuring that your team has mastered these seven essential teamwork skills.

1. Communication

“We never listen when we are eager to speak.” – Francois de la Rochefoucauld 

Communication is a non-negotiable teamwork skill. A large portion of team or project failures (just take the untimely explosion of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter , as one example) arise from miscommunication. For teams to work well together, they need to communicate well and be on the same page. 

The ability to openly share information, align expectations, and offer feedback is essential in the workplace. However, communication isn’t only about sharing messages – listening plays an equally important role. Active listening , in particular, enhances shared understanding and helps teams avoid crossed wires. 

Help your team communicate:

  • The extroverts on your team are more than willing to jump in with suggestions and opinions, but that can mean they end up steamrolling their colleagues. To make sure everyone’s voice is heard, send an agenda to all participants beforehand so people have time to gather their thoughts. Then, be sure to check in with each person during the meeting to make sure they’ve had a chance to speak. For in-depth guidance, run the inclusive meetings play to make sure that everybody’s input is considered when your team meets.
  • Communication isn’t one-size-fits-all, and your team will be better equipped to communicate information and ideas if they know other people’s preferences . Having each member of the team create a user manual gives them a low-pressure way to share their ideal conditions for getting work done — from their favorite communication channels to how they prefer to receive feedback.
  • Host a regular team stand-up to avoid siloed information in the workplace. This is a short, dedicated huddle where you can discuss team goals, progress, and obstacles to keep everybody in the loop and aligned. 

5 data-driven ways to tackle the challenges of virtual teamwork

5 data-driven ways to tackle the challenges of virtual teamwork

2. collaboration.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. – Helen Keller

Collaboration and teamwork are synonyms, so it makes sense that you’d see this teamwork skill high on the list. Even so, simply putting people on the same team doesn’t inherently lead to effective collaboration.

Instead, clarity needs to take priority. Team members should understand their unique roles, responsibilities, tasks, and deadlines, as well as how their individual pieces impact the whole. That broader focus increases accountability and empowers people to find answers or proactively solve problems themselves.

Help your team collaborate: 

  • Who does what shouldn’t be a mystery on your team, however, people may not always have visibility into what tasks their coworkers have to do. Try creating a shared document that details everyone’s regular tasks and current projects. You can also run the roles and responsibilities play so that there’s no doubt or confusion about what’s on each person’s plate.
  • Team collaboration falls apart when people don’t have a grasp on dependencies. For example, Team Member A might not think missing a deadline by a few days is a big deal – until they realize that it means Team Member B can’t start their assigned tasks. Dependency mapping gives you and your entire team a better sense of how things fit together, so you can proactively manage bottlenecks and other issues.
  • There are certain norms that play out on your team on a daily basis – like muting yourself on Zoom when you aren’t talking or using bullet points in emails – despite the fact that they might never be formally discussed. Consider creating a shared doc that spells out the “rules of the road” for your team. Encourage people to add to it regularly. It’s a great way to help newbies on the team get up to speed quickly. Running the working agreements play can help your team iron out a list of those previously-unspoken expectations and avoid misunderstandings. 

3. Goal setting

“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” – Lawrence J. Peter

Teamwork is all about working your way toward a finish line together. But first? You need to be in agreement about what that finish line actually is. While managers might like to think that goals are already obvious and widely accepted, team members may disagree. Proof: 72% of employees admit they don’t fully understand their company’s strategy. That’s why having this teamwork skill is so important.

In order to reap the benefits of effective teamwork, team leaders need to not only explain team and company goals, but also actively involve employees in the process of setting those objectives so that they can take ownership over the outcomes. 

How to help your team set goals: 

  • Use a defined goal-setting framework like objectives and key results (OKRs) or goals, signals, and measures so that everybody understands what you’re working toward and how you’ll know when you get there.
  • Store your team goals somewhere centralized and accessible in the workplace (like Confluence ) so that everybody on the team can refer back to them when needed. 

4. Decision making

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are very few times when teamwork is more frustrating than when you need to make a speedy decision. With so many perspectives to manage, reaching a consensus can be slow. That’s why decision-making is a teamwork skill that’s vital in a team environment, especially in collaborative cultures where the manager isn’t always the one with the last word. 

To get their best work done, people should be able to listen to other opinions and suggestions with an open mind but then come together collectively to choose the best way forward. 

Help your team make decisions: 

  • Sometimes a consensus isn’t possible. In those cases, who has final say on a project? Who’s contributing but not necessarily a key decision-maker? Those roles can get murky. Use the DACI framework so that your team knows who fits where and is able to make more efficient group decisions.
  • Does your team suffer from decision delay? Try setting a deadline for your team to make a choice. Psychology says that while deadlines can be stressful, they can also increase focus. 

The importance of teamwork (as proven by science)

The importance of teamwork (as proven by science)

5. problem solving.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” – Albert Einstein 

From a project that’s running off the rails to a conflict between a couple of colleagues, you and your team are bound to run into your fair share of roadblocks. In those moments, your team’s problem-solving skills are what will carry you through. 

Successful problem solving isn’t just about slapping on a band-aid or identifying a quick fix. Some stumbling blocks can be deceptively complex. To truly address and prevent issues, people need to start by digging deep and understanding all of the factors that are at play using this teamwork skill.. 

How to help your team solve problems: 

  • Use problem framing to step back and understand the who, what, why, and where of a problem before jumping into solutions.
  • The 5 Whys Analysis is simple on the surface – it essentially involves asking, “Why did this happen” five times in a row. This exercise helps your team uncover the root causes of a problem rather than acting on assumptions and surface-level symptoms.
  • The first possible solution to a problem isn’t always the best one, and that’s one of the many benefits of a team: everybody has access to an assortment of ideas and experiences to find the most suitable answer. Sparring helps your team get quick, honest feedback from each other in a way that feels structured and approachable. 

6. Emotional intelligence 

“Emotions can get in the way or get you on the way.” – Mavis Mazhura 

Emotional intelligence is the ability to read the emotional state of yourself and others, then act accordingly. EQ might not be your typical teamwork skill, but it’s important nonetheless.

Your colleagues can’t always check their feelings at the door (and you can’t either). Emotions come into play in our work lives – they bias our perception and influence how we relate to one another. And, research shows that team emotional intelligence has a significant impact on effectiveness, as well as how much conflict the group experiences. 

How to help your team be emotionally intelligent:

  • As the leader, one of the best things you can do is to model appropriate behaviors. Even seemingly small changes, like regulating a big reaction to customer criticisms or asking a coworker if they’re in the right headspace to receive feedback, can show your team how emotional intelligence plays out.
  • People can’t always control their emotions, but they can control and improve their reactions and behaviors. Unfortunately, emotions can easily become confused with personalities. Try to model and encourage people to switch from “I am…” language to “I feel…” language to keep those lines clear. For example, “I am anxious about this deadline” becomes “I feel anxious about this deadline.” It’s a small but significant shift in how the message comes across.

7. Growth mindset  

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

Teams don’t always deal with smooth seas, and a growth mindset is what helps them power through obstacles and find creative solutions. 

To state it simply, a growth mindset is a teamwork skill that sees problems as opportunities. They’re chances to reflect, learn, and improve. A growth mindset helps your team use past experiences to drive better collaborations – and it also means they won’t bristle at perceived failures or criticisms. 

How to help your team have a growth mindset: 

  • Run a retrospective regularly or at the end of project milestones so that your team can honestly discuss what worked, what didn’t, why, and how you’ll use that information moving forward.

Prioritize regular and frequent constructive feedback for all team members. These candid conversations help them understand how they can improve themselves – which, in turn, helps them improve the entire team. 

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Team Task List Template

Team Task List

This project task list is a simple way for teams to track and manage project tasks. Columns in the main worksheet help you keep track of task information such as due dates, difficulty, and priority. Resist the temptation to mark everything as high priority. If everything is high priority, nothing is high priority.

This template uses automations to track when due dates are coming up. When a due date has arrived, an automatic email can be sent using automations. When a due date passes and a task has not been marked "Complete," "On Hold," or "Awaiting Review," the task will automatically be marked as "Overdue."

By adding your team members as users within the workbook, you can even use automations to send automatic emails for upcoming due dates or new task assignments. Once you master the use of automations , there will be nothing you can't do. You'll show them. You'll show them all.

What is an employee task list template?

While there are some additional complexities to it, the basic way that a business works is that you pay your employees to do things that need to be accomplished. (If for some reason you pay your employees not to do things, please send a job application). Most businesses find that their effectiveness relies heavily on employee productivity. If everyone is taking care of their workload, business moves forward. If nobody knows what they're supposed to be doing, productivity drops, things remain undone, and the office puppy is sad.

An employee task list template is a spreadsheet that allows a manager to assign various tasks to their employees to create a complete list of everyone's responsibilities. Putting each employee's obligations into a central document with due dates, provides a clear record of what is expected of every team member. This allows managers to track the progress on every important task, identify team members that may be falling behind, and rebalance the workload if needed. It also allows each employee to see what their duties and responsibilities are, providing them with all the information they need to manage their time effectively.

In short, an employee task list template is a tool to raise productivity for your team, by ensuring that everyone's responsibilities are clearly defined.

Did you know?

80% of workers feel stressed and/or annoyed by inefficient company communication. If your instinct upon learning this statistic is to hold a few more meetings where you can mention it, you may be part of the problem. Nobody benefits when your employees can't get work done because they are distracted by workplace interruptions. Except for your competitors.

While companies have varying views on mask mandates, employers overwhelmingly support task mandates. 100% of employers interviewed said they would be disappointed if their employees ignored their assigned tasks.

2 out of 3 employers have seen increased productivity among their remote workers. Turns out, when you tell employees what they need to do and then get out of their way and let them do it, great things can happen. If only someone would invent some sort of employee task list template, to make that delegation easy and efficient. Oh well. Until then, there are always singing telegrams.

How does it work?

Simply enter each Task that needs doing on its own row in the project task list, optionally tagging a high or low Priority. Attach any associated Files right in the spreadsheet in the appropriate column.

Select an Owner and Project for each task, to track who will be doing it, and why. Enter the Start Date and Due Date, as well as a Workload estimate on a scale of 1-5, to make it easier to balance the overall workload among your team members.

Use Status tags to indicate whether a task is Not Started, In Progress, On Hold, Awaiting Review, or Completed. (Unstarted and In Progress tasks will automatically be marked as Overdue once the due date is reached.)  Progress indications can be added in their own column, as can any relevant notes.

Look at the top of the spreadsheet for a pie chart breaking down Tasks by Status, and a bar graph showing the number of Tasks by Owner. For further insight into how your tasks break down by Status or by Owner, use the left-hand Views options. You can either re-organize the spreadsheet into Groups by Owner/Project/Status, or get Kanban Views stacked by same.

Why do I need an employee task list template?

Because it's one of the easiest ways to improve productivity for your business.

Of course, you want your team to be productive. And there are various things you can do to boost productivity, but they're difficult and not always cheap. One important step is to hire the best talent possible, so you have people who will be good at the job and able to consistently drive results. But that takes investment and a lot of time screening for qualified candidates, so it can't just be solved with a spreadsheet. (Although, if you do have many candidates to sort through, you can make the process easier with this Applicant Tracking Spreadsheet.)

Another good way to incite productivity is to boost your team's motivation. You can do this by keeping morale high at the office, being flexible about the manner in which your team works as long as the work gets done, and offering positive feedback and incentives (read: money) for jobs well done. Again, this requires some time and investment, but can pay off with productivity gains.

However, there is another easier way to increase productivity, and that's using a project task list to keep everyone on track. It doesn’t even require a significant amount of time or investment. Just enter all tasks that need to be completed into this employee task list template, assign them to your team members, and add the due dates.

Now your organization is more productive because your team has a clear list of expectations, and can manage their time more efficiently. You have a clearer overview of how all tasks are progressing, and can adjust and rebalance the workload among your team as needed. And it doesn't require hiring a whole new staff or spending a fortune on bonus incentives. All you need is this free team task list template and a little time to fill it out.

Who benefits from an employee task list template?

Offices where important tasks might otherwise remain incomplete

Managers who need to delegate work among their employees

Employees who want a list of exactly what they are responsible for

64 team building activities to bring your team together (and have fun!)

teamwork task list

Team building activities can make all the difference when it comes to job satisfaction , employee engagement and organizational success . But even with the best intentions, it’s not sufficient to simply bring a group of people together. Effective team building activities can help your group feel more connected and able to collaborate more effectively .

But how do you choose the right activity, and where do you get started when trying to encourage team bonding or alignement? We're here to help with this collection of simple and effective team building activities!

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Building a highly effective team takes effort , consideration, and the deployment of a thoughtful group process . Remember that teams are composed of relationships between people and all relationships need care and attention. The team-building activities below are a great place to start!

That said, some employees may bristle or cringe at the mention of team building activities, and with good reason. Done badly, team building at work can be unimaginative , unproductive, or a waste of time for all involved . 

We’ve put together a collection of proven team-building activities, games, and exercises that cover everything from communication and collaboration to alignment and vision . 

Whether you’re working in a small team or as part of a large organization, taking the time to develop your team and enable everyone in your group to do their best work is time well spent. Let’s take a look!

What are team building activities? 

Team building is an activity or process designed to help build connections between members of a team, create lasting bonds, and enable better teamwork and working practices.

Team building activities might include running team games and activities, holding group discussions, hosting away days, or simply doing things together as a team. They key is that the exercise is designed to bring your team together in a fun and engaging way.

teamwork task list

What is the main purpose of a team building activity? 

The main purpose of any team-building activity is on improving some aspects of how a team works together while bringing everyone together in a shared experience .

This might include working on communication, collaboration, alignment, team values, motivation, and anything else that can enable a group to work together more effectively. It might also include resolving conflicts, sharing skills, or simply bringing your group together in a shared experience.

Broadly speaking, any team building effort should be designed to help bring team members closer or find ways to first define and then move towards your shared goals as a group .

As Forbes notes , team building is “most important investment you can make for your people.” On this point, it’s worth noting that team building doesn’t just happen during the activity and so being purposeful your choice of exercise is important.

The best team building activities hold space for building connections in a way that spills over into day-to-day work and creates lasting bonds. It’s not enough to throw your team into an escape room or scavenger hunt without first thinking about why or how this will benefit your team!

After you’ve chosen some engaging team building activities, it’s time to design a complete process that will engage your team while achieving your desired outcomes.

SessionLab makes it easy to build a complete team building agenda in minutes . Start by dragging and dropping blocks, add activity timings and adjust your session flow to create an effective session.

teamwork task list

What are the main types of team building activities?

Team building activities are games and exercises that help a group collaborate on a shared goal, discuss important issues constructively, share in a fun experience or find better ways of working together.

These activities can take forms – from quick and funny games you use in your regular meeting, or the may be part of a larger process or team development workshop.

Being purposeful and knowing the objective of your session means you can choose an activity accordingly. Sometimes, your team will come together because they have problems to solve, or you might just want to have fun and celebrate your wins. Pick the right activity for the right time to ensure your team is onboard and ready to engage!

Here are the main categories of team building activity that you might want to use with your team. We’ve made it easy to get started with the right activity for your team by including the length of each game, how many participants can play and how hard it is to run alongside clear instructions.

Team get to know you activities

Starting the team building process can be difficult, especially if you’re working with a new team who don’t yet know each other well. The activities in this section are focused on helping teams get to know each other better and start to develop bonds and trust as a team.

Even if your team has been around a while, learning more about one another and building deeper bonds is useful for both team cohesion and group happiness. These are also great activities to use when trying to improve employee engagement and company culture – any organization is only as strong as the bonds between its people!

Try these get-to-know-you games to encourage conversation and break the ice – especially if you’re working with a remote workers who might not be in the office together.

3 Question Mingle

Conversation is often the best starting point when it comes to team building, but without structure, it can be difficult for groups to get moving. In 3 Question Mingle, each team member writes three questions on sticky notes and then has a one minute meeting with another person. They each ask another one question and then trade those post-its. Invite the group to move around the room asking questions in pairs and swapping questions afterwards. 

Not only does this team building activity help an entire team get to know each other, but it also invites the group to ask the questions they want to ask. By combining structure with self direction, you can get your team building workshop off to the right start! Bonus points for adding those sticky notes to a memory wall for later reflection!

3 Question Mingle   #hyperisland   #team   #get-to-know   An activity to support a group to get to know each other through a set of questions that they create themselves. The activity gets participants moving around and meeting each other one-on-one. It’s useful in the early stages of team development and/or for groups to reconnect with each other after a period of time apart.

9 Dimensions Team Building Activity

Building better team relationships and improving group dynamics often means sharing something about ourselves and finding space to discuss and be honest. In this team building exercise, give each team member a set of red, green, yellow and blue dots alongside the 9 dimensions you’ll be looking at. Each participant puts a dot on each dimension based on whether they believe they’re crushing it or need to do more work. 

By sharing some of their 9 dimensions, your team gets to surface things they’re proud of, as well as those that need work. You’ll explore what your group is aligned on in the debriefing section and then move forward together as a team.

9 Dimensions Team Building Activity   #icebreaker   #teambuilding   #team   #remote-friendly   9 Dimensions is a powerful activity designed to build relationships and trust among team members. There are 2 variations of this icebreaker. The first version is for teams who want to get to know each other better. The second version is for teams who want to explore how they are working together as a team.

Awareness Circle

Getting to know people is easier for some members of a group than it is for others. While extroverts can start chatting to new team members with ease, introverts may find it more difficult to bond with their team and create meaningful team bonds.

In this activity, you’ll encourage a group to get to know each other without speaking and show that everyone in a team has a connection. Another great takeaway from this activity is to take note of the diversity (or lack thereof) in the room and consider this as a point for future team development. 

Awareness Circle   #teampedia   #team   #icebreaker   #opening   This activity helps participants to get-to-know each other without saying a word.

Best and Worst

Teambuilding activities are often at their most effective when you ignite the passions of everyone in a group and bring up talking points that enable people to share something of themselves with the team.

Best and Worst asks each participant to ask one question about the best and worst thing they want to learn from the group. For example, “What’s the best recipe you know?” or “What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had?” After putting all the questions in a hat and choosing a random pair, invite the group to share their answers and related stories.

Best and Worst   #teampedia   #get-to-know   #opening   #icebreaker   #team   This activity could easily break the ice at the beginning of a workshop, enabling participants to get to know each other in a fast process.

Break the Ice with The Four Quadrants Activity

Sometimes pictures are better than words when it comes to helping a team get to know one another. Creative games like this one can also be especially effective at helping introverts or distanced teams share with the group.

Start by handing out sheets of paper and inviting each participant to draw a 2×2 grid and pose four questions to the group. Each team member draws their answer in one of the grid squares and once the time limit is up, invite the group to share. If you’re looking for a fun game that encourages creative thinking while being visual and memorable, look no further! 

Break the Ice with The Four Quadrants Activity   #team   #icebreaker   #get-to-know   #teambuilding   The Four Quadrants is a tried and true team building activity to break the ice with a group or team. It is EASY to prep for and set up. It can be MODIFIED to work with any group and/or topic (just change the questions). It is FUN, COLORFUL and VISUAL.

Group Order

Supporting the get-to-know process at the start of a session or with a new team can be as simple as asking participants to group themselves together based on what they know about each other and inviting them to find out what they don’t.

This activity requires nothing more than getting your group together in a room and asking them to line themselves up in an order based on a criterion such as distance from home to the workplace, birth date in the calendar year or number of different countries visited. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to get people talking and sharing when in pursuit of a common goal.

Group Order   #get-to-know   #energiser   #icebreaker   #thiagi   #team   This is an energizing activity that helps members of a group get to know each other, network, and recognize what they have in common.

Happiness Exercise

Good teams know how to appreciate one another and share joyful, happy experiences. When a new team is getting to know each other, using an exercise that encourages the sharing of positive stories and experiences not only allows people to connect but also builds a positive atmosphere in the room.

You might also use this team building activity at work or with a more established team. If your team has been going through a challenging period, it can be transformational to share things that make everyone happy and defuse stress or tension as a team.

Happiness exercise   #teambuilding   #icebreaker   #warm up   #remote-friendly   This exercise is a simple application of the principles of Appreciative Inquiry.

Just One Lie

Not all team building games need to reinvent the wheel. Particularly with new teams or groups that aren’t used to team building, keeping it simple with a tried and tested method can be your best bet.

Just One Lie is adapted from the well-known icebreaker two truths and a lie, though encourages participants to mingle and share lots of facts about themselves with one another – great for breaking the ice and getting to know one another too!

Just One Lie   #icebreaker   #energiser   #team   #get-to-know   This method is adapted from the well-known icebreaker ‘Two Truths And A Lie’  to create an activity that you could return to throughout a meeting.

Both groups and individuals go through many twists, turns and changes throughout their life. At its best, team building not only helps create better teams but allows time for reflection and deeper sharing between participants.

With Life Map, encourage your group to draw or create a collage of their life story they can then share with the team. This kind of deeper getting to know your exercise can really help bring a team together and allow for meaningful self-reflection too! 

Life map   #team   #teampedia   #icebreaker   #get-to-know   With this activity the participants get to know each other on a deeper level.

Name Juggling

Working with new teams means having new names to learn. Team building starts with getting to know everyone, but how can we make this more fun and dynamic than simple introductions?

In this get to know you game, start by having everyone stand in a circle and introduce themselves by name. Introduce a ball and have people state someone’s name before throwing the ball to that person. That person thanks the person who passed the ball by name before then passing the ball on to someone else. Once people get comfortable, spice things up by introducing more balls and trying to keep them in the air!

Name Juggling   #teampedia   #icebreaker   #energiser   #get-to-know   #team   Name Juggling is another variation of a try-to-learn-everyone’s-name but the game guarantees high energy level as well as some strategic thinking.

Finding you have things in common with other team members is one of the cornerstones of effective teamwork and communication. While conversation games or other team building activities might ask for an in-depth approach, Open Fist helps teams bond with a simple, effective activity.

Sharing little known facts about ourselves can help teams be more cohesive and by limiting the number of shared facts to the amount of fingers on a hand, this quick team building activity can fit into an agenda with ease.

Open Fist   #get-to-know   #icebreaker   #thiagi   #team   Teams work better when they find things in common. Stronger teams reduce turnover, increase pleasant interactions, and improve productivity.

Personal Presentation

Team building is all about building trust and openness between teammates. Sharing personal experiences and enlarging the social aspects of the group with presentations not only allows everyone to get to know each other but also encourages team development skills too.

For this team building method, ask each participant to prepare a presentation including three things that have shaped who they are as a person. Encourage creative thinking by asking teams to use simple drawings and words to visualize their presentation too.

Personal Presentations   #hyperisland   #team   A simple exercise in which each participant prepares a personal presentation of him/herself sharing several important experiences, events, people or stories that contributed to shaping him or her as an individual. The purpose of personal presentations is to support each participant in getting to know each other as individuals and to build trust and openness in a group by enlarging the social arena.

Cross the Circle

Finding common ground and shared experiences across a diverse group is what team building is all about. In this playful team building activity, participants are encouraged to cross the circle in response to questions posed by a person in the middle.

For example, “Cross through the circle if you have worked here more than 5 years.” or “Cross through the circle if you can play an instrument.” After each stage, a new person gets to pose a question and your team gets to know one another and their commonalities in a simple, effective way.

Cross the Circle   #teambuilding   #get-to-know   #energiser   #team   #thiagi   This activity provides a playful way for participants to find commonalities among themselves.

Funny team building activities

In an increasingly stressful environment of deadlines and meetings, it’s worth remembering the value of joy, play and simply have fun as a team.

Injecting fun and laughter into your team building event is effective on many levels. We often recommend starting a session with one of these activities, as they can help set a more relaxed and personable tone in an instant.

We’ve also found that some of the more memorable moments of our sessions have come out of these kinds of activities. It’s lovely to have something funny to reference in future meetings too!

Bringing team members out of their shells and loosening them up with a funny game can also help prevent existing hierarchies or team structures from affecting the team building session. 

You can also use these funny team building activities to kick off your session, or when the energy levels drop and you need to get your team re-engaged for the team workshop ahead. Let’s take a look.

Having fun and energizing your team is a great way to kick off your team building event. Bang is a simple and effective game that encourages quick reactions and fun – perfect for both new and established teams to play together! 

Start by electing a sheriff and having the rest of the group stand in a circle around them. The sheriff spins around and points at one person in the circle and says “bang!” That person then crouches as quickly as possible. The two people on either side of the person crouching must quickly point at each other and shout the other’s name. Whoever does not react quickly enough is eliminated. Try using this one at the beginning of a team building event to really loosen up the group!

Bang   #hyperisland   #energiser   Bang is a group game, played in a circle, where participants must react quickly or face elimination. One person stands in the middle of the circle as “the sheriff”, pointing at other players who must quickly crouch while those on either side of them quickly “draw”. A good activity to generate laughter in a group. It can also help with name-learning for groups getting to know each other.

Build-a-Shake

Creating a secret handshake was something many of us did as kids. This team building activity taps into that same sense of creativity and also encourages team members to get to know each other while sharing and building on their handshake in pairs. By moving between pairs and teaching others the steps of your handshake, this also helps create group closeness and cohesion. We love team building activities or office games that encourage people to bring a little of themselves to the table and Build-a-Shake is a great example of that!  

Build-a-Shake   #teampedia   #energiser   #get-to-know   #opening   #team   How to introduce yourself in a fun, creative way? Build a handshake!

Simple tasks that require team focus, cohesion, and awareness are great for any group working on team building. In Count Up, a team has to come together and count up to twenty with their eyes closed and without any other communication. People cannot say more than one number at a time, and if two people speak at the same time, the group must start over. 

Though it seems simple, this team building exercise can really demonstrate the power of effective teamwork and is a great opener for a team building workshop. 

Count Up   #hyperisland   #team   #energiser   #remote-friendly   In this short exercise, a group must count up to a certain number, taking turns in a random order, with no two people speaking at the same time. The task is simple, however, it takes focus, calm and awareness to succeed. The exercise is effective to generate calm and focused collective energy in a group.

Follow the Leader

When performing online team building, simple activities are often the best strategy in ensuring participation and removing frustration. Follow the Leader is a great team building energiser suitable for online and offline teams.

In virtual settings, put Zoom into gallery view and invite people to perform an action in the frame of their screen that other participants have to follow. Being a little silly is encouraged and this team building exercise often results in laughter and energy as a result! 

Follow the Follower   #zoom   #virtual   #physical   #teambuilding   #connection   #energiser   #opening   #remote-friendly   #ericamarxcoaching   One person is designated as the leader.  Others copy exactly how the leader moves.  The leader calls on a new person to be the leader, and so on. Follow the follower variation is when the leading gets passed to the entire group and no single person is leading.

Portrait Gallery

Creative team building activities are great for breaking the ice or energising a team via play. In Portrait Gallery, you and your team will collaboratively create portraits of everyone in the group and have a fun, electric set of portraits to display afterward.

Start by splitting your group into two teams. Team B will draw portraits of Team A, though every 10-15 seconds, they’ll pass their current drawing to the next person to continue. By the end of this team building game, you’ll have a set of eclectic portraits for everyone in the group and have broken the ice significantly too! 

Portrait Gallery   #hyperisland   #team   #icebreaker   The Portrait Gallery is an energetic and fun icebreaker game that gets participants interacting by having the group collaboratively draw portraits of each member. The activity builds a sense of group because it results with each participant having a portrait drawn of him/herself by the other members of the group together. It also has a very colourful visual outcome: the set of portraits which can be posted in the space.

Fun team building games are a great way to start any group development process, and they’re even better if they energize the team too! Snowball is a great activity for getting people out of their seats and moving around while also breaking the ice. 

Start by asking a question relevant to your group and ask each participant to write an answer on a piece of paper. Once that’s done, invite everyone to crumple their paper and come to the centre of the room to have a snowball fight! After a few minutes, ask everyone to keep a snowball and find the person who wrote the answer. Not only does this team building exercise invite energy into the room, but it encourages people to get to know each other too.

Snowball   #get-to-know   #opening   #energiser   #teambuilding   #team   This is a great activity to get people up and moving around in a playful way while still learning about each other. It can be related to any topic and be played at any time during the group’s life.

Celebrity Party

You’ve likely played the game where you stick the name of a random celebrity on your head while then asking questions to help you guess who it is. (Or at least seen a film where someone else does it!) It’s simple, but it absolutely works when you want to break the ice or just generate some laughter and conversation.

This classic team building game is a great way to warm up large groups, encouraging mingling and have fun too. Ask participants to be creative, keep it light and not to give hints and you have all the makings of an effective team building exercise.

Celebrity Party   #teampedia   #icebreaker   #communication   #diversity   #team   #action   Great activity to help people warm up in a new environment.

Non-verbal improv

Whether you’re working with remote teams or co-located groups, having fun when you get together should never be undervalued. We love simple games that are also ways to begin conversations about how we’d like to work together more effectively.

This improv game is easy to touch and is a great way to build team connections while raising some smiles. Start by preparing some actions on post-it notes, such as drinking a glass of water or eating pasta. Next, invite participants to mime the action without speaking. Include more difficult and amusing scenarios to challenge the group and create some funny opportunities for team connection!

Non-verbal improv   #improv game   #energiser   #fun   #remote-friendly   An improv game where participants must use non-verbal communication and actions to communicate a phrase or an idea to other players. A fun game that’s a great way to open a discussion on better communication!

Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament)

Encouraging team members to play and have fun is an often overlooked aspect of building better teams. Play is an inherently human activity, and by doing this as a team, we can start to see ourselves as more than just a group of people who work together.

In this version of Rock, Paper, Scissors, large groups pair off until only two players remain for a final showdown. We love that losing players become fans of the winners and cheer them on. This is a quick and easy team game that can build excitement and get the group ready for deeper team building activities to come!

Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament)   #energiser   #warm up   #remote-friendly   This is a fun and loud energiser based on the well-known “Rock, Paper, Scissor” game – with a twist: the losing players become the fan of the winners as the winner advances to the next round. This goes on until a final showdown with two large cheering crowds! It can be played with adults of all levels as well as kids and it always works! 

Fun team building activities often ask the group to let go of their inhibitions and find space to be playful and silly. This game from Hyper Island encourages the group to perform some loud, exuberant moves to emulate our favourite historical raiders – the Vikings.

You might use this activity during a longer workshop or meeting to energize a group and create a memorable moment with your team. For bonus points, have a group photographer capture those moments and put them on a history wall for reflection later!

The Viking   #hyperisland   #energiser   In this group game, players stand in a circle and perform a series of loud physical moves, passing from one person to the next. When a player hesitates or makes a mistake, he or she is eliminated and the game continues. The game generates laughter and playfulness in the group.

Wink Murder

We love team building exercises that include space for friendly competition and laughter. Wink murder is a variation on a classic party game that asks every team member to try and catch the wink assassin, whose job it is to eliminate the other players by winking at them without being caught.

We especially like the fact this game makes team members to use creative thinking while playing. Run multiple rounds with extra rules such as adding an accomplice to spice things up and have even more fun!

Wink Murder   #icebreaker   #energizer   #group game   #team   #teambuilding   A fun energizer where one player must try and eliminate the rest of the team by winking – all without being caught.

teamwork task list

Corporate team building activities

Running team building games in the office can be a great way to finish up the week, onboard new team members or just boost employee engagement.

While all of the activities in this post are suitable for the office, the team building games in this section are especially effective in a corporate environment where some team members may need some coaxing or you want to gently introduce important topics.

Try these activities if you want to add an opportunity for your team to bond during a corporate training session, all-hands or other office event.

Appreciations Exercise

Office trivia can be fun, but you know what’s better? Taking a moment to appreciate each team member and uplift everyone in the group.

This method is designed to help everyone in a group receive appreciative feedback on their strengths from others. Start by sitting the group in a circle and having each participant write their name on a piece of paper and pass it to the person on their left. Each person writes down what they have most valued about the person whose name is on the sheet before passing it along.

At the end, share these appreciations and celebrate everyone in the group! You might even include this activity during a happy hour to truly celebrate one another!

Appreciations Exercise   #team   #appreciation   #self esteem   #remote-friendly   When you hear about your strengths from others and acknowledge them to yourself, this builds your motivation and self-confidence. If you do this at the end of a workshop, you go away feeling good about yourself and your colleagues too.

Cover Story

Bringing an activity that encourages creative thinking and imagination can be an effective method for getting team mates involved at your next corporate event. In this game, small groups create a magazine cover with your team on it and add headlines and taglines that show the best possible version of your team.

By defining the ideal future state for the organization your group can see what actions they might take today while also creating a fun and useful artefact for the team. Use as many sheets of paper as you need!

Cover Story   #gamestorming   #idea generation   #organizational development   #vision   #strategy   Cover Story is a game about pure imagination. The purpose is to think expansively around an ideal future state for the organization; it’s an exercise in visioning. The object of the game is to suspend all disbelief and envision a future state that is so stellar that it landed your organization on the cover of a well-known magazine

Coat of Arms

Even established teams have more to learn about one another. A corporate team building activity is a great time to encourage groups to go deeper and share who they are as a team.

In Coat of Arms, each team member begins by drawing a personal coat of arms and then sharing it with a partner. The partner interprets the coat of arms and then presents it to the rest of the group. This kind of getting to know you activity taps into group creativity and is a fun way of helping your team bond. 

Coat of Arms   #teambuilding   #opening   #icebreaker   #team   #get-to-know   #thiagi   Coat of Arms exercise provides a way for participants to introduce themselves and their colleagues, particularly for groups who think they already know each other very well. Almost invariably participants discover something about their colleagues of which they previously had no idea. Occasionally this revelation has an immediate and direct application to another participant’s current project or challenge.Because this activity forces people to use drawings rather than words, it is particularly useful as a dual-purpose introductory exercise in training sessions that deal with such topics as innovation, creativity, and problem-solving.

My Favourite Manager

Leaders and managers can be a deciding factor in creating a great company culture and employee happiness. In this game, get started by bringing your team together to discuss their favourite and least favourite managers.

This corporate team building activity is great at creating a safe space to discuss management styles and create empathy between teams. You’ll often find team members can shift their perspective, learn something about how they relate to their leaders and have fun too!

My Favourite Manager   #management   #leadership   #thiagi   #teamwork   #remote-friendly   Participants work individually, assuming the roles of three different people and brainstorming their perceptions of three most favourite managers and three least favourite managers. Later, they work with a partner (and still later, in teams) to prepare a list of dos and don’t-s for improving employees’ perception of a manager’s style.

Who are you? The Pirate Ship exercise

Explore team roles and responsibilities in a lighthearted manner is a great way to spend time during an office event.

In this simple but powerful team building exercise, share the image of the crew of a pirate ship. Next, invite participants to reflect on who they most identify with on the ship. Who is the captain? Who is looking out for land or maintaining the deck? By reflecting together around a fun premise, you can encourage meaningful discussions with your grop.

Who are you? The pirate ship exercise (dinámica del barco pirata)   #team alignment   #team   #remote-friendly   #teamwork   #warm up   #icebreaker   This an easy but powerful exercise to open a meeting or session and get participants to reflect on their attitudes or feelings about a topic, in the organization, team, or in the project.

History Map

Building effective teams is often a process of ideation, reflection and iteration over time. Sometimes, it’s easy to lose sight of just how much a team or organization has grown. With this corporate team building activity, invite your group to reflect and build on their collective experience with a memory wall that collects moments over a fixed period of time.

It’s a great way of reinforcing major takeaways, celebrating the highlights and creating a sense of closure and progress. By also encouraging the creation of a shared visual resource, History Map also enables creativity and a sense of fun that can provide the perfect end to a project or working session. 

History Map   #hyperisland   #team   #review   #remote-friendly   The main purpose of this activity is to remind and reflect on what group members or participants have been through and to create a collective experience and shared story. Every individual will gain a shared idea of what the group has been through together. Use this exercise at the end of a project or program as a way to reinforce learnings, celebrate highlights and create closure.

Birds of a Feather

It’s not uncommon for teams to naturally form sub-groups with common characteristics. This exercise effectively shows how consciously creating more diverse groups can make teams more resilient and productive.

Get started by giving each team member an index card with a single letter on it. Then ask people to form a group of five people as quickly as possible without any further instructions. Next, ask the groups to form the longest word possible from their cards. It will quickly become apparent that the best way to win the game is with a team that has diverse cards.

This simple game is a great introduction to a wider conversation about diversity or inclusion. As always, debrief learnings and invite deeper conversation in the group to make this activity a success.

Birds of a Feather   #teamwork   #diversity   #team   #creativity   #thiagi   Participants naturally want to form groups with common characteristics. This exercise illustrates how diverse groups have access to more resources and provide a greater variety of solutions. Each person is given an index card with a letter on it, and then asked to form a group of five people. Participants assume that they should get into groups with others who have the same letter. However, when the facilitator asks them to form the longest word possible with the letter cards, they realize that it would have been more beneficial to have created a diverse group.

Corporate meetings can sometimes be heavy going, but they don’t need to be. In this fun teambuilding game, encourage your group to loosen up while working together to solve a puzzle that involves their bodies!

Start by getting your team members into groups of 7-12 people. Ask each group to stand in a circle, close their eyes and then link hands with two other people in the circle. Next, ask each group to work to untangle the human knot they have created without breaking the chain. This is a really fun game that requires clear communication, collaboration and a little flexibility too!

Human Knot   A physical-participation disentanglement puzzle that helps a group learn how to work together (self-organize) and can be used to illustrate the difference between self-organization and command-control management or simply as a get-to-know-you icebreaker. Standing in a circle, group members reach across to connect hands with different people. The group then tries to unravel the “human knot” by unthreading their bodies without letting go of each other people’s hands. As a management-awareness game to illustrate required change in behavior and leadership on a management level (e.g., illustrate the change from ‘task-oriented’ management towards ‘goal/value-oriented’ management).

Team communication and collaboration activities

Team work doesn’t always come naturally, and effective team collaboration needs attention, reflection and work in order to happen. It’s not enough to just assume your team members will be able to work together efficiently: all teams can benefit from a strategic and well-thought approach to how they communicate and collaborate.

Whether you’re having a team away day or using methods expressly designed to improve collaboration, you’ll find inspiration in the activities here!

These team building exercises are helpful whether you’re trying to solve miscommunication or collaboration issues, or just want to strengthen your company culture or communication skills.

Conflict Responses

It’s important to remember that every team is made up of individuals and sometimes, conflicts or disagreements can arise. While its regular working practice to disagree, our responses to conflict and how we deal with them when they arise are in our control and can be improved.

In this exercise, reflect on previous conflicts as a team and collectively create a set of guidelines to use in the future. Resolving issues effectively is a massive part of team collaboration, and by including all team members in this process you can get more meaningful results too.

Conflict Responses   #hyperisland   #team   #issue resolution   A workshop for a team to reflect on past conflicts, and use them to generate guidelines for effective conflict handling. The workshop uses the Thomas-Killman model of conflict responses to frame a reflective discussion. Use it to open up a discussion around conflict with a team.

Heard, Seen, Respected

Team empathy is a vital ingredient of good team work though whatever the size of your organization, it can sometimes be difficult to walk in the shoes of others and see things from other perspectives.

Heard, Seen, Respected is a team building activity designed to help participants practice deeper empathy for colleagues and build the kinds of bonds and working practices that can improve team collaboration. By inviting participants to notice patterns in the stories shared and find common takeaways, it’s a great way to get everyone involved on the same page and improve communication skills too.

Heard, Seen, Respected (HSR)   #issue analysis   #empathy   #communication   #liberating structures   #remote-friendly   You can foster the empathetic capacity of participants to “walk in the shoes” of others. Many situations do not have immediate answers or clear resolutions. Recognizing these situations and responding with empathy can improve the “cultural climate” and build trust among group members. HSR helps individuals learn to respond in ways that do not overpromise or overcontrol. It helps members of a group notice unwanted patterns and work together on shifting to more productive interactions. Participants experience the practice of more compassion and the benefits it engenders.

Myers-Briggs Team Reflection

One potential obstacle to effective team collaboration is when members of the group don’t fully understand one another. Team building activities for work that encourage participants to not only try and understand their colleagues but themselves can be especially helpful when helping a team be more cohesive.

In this activity, invite your group to first take a version of the Myers-Briggs personality test. Start by asking each team member to reflect on their own personality type before then moving towards small group discussion. 

When using this activity, it’s important to correctly frame the usage of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework: This can be a useful framework to understand different communication preferences between people, but team members should not be labeled or put into boxes based on their self-reported preferences. 

Myers-Briggs Team Reflection   #team   #hyperisland   A workshop to explore personal traits and interpersonal relations using the Myers-Briggs personalities model. Use this tool to go deeper with your team to understand more about yourselves and each other on personal and professional levels.

Strength Building exercise

Exercises for team building come in many varieties. In this activity, the emphasis is on the team championing one another and increasing confidence, self esteem and mutual trust.

Start by asking team members to share an event where they accomplished something that made them feel good about themselves. The rest of the team chimes in to suggest two to three strengths they must have exhibited in order to achieve the accomplishment. Team collaboration often means helping others on the team achieve their best, and this activity helps the group uplift one another meaningfully and effectively.

Strength Building exercise   #team   #appreciation   #self esteem   #remote-friendly   People develop confidence and self esteem as they discover that their achievements and skills are valuable. This is an exercise for team building and for increasing self esteem and mutual trust.

Strength Envelopes

All members of a team have unique strengths, capabilities and working preferences. When working as a group, you can improve engagement and group workflow by having each participant utilize their strengths and do work that interests them the most.

With this team building activity, ask participants to write their name on an envelope and invite other members of their team to spend a few minutes writing down strength statements for that person. Place these in the envelope and pass them along so at the end of the session, each person has a set full of strengths they can use as the basis for reflection. 

Strength Envelopes   #appreciation   #self-awareness   #feedback   #team   #thiagi   #teambuilding   #action   This activity helps working teams to discover and share individual strengths and to increase their engagement by structuring their jobs around these strengths. Suitable for people who work together (for example, members of an intact work team) organized into playgroups of 5 to 9 members.

Team of Two

Whether you work in a small startup or a multinational organisation, the reality is that a large part of your working day will be spent working in pairs and interacting on a one-to-one basis. Whether in-person, over email or on video chat, finding ways to work together more effectively is vital for effective teams.

Try this team building exercise to help empower your groups toward more effective communication skills and have more meaningful interpersonal relationships at work. As a member of a remote team, I’ve found this method to be personally useful time and time again.

Team of Two   #communication   #active listening   #issue analysis   #conflict resolution   #issue resolution   #remote-friendly   #team   Much of the business of an organisation takes place between pairs of people. These interactions can be positive and developing or frustrating and destructive. You can improve them using simple methods, providing people are willing to listen to each other. “Team of two” will work between secretaries and managers, managers and directors, consultants and clients or engineers working on a job together. It will even work between life partners.

What I Need From You (WINFY)

Some of the best team building activities focus on helping your group improve their teamwork skills and communicate and collaborate better as a team. A sometimes overlooked part of working as a team is clearly articulating what you need from other people and knowing how to ask for it.

What I Need From You is a team building method designed to help team members better articulate their core needs and be transparent with the group. This leads to a more cohesive team that works together with integrity and understanding.

What I Need From You (WINFY)   #issue analysis   #liberating structures   #team   #communication   #remote-friendly   People working in different functions and disciplines can quickly improve how they ask each other for what they need to be successful. You can mend misunderstandings or dissolve prejudices developed over time by demystifying what group members need in order to achieve common goals. Since participants articulate core needs to others and each person involved in the exchange is given the chance to respond, you boost clarity, integrity, and transparency while promoting cohesion and coordination across silos: you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again!

Team problem solving activities

Teams often come together to solve collective problems as a group . Whether these are large projects or simply finding better ways to work together on a day-to-day basis, solving problems is something all teams should do – in or out of a conference room!

Enabling better team practices with a game that asks for creative problem solving is a wonderful way to bring everyone together. We love using these kinds of team building exercises to bring large groups together to solve a fun, simple problem.

By engaging team members in this way, they not only have fun, but they learn how to work together more effectively and reflect on how they can take that learning back to their day work.

In this section, we’ll look at team building exercises you can use to encourage creative thinking, problem solving and teamwork in an experiential way!

Blind Square – Rope Game

Nothing energizes a team workshop like a seemingly simple problem that also gets everyone moving and engaged. In this team problem solving game, start by tying a length of rope into a circle and invite the participants to plan how to make the rope into a perfect square while blindfolded.

After planning time, team members is blindfolded and has ten minutes to form the square. By debriefing afterwards, your group will find communication, planning and attention to detail are all important aspects of team problem solving – all while having fun too!

Blind Square – Rope game   #teamwork   #communication   #teambuilding   #team   #energiser   #thiagi   #outdoor   This is an activity that I use in almost every teambuilding session I run–because it delivers results every time. I can take no credit for its invention since it has existed from long before my time, in various forms and with a variety of names (such as Blind Polygon). The activity can be frontloaded to focus on particular issues by changing a few parameters or altering the instructions.

Crocodile River

We love team building activities that challenge the group to work together in inventive ways and also help energize a workshop setting. Crocodile River is a team problem solving exercise that challenges team members to support one another physically as they look to move across a wide outdoor space.

By changing the setting and inviting problem solving and strategic thinking to solve a challenge, your group not only stretches their problem solving muscles but also works on team communication, leadership and cooperation. As with any more abstract team building game, be sure to debrief afterward for best results!

Crocodile River   #hyperisland   #team   #outdoor   A team-building activity in which a group is challenged to physically support one another in an endeavour to move from one end of a space to another. It requires working together creatively and strategically in order to solve a practical, physical problem. It tends to emphasize group communication, cooperation, leadership and membership, patience and problem-solving.

Classic team building games like Egg Drop offer tried and tested ways to encourage teams to solve problems together while improving the way they communicate. This game often generates a bunch of laughter and creative thinking too – how can we save this poor egg!

In this team problem solving activity, invite small groups to build a freestanding structure that can support the dropping of an egg from seven feet. Include some caveats and challenges to make it more difficult and encourage an even greater degree of team collaboration. Just make sure you bring a mop for afterwards!

Egg drop   #teampedia   #collaboration   #teamwork   #icebreaker   #team   This fun activity could be used as an icebreaker for people who have just met but it can be framed as a method that shows and fosters team communication, collaboration and strategic thinking as well.

Helium Stick

Bringing team members together with problem solving activities that also encourages play can perform multiple functions. Not only do you encourage teamwork and the building of various team skills but you can have fun and promote laughter too.

Helium Stick is an example of a simple team building game that does double duty by encouraging fun, physical activity while introducing and exploring some core team building concepts. Ask the group to lower a long pole to the ground while keeping all of their fingers in contact with the pole at all times – more difficult than it first appears!

Helium Stick   #teampedia   #team   #teamwork   #icebreaker   #energiser   A great and simple activity for fostering teamwork and problem solving with no setup beforehand.

Lego Challenge

Creating something is often the purpose of bringing your team members together. Tap into the engaging process of co-creation and collaboration with this team building game using LEGO.

Building on the concept of LEGO Serious Play, this exercise is a great way of encouraging play, out-of-the-box thinking and creative approaches to existing problems. Additionally, each team member has a secret assignment which increases the challenge and encourages finding inventive ways to cooperate effectively and achieve both personal and team goals. 

LEGO Challenge   #hyperisland   #team   A team-building activity in which groups must work together to build a structure out of LEGO, but each individual has a secret “assignment” which makes the collaborative process more challenging. It emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, conflict, cooperation, patience and problem solving strategy.

Marshmallow Challenge with Debriefing 

Real-life challenges are often time-sensitive and need to be considered thoughtfully and pragmatically. Team building activities for work are especially effective when they help create this same sense of urgency while encouraging team work.

In just eighteen minutes, groups must build the tallest free-standing structure out of materials including: spaghetti, tape, string, and one marshmallow, placing this last item on top. In this version of the team building game, there’s a debriefing section which encourages reflection on the roles of everyone in the team. 

Marshmallow challenge with debriefing   #teamwork   #team   #leadership   #collaboration   In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. Visit the Marshmallow Challenge website for more information. This version has an extra debriefing question added with sample questions focusing on roles within the team.

Getting outside and doing fun, physical activity can be a great way to bond teams and mix up a normal working routine. In this team problem solving game, participants are asked to work to make holes in a grid of string and rope that can safely and effectively accommodate everyone in the group getting through at once. Team members are not allowed to touch the string or rope and with diverse groups, the difficulty this presents makes for an interesting problem solving challenge for teams to solve. 

Spider web   #team   #teampedia   #warm up   #outdoor   #physical   This is an active team building game and requires participants to move about a lot and so can be also used as an energiser.

Stress Balls

At one point or another, most teams will be asked to perform effectively under pressure, whether that’s generated by internal or external stressors. By using team building games that help participants work together and communicate effectively even under difficult circumstances you can prepare your team members for almost anything!

Stress Balls is a fun game to help start exploring team resilience and problem solving under pressure, and it’s easy to run with large groups too! Start by simply passing a single ball around the room before adding more complex rules to help team members learn a valuable lesson about communication and teamwork!

Stress Balls   #energiser   #communication   #teamwork   #team   #thiagi   #action   #icebreaker   Understanding the importance of communication and teamwork is an important requirement for high performance teams of knowledge workers. This exercise is an effective energizer that requires communication and teamwork. Ask participants to form a circle and throw a ball around to simulate the movement of a message. Change different variables such as speed, quantity, and complexity to create a mess.

Scavenger Hunt

Activities that encourage groups to use teamwork and communication to achieve their goals are great ways to build team spirit. A classic scavenger hunt is a wonderful way to bring large groups together and have fun doing something a bit different!

Be sure to use office trivia, inside jokes or aspects of your company culture to inform this fun team building activity. You’ll find it much more effective if it’s tailored to your group. Bonus points if you can mix in activities that speak to the various departments or skillsets in the group during your scavenger hunt!

In the virtual-friendly version below, you’ll also find rules to help you run this activity with a remote team.

Virtual scavenger hunt   #energiser   #teambuilding   #remote-friendly   A fun team-building energiser that encourages groups to recreate the scavenger hunt experience in a fully remote environment! 

Team bonding and trust building activities

Mutual trust is a vital ingredient for any group of people working together, though it doesn’t always emerge organically. Taking the opportunity to build team bonds and create trust creates benefits for team connection, happiness and your company culture too!

While many of the fun team building activities above will bring your team together in some way, these methods are designed to expressly create better team bonds and build trust.

When working on improving team trust, we recommend being open about the goals of the exercise and encouraging the group to be honest . Being intentional during these activities can really help bring the group together!

Trust Battery

Great teamwork isn’t just about bringing a group of people together into the same space. Without honesty, openness, and trust, your team can’t collaborate effectively and can lead to frustration or frazzled relationships.

Trust Battery is a team building activity designed to help all members of your group reflect on their trust levels and rebuild those batteries with lower levels. By encouraging all members of a team to meaningfully reflect, you can enable better team collaboration and help your team feel closer and more cohesive too.

Trust Battery   #leadership   #teamwork   #team   #remote-friendly   This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team, and encourages focus on actions that can charge the depleted trust batteries.

Telling Our Stories

Everyone has a story to tell, though without a framework or guiding principles, surfacing those stories in a way that makes everyone feel safe and head can be tricky – especially for new teams. Team building activities that combine self reflection, sharing and structure are great for helping people to get to know each other deeply and build better bonds.

In Telling Our Stories, invite participants to reflect on childhood, young adulthood and today while answering questions on colored post-it notes. By sharing from the full gamut of our experiences, your team can get to know one another meaningfully and create trust too. 

Better Connections

Great teamwork and collaboration is all about building stronger relationships and connections and this often means taking the time to see each other as more than just our job title. Once we get a fuller picture of who we are outside the office, everyone can feel more seen and understood. This is one of the cornerstones of team bonding and trust!

Encourage people who know each other the least to pair up and create space for meaningful reflection too – your team culture will thank you for it! It’s also a great way to improve communication skills and break down silos.

Better Connections   #interpersonal relationships   #teambuilding   #team   #connection   #thiagi   #get-to-know   We build a stronger relationship with people when we see them as human beings with whom we share similarities in terms of family and life situations. It is very difficult to form strong relationships with people about whom we know very little.We feel more connected to “full” people. For example, take John, the accountant. If I think of John as an accountant, I might put him into a box of what I think I know about accountants. I might not feel connected to accountants and will treat him accordingly. But when I think of John as a keen mountain climber and outdoor adventurer with two children, one of whom is graduating from university next month, then John becomes human to me, and I can feel connected to him.

Feedback: Current Strongest Impression

Giving and receiving feedback is a great team building activity that sees benefits long after your session. When we find ways to be more open with one another and say what we really think, the results can be transformative for any group.

This activity is a great one to bring to any event where you want to improve team bonding, as it creates a safe and simple way to start practicing more honest feedback. The next time you think about how to improve the way your team works together, think about whether you have a good feedback culture. The trust that good, open feedback can create is a fundamental part of any high performing team!

Feedback: Current Strongest Impression   #hyperisland   #skills   #feedback   Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be conducted with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics. This is a good first feedback exercise. It supports individuals to try out giving and receiving a very basic form of feedback in a safe way.

When a team doesn’t trust one another, the atmosphere and culture of a team suffers. Creating space to align and create a shared understanding of what trust means to your team is a great way to build team bonds and improve the way you all work together.

Start this activity by bringing together a set of trust cards containing characteristics, behaviours, attitudes, habits, values, and beliefs associated with trust in the workplace. Next, ask participants to create their own trust cards and move towards creating three core trust cards for your team.

By co-creating the output together, this team building activity is great for ensuring buy-in and creating long-lasting trust.

Trust   #thiagi   #issue analysis   #trust   One of the most important concepts in the workplace is trust. It affects performance, informal and formal relations, atmosphere of the workplace etc. With this activitiy you cn discover what one thinks about trust.

Translated Rant

Team building workshops are a great place to give your team room to have fun, vent and be honest with one another. Creating space for honesty while also building communication skills is the goal of this fun team building activity!

Split your group into pairs and have one person rant about a pet peeve for 60 seconds. Next, have the other person translate this rant while focusing on what the person really cares about. This kind of deep listening activity is fundamental to creating team trust, and sharing some of our annoyances in the group is great for building bonds too!

Translated Rant   #active listening   #emotions   #values   #trust   #conflict   #introductions   #opening   #connection   One person rants for 60 seconds. The second person translates their rant into what they care about and value.

teamwork task list

Team purpose and alignment activities

Even the best teams can have differences of opinion and approach. While different viewpoints and perspectives are useful in many situations, it’s also vital that everyone is aligned on team purpose and vision.

Aligning on how the team will work together is an important part of helping the team be happy, productive and pulling in the same direction.

In this section, we’ll look at team work activities to help improve team alignment and get everyone working towards the same purpose. Let’s get started!

Alignment & Autonomy

Activities that help improve each member of your team work more effectively and feel empowered to operate autonomously can be great for improving employee happiness and productivity. If we feel aligned on the core purpose and goals of our team while also being given the space to work in the way that is right for us, we can boost employee engagement and job satisfaction too! 

In Alignment & Autonomy, invite participants to reflect on times when they felt aligned and autonomous versus non-aligned and non-autonomous. By sharing, reflecting, and then ideating on solutions, your whole group can move forward together.

Alignment & Autonomy   #team   #team alignment   #team effectiveness   #hyperisland   A workshop to support teams to reflect on and ultimately increase their alignment with purpose/goals and team member autonomy. Inspired by Peter Smith’s model of personal responsibility. Use this workshop to strengthen a culture of personal responsibility and build your team’s ability to adapt quickly and navigate change.

Engineering Your Team OS

When seeking to improve teamwork, it can be useful to think of your team as a system with complex, interlocking parts which may need a gradual refresh and redesign. This kind of abstraction can help prevent discussions from becoming too personal or difficult and ensure that your team alignment efforts are a success.

In this activity, your team designs an ideal working system by making aspirational statements and then methodically chooses a single statement to work towards ahead of the next meeting. By making positive changes incrementally, your team can achieve alignment and better working practices in a meaningful and sustainable manner. 

Engineering Your Team OS   #team   #hyperisland   This is designed to work as a standalone workshop or as a companion to the Team Self-Assessment tool . Using reflections and insights on your working process, your team will ‘update’ its operating system by making deliberate choices about how to work together. The goal is gradual development, not a radical shift. You will design an ideal-state for your team and slowly work towards that.

Generative Relationships STAR

Better working relationships start with shared reflection and the discovery and discussion of existing working patterns. This team alignment activity invites participants to assess their team along four vertices: Separateness, Tuning, Action and Reason and jointly shape next steps and future actions.

By including the whole team in the alignment process from start to finish, you can get meaningful buy-in and see real results! We love using this on an online whiteboard too. It can be a great way to help remote workers consider their inter-personal relationships!

Generative Relationships STAR   #team   #liberating structures   #teamwork   You can help a group of people understand how they work together and identify changes that they can make to improve group performance. All members of the group diagnose current relationship patterns and decide how to follow up with action steps together, without intermediaries. The STAR compass tool helps group members understand what makes their relationships more or less generative. The compass used in the initial diagnosis can also be used later to evaluate progress in developing relationships that are more generative.

Team Canvas Session

Team alignment isn’t always straightforward. The more large, complex or multi-discipline your team is, the trickier it can be to help the group mesh and understand their roles and responsibilities to the team and each other.

In Team Canvas Session, you and your team create a shared visual resource for understanding and articulating your goals, values and roles of your team. It can be used for general alignment, for onboarding new team members and even for defining the structure and purpose of a brand new team – simply recreate or download the team canvas and get started today!

Team Canvas Session   #team alignment   #teamwork   #conflict resolution   #feedback   #teambuilding   #team   #issue resolution   #remote-friendly   The Team Canvas is Business Model Canvas for teamwork. It is an effective technique to facilitate getting teams aligned about their goals, values and purposes, and help team members find their role on the team.

Team Self Assessment

All groups need to go through a period of reflection and self-assessment in order to grow. But without structure or a guiding framework, these discussions can become bogged down or unproductive. With this reflective team building activity, you can enable a thoughtful and thorough team self-assessment along six guiding dimensions.

Start with individual reflection before bringing everyone back together to debrief and see what you’re aligned on and what needs more work. By then narrowing these down to the most important elements, you can align and enable better co-working practices quickly and efficiently!

Team Self-Assessment   #team   #hyperisland   #remote-friendly   This is a structured process designed for teams to explore the way they work together. The tight structure supports team members to be open and honest in their assessment. After reflecting as individuals, the team builds a collective map which can serve as the basis for further discussions and actions. The assessment is based around 6 dimensions. Each one encouraging the team to reflect and analyse a different and crucial element of their behaviour.

Letter from the Future

Without a cohesive shared vision, teams can become unproductive or harbor frustration on team direction. By spending time with visioning activities, you can help everyone push in the same direction while still utilizing their unique talents.

In Letter from the Future, invite your team to imagine all the changes that might impact them in the next 5 years and write a letter back from that point. Ask your team to cover what’s been accomplished in those five years, and what kind of challenges and obstacles were overcome to make this happen. Remember to remind teams that good letters have a beginning, middle, and end and that they should read clearly – this will help during the sharing and debriefing section of this method!

Letter from the Future   #strategy   #vision   #thiagi   #team   #teamwork   Teams that fail to develop a shared vision of what they are all about and what they need to do suffer later on when team members start implementing the common mandate based on individual assumptions. To help teams get started on the right foot, here is a process for creating a shared vision.

Team Purpose & Culture

Defining your team’s purpose and culture is an integral part of team building. By clearly articulating why your team exists and how you will all work together to fulfill that purpose, you can align and bring focus to all the work you do. This team values and vision activity aims to create a shared visual resource that your team can refer to in the future.

It also uses wisdom from other successful organizations to help enable meaningful conversation and move from individual purpose statements to a single one for the whole team. If you’re looking for a complete process that can guide your team values and vision efforts, this method from Hyper Island is worth a try!

Team Purpose & Culture   #team   #hyperisland   #culture   #remote-friendly   This is an essential process designed to help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose). Defining these two things will help any team to be more focused and aligned. With support of tangible examples from other companies, the team members work as individuals and a group to codify the way they work together. The goal is a visual manifestation of both the purpose and culture that can be put up in the team’s work space.

Checkout and recap activities for your team building workshop

The process of team building and enabling a group to work together more effectively can be involved and exhaustive.

As with any group process or workshop, taking the time to reflect, recap and check out can ensure the lasting impact of what was covered in the session.

You’ll often find that finding time to close team building activities creates space for further employee engagement and reflection. Getting team members involved in choosing the next activity or coming up with a theme for the next round of office trivia!

In this section, we’ll take a look at some great team building activities for closing a session and for recapping the main learning points. Let’s dive in!

Check-in / Check-out

Ensuring everyone in a group is present, focused and committed to the work of a session is a vital ingredient in making a team building session a success. With this workshop method from Hyper Island, you can not only start and end your session the right way, but you can help everyone in your group be seen, heard and understood by the rest of the team.

This is especially useful with a remote team, where ensuring clear connection between team members who don’t share a physical office is especially important.

This activity also helps encourage reflection and brings the workshop to an effective close – be sure to give it a try!

Check-in / Check-out   #team   #opening   #closing   #hyperisland   #remote-friendly   Either checking-in or checking-out is a simple way for a team to open or close a process, symbolically and in a collaborative way. Checking-in/out invites each member in a group to be present, seen and heard, and to express a reflection or a feeling. Checking-in emphasizes presence, focus and group commitment; checking-out emphasizes reflection and symbolic closure.

The trip back from a team building event is a great place to share feedback and appreciate one another. Don’t have a bus? No worries! Create a few rows of chairs and simulate the experience for this reflective closing activity.

Once you’ve gotten the chairs of the bus set-up, ask participants to speak the person next to them and share: what they like about the other person, what they appreciate and what about the other person makes them happy. Speak for just 45 seconds each and then ask the group to switch seats.

Bus Trip   #feedback   #communication   #appreciation   #closing   #thiagi   #team   This is one of my favourite feedback games. I use Bus Trip at the end of a training session or a meeting, and I use it all the time. The game creates a massive amount of energy with lots of smiles, laughs, and sometimes even a teardrop or two.

One Breath Feedback

In particularly large teams, it can be tempting to forgo the closing activity or individual feedback steps just because it will take so long and it can be hard to maintain energy and interest. One Breath Feedback solves this problem by giving each participant the space of a single breath to check out and reflect on the session. By ensuring that everyone has room to speak and be heard while also placing a time limit on the reflection, you can cap off a team building workshop effectively and intelligently.

One breath feedback   #closing   #feedback   #action   This is a feedback round in just one breath that excels in maintaining attention: each participants is able to speak during just one breath … for most people that’s around 20 to 25 seconds … unless of course you’ve been a deep sea diver in which case you’ll be able to do it for longer.

Team building workshop templates

Building better teams often starts with designing an effective group process. Whether this takes the form of a workshop or meeting, you’ll want a balance of activities, ice breakers and reflective methods in order to help your group align and grow together.    

In this next section, we’ll take a look at some example processes with a complete template you can use to get started. Let’s take a look.

Team development day for a new team

Helping new teams to bond and find a shared purpose and value system is often best achieved with a well designed group process. Try the team development day template when working with a brand new team or one which has seen large growth and is in need of development.

Here, you’ll find a complete one-day group process full of team building activities that can take a group from getting to know each other all the way through to defining their needs and making commitments. 

Team Development Day for a New Team
Emotional Culture Workshop

Good teams are empathetic and in touch with their emotions. Using the emotional culture deck , this workshop can be run in under 3 hours and helps your team define and improve working relationships and the emotional culture of your team.

Taking the time to articulate and define these items ensures that everyone in your group is seen, understood and valued, and that you have a shared language for moving forward.

Team Dynamics Workshop

Cohesive teams that work well together are those with an understanding about what makes a team and how it functions.

Support your team building activities with this half-day workshop template and guide your group through a process of understanding and building on the dynamics of working together. 

Team Dynamics Workshop Template

Team building sessions made easy

Designing an effective team building workshop means creating a balanced agenda of activities and group discussions while also keeping everything on time.

With SessionLab, you drag, drop and reorder blocks to build your agenda in minutes.

Your session timing adjusts automatically as you make changes and when you’re done, you can share a beautiful printout with your colleagues and participants.

Explore how teams use SessionLab to collaboratively design effective workshops and meetings or watch this five minute video to see the planner in action!

teamwork task list

Over to you

Enabling better teamwork and building stronger, more cohesive teams isn’t easy. Whether you’re running a team building day, team workshop, or simply adding some team building activities to your meetings, we hope that some of the methods above can help you and your group come together and do better work. 

Got a team workshop to plan? Check out our complete guide to workshop planning to make the process a breeze. Want to start creating your agenda quickly? Use a meeting or workshop template to save time designing or get inspiration.

Which of these team building activities is your favourite? Is there anything missing from the list above? Let us know in the comments! We’d love to hear about how we can all improve our team building efforts.

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Hey there, Thank you so much for sharing this interesting stuff ! I will share these ideas with my HR Departments. And I am sure this blog will be very interesting for me. Keep posting your ideas!

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All the training techniques have been well thought pit, planned and illustrated with tangible objectives which in itself is incredible to say the least. Have learnt so much which O shall incorporate and refine in my Workshops…Than you Team Session Lab

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teamwork task list

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So, you’ve decided to convene a workshop, a special time set aside to work with a team on a certain topic or project. You are looking for brilliant ideas, new solutions and, of course, great participation. To begin the process that will get you to workshop success, you’ll need three ingredients: participants willing to join, someone to facilitate and guide them through the process (aka, you) and a detailed agenda or schedule of the activities you’ve planned. In this article we will focus on that last point: what makes a good agenda design? Having a good agenda is essential to ensure your workshops are well prepared and you can lead…

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Facilitation skills are the abilities you need in order to master working with a group. In essence, facilitation is about being aware of what happens when people get together to achieve a common goal, and directing their focus and attention in ways that serve the group itself.  When we work together at our best, we can achieve a lot more than anything we might attempt alone. Working with others is not always easy: teamwork is fraught with risks and pitfalls, but skilled facilitation can help navigate them with confidence. With the right approach, facilitation can be a workplace superpower.  Whatever your position, career path, or life story, you probably have…

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  • 11 Benefits of teamwork in the workplac ...

11 Benefits of teamwork in the workplace (with examples)

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Teamwork is one of the most important tools when it comes to organizational efficiency. Though we can all agree that teamwork is important, not everyone realizes just how impactful it is in the workplace. Teamwork in the workplace is when a group of individuals work together toward a collective goal in an efficient manner. When multiple people work together toward a common goal, your business can flourish. 

We’ve rounded up 11 top benefits of teamwork in the workplace, with examples throughout to help you better understand just how important teamwork is. Ready to work on teamwork? Let’s dive in.

What is teamwork?

Teamwork is the process of working collaboratively with a group of people to achieve a specific goal. It involves the combined efforts of individual members who bring their unique knowledge and skills to the table. Effective teamwork in the workplace relies on key components such as active listening and open communication, and ensures each person's input contributes towards reaching the team's goals.

Why is teamwork important?

Teamwork in the workplace is important because it supports an organization's operational efficiency. Strong team dynamics enable individual members to divide complex projects into manageable tasks, which enhance productivity and enable an organization to function more effectively. Moreover, successful teamwork creates a supportive network that can significantly enhance job satisfaction and employee morale.

Benefits of teamwork in the workplace

1. teamwork cultivates effective communication.

Effective teamwork in the workplace starts with solid communication . In order to work together—whether when ideating or working on a new project—you need to communicate to create cohesion and clear goals.

Teamwork cultivates effective communication

Communication starts by building camaraderie and team synergy . A great way to do this is by organizing team building activities. This could be a quick icebreaker at the beginning of a meeting or a whole day spent solving fictional problems with teammates. 

A successful team that demonstrates clear communication is more efficient and productive. Not to mention it creates an enjoyable work environment. 

Communication example: Daniella and Kabir are working on a project task together. Kabir is confused when reviewing the project notes so he messages Daniella to ask for help. They hop on a quick call and work through the problem together. By working as a team, they effectively communicated and were able to complete the task the same day. 

Tip: Take communication one step further by keeping tasks and collaboration in a shared digital space. That way, everyone can stay on the same page, no matter where they are.

 2. Teamwork improves brainstorming

Brainstorming is a powerful method that helps teams think outside of the box. It involves individuals working together by communicating ideas for a number of initiatives. These could include projects, processes, products, and services. 

Good teamwork means your team communicates and feels comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas. Without teamwork, your brainstorming sessions could suffer, and, in turn, so could your team’s quality and performance. 

Ultimately, the success of brainstorming sessions relies on solid teamwork in the workplace. By investing time to foster trust and open communication, every individual’s potential can be maximized, benefiting the whole team. You can do this by connecting in a one on one setting regularly and encouraging team members to share their insights. 

Brainstorming example: Kat needs to come up with three design ideas for a new landing page. Instead of ideating by herself, she asks the team to join in on a brainstorming session. Since there are many team members sharing ideas, Kat receives more than enough ideas to get started. 

Tip: Check out 29 brainstorming techniques to help spark creativity within your team. 

3. Teamwork encourages a common goal

Having a common goal in mind is essential when it comes to prioritizing projects and new initiatives. With multiple team members working on individual tasks, a project goal helps keep deliverables aligned and ensures objectives are met. 

There are a number of ways you can communicate a goal in a way that both encourages teamwork in the workplace and promotes collaboration. These include:

Business case : A business case is a document that details the value of a project or initiative. This ensures each team member has the same starting point before diving into a project.

Team meeting: Meetings are a great way to get your team in one place to communicate expectations and work together. Having an initial meeting—as well as a post mortem meeting once the project is over—can help determine deliverables and ensure objectives were met. 

Timeline software : Timeline tools can help your team visualize the work you need to complete and how you’ll hit your project goals. Clarifying task due dates and dependencies unlocks teamwork and allows team members to thrive. 

Goal-oriented example: Kat is leading a meeting on a new process that’s being put into place. Kabir asks what the purpose of the process is. Kat explains that they’ll be adding a new tool to their scheduling process to automate some of the team’s work, like tedious and time consuming tasks. Now, the team understands the underlying goal.

Tip: Align tasks to goals using goal-setting software that helps you achieve progress and keeps team members on the right track every step of the way.

4. Teamwork in the workplace improves problem solving skills

Problems can be difficult to solve on your own. That’s why working together as a team can offer quicker and often more effective solutions. 

Teamwork improves problem solving skills

Not only does this help create an efficient process for problem solving, but using teamwork creates shared goals.

Problem solving example: Project manager Kat finds out there is an issue with image implementation that’s postponing the project launch date. Instead of trying to solve it alone, she enlists her team in a brainstorming session to come up with solutions. Because she asked her team for help, she was able to co-create a solution in just an hour, as opposed to what could have taken days by herself. 

Tip: Practice problem solving as a group by using team building activites to motivate your team members to feel confident in their solutions. 

5. Teamwork helps build trust

Trust in the workplace is something that is built over time. It takes transparent communication, one-on-one sessions, and support to build that trust with team members. 

A team that trusts each other feels comfortable communicating ideas, collaborating in the workplace , and growing individual strength. Not just that, but they also feel a sense of belonging within the group. 

The absence of teamwork in the workplace can lead to a breakdown in trust. This can result in team members feeling isolated and turning competitive, focusing on individual achievements over team success, which can undermine both morale and performance. 

Trust example: Ray has a task that’s overdue. His manager, Kabir, offers to sit down with him and offer support. Afterward, Ray feels relieved and has the confidence to complete the task. Next time he has an issue, he knows he can reach out to Kabir for support. 

Tip: Building teamwork in the workplace goes beyond the daily tasks; it's about connecting with your team members on a personal level. Figuring out what makes them unique is a great way to build trust over time. 

6. Teamwork improves company culture

Most companies strive for a good organizational culture , but it’s not as easy as having chats at the water cooler or a monthly pizza party. Company culture involves making your team members feel heard and empowered to do their best work while offering them work-life balance and an overall enjoyable work environment. 

To build culture, encourage camaraderie and teamwork in the workplace. Spending time with one another can help build this bond and, in turn, improve working relationships and the culture around the (virtual) office. 

Culture example: Kabir’s team has a huddle every Monday where they share what they did over the weekend and any upcoming projects for the week. Since they get to talk about both personal and work-related topics, the team enjoys their Monday meeting. In fact, communication and overall culture have improved since the team began meeting on Mondays. 

Tip: Build shared values by giving team members the opportunity to share the values they think are important. 

7. Teamwork creates efficiency

From communicating effectively to improving company culture, teamwork drives many benefits, including creating team efficiency . An efficient team works together to quickly manage problems and daily tasks. As a result, efficient teams use resources more effectively and reach their deliverables faster. When it comes to organizational growth, few strategies are as impactful as cultivating streamlined efficiency through teamwork in the workplace. Such cohesion is instrumental in fostering innovative solutions while maintaining consistent quality.

Efficiency example: There’s a new project on the horizon for Ray and his team. Ray’s first instinct was to ask Kat, his senior specialist, to tackle it since she’s the best fit to handle the task. After analyzing the difficulty of the project, he decides to have his entire team tackle it together. To his surprise, they completed the project in just half the initial timeline.

Tip: To encourage efficiency across projects, align your team using one work management tool. That way, everyone can clearly see the goals you’re working towards, the timeline for that work, and who's responsible for what.

8. Teamwork increases employee engagement

A little known secret to fostering long-term happiness and engagement is to nurture teamwork in the workplace. When team members feel part of a supportive group, they're more likely to be content and involved, which naturally boosts their work satisfaction over time. 

To increase employee engagement, encourage teamwork inside and outside of work. Schedule time for your team to connect about more than just work. Your team will feel more open when working in a group, which leads to a higher retention rate. 

Engagement example: Kat’s team has been working hard on a top priority project. Unfortunately, issues arose and now they have to stay late to finish the project before the weekend. Kat knows that she needs to do something to keep the team’s spirits and energy up. She decides to start the evening with a team building activity. This immediately engages the team and gets everyone excited to put their heads together and finish the project off strong.

Tip: Make your virtual meetings more engaging by starting them off with a quick ice breaker question to lighten up the mood. 

9. Teamwork motivates high performing teams

Accountability is a powerful motivator, and teamwork in the workplace is a surefire way to instill this sense of responsibility. It spurs team members not just to meet expectations, but to exceed them and willingly contribute their best ideas to the group's endeavors. The higher performing each team member is, the higher performing your overall team will be, meaning you can create high quality work more efficiently. Not only is a high performing team good for your company, but it also helps job satisfaction, as doing well will motivate individuals to continue growing their skillset.

High performing example: It’s team review time and Kat gets a shoutout at all hands for implementing a new process to increase productivity. Kabir, a new team member, feels empowered to work hard and will receive a superb review next quarter. 

Tip: High performing teams are usually made up of individuals who seek motivation from within, otherwise known as intrinsic motivation . 

10. Teamwork in the workplace develops individual strengths

Teamwork isn’t just about team success—it also supports individual development as well. Team members who grow their individual knowledge can then share that with others during future projects. 

Teamwork develops individual strengths

The result: Individual team members grow their own strengths as well as the strengths of the team. These could include your ability to problem solve, effectively communicate , and combat procrastination—all of which are important skill sets to develop in the workplace. 

Individual strengths teamwork example: Kabir is new to the team and working on his first task. He’s a little stuck so he reaches out to a team member for help. Kat shares her tips on how she works on a similar task. She even shares a tool that Kabir didn’t know about. This helps him complete the task more efficiently.

Tip: If a team member can complete a task just as well as you could, delegate it without intervening. This allows your team members to grow their individual strengths and skills. 

11. Teamwork improves decision making skills

While problem solving and decision making sound similar, decision making skills are all encompassing. To be good at decision making, you need the confidence to make quick decisions based on the knowledge you’ve gathered in your role. 

Teamwork in the workplace is invaluable for improving decision-making abilities. It creates an environment where team members are encouraged to tackle questions and make decisions promptly, which is essential for real-time problem-solving.

Decision making teamwork example: Kabir is leading his first team meeting for a new project. As he’s explaining the upcoming timeline and deliverables, an executive asks who will be working on the project. Kabir is quick to answer confidently, as he’s already brainstormed with his team on who will tackle what. 

Tip: Encourage teamwork in the workplace by inviting team members to actively participate in important meetings, such as by presenting their solutions. This gets them used to explaining their thought process in front of other team members. 

How to improve teamwork in the workplace

Improving teamwork in the workplace is about fostering an environment that values the contributions of all team members and encourages collaborative efforts towards shared goals . It involves enhancing teamwork skills across the board. Here are seven steps you can take to foster great teamwork.

Clarify roles and responsibilities. Assign clear goals based on desired outcomes, allowing employees to understand their objectives. For instance, a designer might be tasked with improving user experience, as measured by customer feedback, rather than just completing a set number of designs.

Establish outcome-based expectations. Shift the focus from processes to results, which urges team members to think strategically about accomplishing their objectives. For example, this method could lead a sales team to prioritize closing deals that align with long-term business strategy over merely hitting short-term numbers.

Set standards of excellence. Define what high-quality work looks like for each position and establish performance benchmarks. A customer service rep, for example, would aim for swift resolution times and high satisfaction ratings, setting a clear target to strive towards.

Provide time for self-reflection. Allocate time for individuals to assess their strengths and passions. A software engineer might discover their knack for algorithm optimization, steering them towards new learning opportunities.

Align strengths with tasks. Give individual team members roles that capitalize on their strongest skills. When a marketing analyst with a talent for data visualization is tasked with creating campaign performance reports, their skill set directly enhances the value of the work produced.

Foster an atmosphere of trust and openness. Cultivate an environment that values teamwork in the workplace through sharing and open communication between colleagues. By establishing regular "open floor" meetings, team members can freely exchange innovative ideas and feedback, bolstering team performance.

Encourage continuous improvement. Establish a routine of constructive feedback, supporting personal and professional growth. This approach might involve quarterly performance discussions that not only review past achievements but also set actionable objectives for skills and career development.

Teamwork in the workplace FAQ

What are the benefits of working in teams .

Working in teams is beneficial because it allows for the division of difficult tasks, making complex projects more manageable and enabling solutions that leverage diverse skill sets. Teamwork in the workplace fosters a collaborative environment where each person contributes different perspectives, which can lead to more innovative solutions and shared success.

How do you demonstrate teamwork skills at work? 

Demonstrating teamwork skills at work involves actively listening to colleagues, contributing ideas, and showing reliability. Being part of a team means collaborating effectively, whether in person or virtually, and supporting others in achieving shared goals. Teamwork in the workplace is about being adaptable, communicative, and committed to the team’s success.

What makes a good team? 

A good team operates with a strong sense of unity and shared purpose. Its members possess complementary skills, and there's a balance of roles that ensures all necessary tasks are handled efficiently. Strong teamwork in the workplace embraces open communication, respects each other's contributions, and is focused on achieving collective goals.

Why is teamwork important in business? 

Teamwork is important in business because it brings together different viewpoints and improves problem-solving capabilities. It fosters efficiency and productivity, as tasks are completed faster with collaborative effort. The importance of teamwork in the workplace is also evident in driving innovation, as employees are encouraged to brainstorm and contribute ideas in a supportive setting. Plus, when teamwork is strong, it can lead to improved employee morale and job satisfaction.

Drive teamwork through communication

Teamwork is a valuable tool to use in the workplace that comes with a multitude of benefits. From building trust to encouraging problem solving skills, teamwork brings your team together and creates clear communication. 

If you want to encourage teamwork in the workplace, try work management software. Make working on common goals easier and keep communication streamlined.

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Top 10 collaborative task management tools

Collaboratif

To be productive in your work, it is important to be well organised and to manage your time effectively. This includes knowing the tasks you need to complete each day, their deadlines and their status (upcoming, in progress, overdue, completed). Today, there is no need to write down your tasks on a loose sheet of paper, a post-it note or an Excel file because there are task management tools to simplify your life.

With a task manager, you can create and schedule your tasks, prioritise them, track their progress, allocate resources to each task, request help from a colleague, receive notifications when a task is overdue or automate recurring tasks. Better manage your daily tasks by using a collaborative task management tool allows you to be more efficient in the overall management of your projects.

Here is a comparison of the 10 best collaborative task management tools available today.

1. Wimi, more than just a task manager

With Wimi, you can easily manage all your project tasks. This 100% French collaborative suite is highly secure (it is one of the first collaborative suites to be SecNumCloud qualified) and allows you to create workspaces dedicated to your projects and activities. Your data is centralised, giving you a global view of the progress of your work. Wimi’s many features make it an indispensable tool for efficiently managing all your projects and easily collaborating with your team members, no matter where they are located.

Wimi’s customers include Groupama, the Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Musée d’Orsay.

Key features

  • The creation of workspaces for each project/activity.
  • A dashboard to see the planning of tasks and monitor their progress.
  • The ability to filter task lists and import them from other task managers.
  • A multitude of features to manage your projects efficiently (document sharing, shared calendars, version management, etc.).
  • Monitoring the progress of your projects with a reporting tool.
  • The ability to integrate your favourite applications and tools.

Limitations

  • As an all-in-one project management software, Wimi will not suit you if you are only looking for a task management tool.
  • Packages start at €3 per user per month. Price can decrease according to the number of users.
  • Special offers for students and associations.
  • Free 14-day trial.

2. com, a solution to manage your tasks efficiently

By choosing monday.com, you provide your teams with a platform that allows them to improve their productivity and customise the organisation of their work. With this Israeli software, managing your tasks becomes child’s play. You can find all documents, information and comments related to a task in one place. You can transform a request directly into a task and immediately assign a collaborator to carry it out. You can define the status and priority of a task and follow its progress at a glance on your dashboard.

Accor, Coca-Cola and Universal Music Group are among the companies that rely on monday.com.

  • A dashboard to track your tasks in real time.
  • The ability to easily automate a large number of tasks.
  • Gantt and Kanban for a simple and visual follow-up.
  • The integration of your tools in the same space.
  • Other monday.com products to efficiently manage all types of projects.
  • Only Enterprise customers can choose to host their data in Europe. For the others, their data is therefore subject to the Cloud Act or the Patriot Act because it is hosted on American soil.
  • Prices start at €8 per month for the basic version.
  • Free trial.

3. MeisterTask, the secure management of your tasks

MeisterTask is an Austrian platform that works with the Kanban method to allow you to easily manage and visualise all your tasks. This collaborative tool is indispensable for monitoring the progress of your projects and viewing the status of the various tasks to be completed (to do / in progress / finished). Easily plan your projects and collaborate efficiently with your team thanks to a powerful task manager and adapted functionalities (check list, agenda, notifications, user groups, comments, etc.).

Companies that have chosen MeisterTask include Allianz and Ritter Sport.

  • A customisable dashboard.
  • Measure time spent on a task to evaluate performance.
  • Creation of checklists for each task.
  • Add attachments and link tasks together.
  • Customised organisation of tasks using a label system.
  • MeisterTask is best suited to small teams.
  • Packages from € 8.25 per month.
  • A basic version is free.
  • Special rates for students and teachers.

4. Todoist, an application to organise all your tasks

Need help organising, planning and managing your tasks at work, but also in your private life? Todoist is a simple and intuitive application that allows you to better organise your schedule. Choose the level of detail you want to work with. Add a task and complete it, or set a deadline, a priority level, create subtasks, schedule a reminder and share or delegate your tasks. With Todoist, you can free your mind and be more productive every day.

Todoist’s customers include Netflix, Apple and NASA.

  • Clear visualization of current tasks.
  • Highlighting of important tasks.
  • The ability to easily delegate your tasks.
  • Display with Kanban-like cards and add comments and files to your tasks.
  • Create productivity goals and visualise your performance.
  • Some features are only available in the Pro version.
  • For data hosting, Todoist uses the services of Stripe, AWS and Google Workspace. Your data is therefore subject to the Cloud Act.
  • A free version.
  • Packages from €4 per month.
  • Free 30-day trial of the Todoist Business subscription.

5. do, a single application for better organisation

Being well organised is essential to manage your daily tasks efficiently and improve your productivity. An app like Any.do is the ideal tool to never forget anything, to reach your goals and to be perfectly organised. You create to-do lists that you colour-code according to priorities and categories. You can easily track your progress and create reminders to avoid forgetting. Finally, Any.do syncs to all your devices so you can access your to-do list anywhere, anytime.

  • A calendar to manage your time efficiently.
  • Smart reminders (one-off, recurring or location-based) to make sure you don’t forget anything.
  • A daily planner to focus on your goals.
  • Adding notes, subtasks and attachments.
  • The ability to share your to-do lists and assign tasks.
  • It is a very simple application that lacks functionality.
  • The data is hosted in the US and therefore subject to the Cloud Act.
  • A Premium version from €5.97 per month.

6. Microsoft To Do to better plan your tasks

Among the many collaborative tools offered by the American giant Microsoft to improve your productivity, there is a task manager called Microsoft To Do. You can easily create your to-do lists and share them with your team, get an overview of your day, add colour codes to help you find your way around, set deadlines and set one-off or recurring reminders so that nothing gets by you. Microsoft To Do helps you stay focused and achieve your daily goals.

  • Share your to-do lists.
  • Create subtasks and add deadlines and notifications.
  • Integrate tasks with Outlook.
  • Intelligent and personalised task suggestion for greater efficiency.
  • Microsoft is an American company subject to the Cloud Act.
  • Microsoft To Do alone is available for free.
  • The Microsoft 365 offer starts at €5.10 per user per month.
  • Free trial of Microsoft 365 for 1 month.

7. Google Keep, task management made easy

Like Microsoft, Google has also created its own task list tool called Google Keep. This application allows you to write down everything that comes to mind, whether it’s work tasks or personal activities. At work, Google Keep helps you stay organised and work more efficiently by recording all your ideas and tasks. You can share your to-do lists with others, add documents, photos and audio files, and create reminders so you don’t forget anything.

  • Automatic transcription of an audio file into a written note.
  • The ability to turn a photo into text.
  • Create reminders based on time or location.
  • Easy access to your to-do lists in other Google tools.
  • The ability to sort your notes by colour, label or attribute.
  • As an American company, Google is subject to the Cloud Act.
  • Google Keep is available for free for individuals.
  • Google Workspace packages start at €4.68 per user per month.

8. Trello, an efficient to-do list solution

Like Wimi, Trello is a project management software that can also be used as a task manager. Thanks to its lists and tables, Trello gives you a clear and precise view of the progress of your tasks and of who is doing what. This visual tool can be customised to suit your team’s working methods and improve your daily productivity. Easily assign collaborators to your tasks, set deadlines, create subtasks, leave comments, add attachments and track your progress at a glance.

Trello clients include Zoom, Visa and John Deere.

  • Visualisation of tasks and projects in different ways (table, timeline, calendar, etc.).
  • The ability to easily automate certain tasks.
  • A variety of templates available, easy to use and proven by the Trello community.
  • Reminders so you don’t miss any deadlines.
  • Integration with your favourite tools.
  • This all-in-one tool will not suit you if you are only looking for a task manager.
  • Trello is an American company, so your data is not hosted in Europe and is subject to the Cloud Act.
  • Paid packages from €5 per user per month.
  • Discounts for non-profit organisations and educational institutions.

9. Pomotodo, manage your tasks with the Pomodoro method

You are probably familiar with the Pomodoro method, which consists of working in 25-minute intervals in order to be more efficient. The Pomotodo application is inspired by this technique to allow you to be more productive in managing your tasks. It’s a simple but effective tool to list your tasks, prioritise them, highlight them, etc. You know how much time you spend on each task, and you can track and evaluate your productivity every day.

  • A stopwatch to keep track of the time spent on each task.
  • Statistics to see how fast you are working and how many tasks you have completed in a given period.
  • A history of completed tasks.
  • The application is available online, on desktop and on mobile.
  • No integration possible.
  • Pomotodo is a Chinese company, so your data is not hosted in Europe.
  • A Pro version for more features from €3.90 per month.
  • A 50% discount for students and teachers.

10. Notion, an all-in-one tool to manage your tasks

Notion collaborative software helps you to be more efficient, especially by centralising your work, documents and data on a single platform. You collaborate efficiently with your colleagues on your projects, no matter where they are located. And you easily manage your tasks by customising the software to suit your needs. Notion is an all-in-one tool that combines multiple features to help you be more efficient in managing your daily tasks.

Capgemini, AXA Climate and Qonto are some of the companies that use Notion.

  • Note taking.
  • Creation of boards with Kanban view.
  • Use of ready-made templates.
  • Customisation of your workspace.
  • Community support if you need help or resources
  • As a US-based company, Notion is subject to the Cloud Act.
  • Team packages from €8 per user per month

Today, task management has never been easier thanks to the multitude of collaborative tools available. Our comparison allows you to evaluate the different offers. Don’t hesitate to test the free versions or to take advantage of the free trial to find the task manager that best suits your needs.

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How we Use Teamwork Projects to Manage Over 40 Projects at Once

How we Use Teamwork Projects to Manage Over 40 Projects at Once

Teamwork is the project management tool we have been using for the past 4 years, and it has become a fundamental part of the NeoMam process for achieving media placements for our clients.

In this blog post, I am going to discuss 3 Teamwork Projects features that we use, how we use them and mistakes to avoid. These 3 features are:

1. Teamwork Projects Task List Templates

2. teamwork projects messaging, 3. teamwork projects notebooks, using teamwork projects task list templates.

teamwork tasks

One of the reason’s we selected Teamwork.com over other project management tools was it’s ability to template out task lists that can then be easily activated for projects.

At NeoMam, we have spent the last 4 years refining a tried and tested process of creating content that will get powerful results. We want to make sure that we repeat this successful formula for every single project we do, so templating task lists inside of TeamWork was ideal.

Task lists are simply a set of tasks under one list. Users then have tasks assigned to them with a due date flag up in their own TeamWork dashboard for the day they are due.

Teamwork dashboard

However, creating tasks from scratch for every project can become tiresome. Teamwork Project’s ability to template out task lists is really powerful. It means you can create a template, which can then be quickly added to a new project.

Task list in Teamwork

In Teamwork Projects, you can generate as many task lists as you need. We currently have 25 task list templates (which we plan to reduce over the coming months), containing all the tasks needed to complete the project. Each task list is activated at the relevant stage of the content production and promotion process.

Example Task List Template

A task list template on Teamwork Projects looks like the following image, taken directly from our NeoMam Teamwork Projects account. It contains tasks, due days and assigned roles or individuals.

Teamwork task

Assigning People or Roles

For each task, you can allocate an individual, such as Joe Bloggs, or a role. Assigning the task to a role instead of an individual is really useful, as it allows tasks to be assigned once the actual project is set up. For example, a task could be assigned to ‘Designer’ and once the project is set up, the most suitable designer will be selected and the tasks can be allocated.

Assigning Timeframes

You can also assign timeframes in the templates. Instead of having to manually assign a date every time you create a task, by creating a task list, you create a set of due dates. 

For example, if you assign a project on Day 1, and it takes 2 days to complete the project brief, you can set the due date for the Project Brief Completion due date as Day 2 within the Task List Template. When you activate the project using this task list, you will be asked what Day 1 is. If it’s 1st December, then automatically Project Brief Completion due date will be 2nd December. If the project is a little more custom, then it’s easy to quickly adjust the due date.

Teamwork Projects allows you to skip weekends, so you can easily work out the number of working days needed. When the tasklist is added to the live project, it will automatically work out due dates around the weekends.

NeoMam Tips:

1. don’t set up too many tasks.

We learnt the hard way with having ‘task mania’ where individuals end up getting assigned too many bitty tasks, which ends up clogging up their task dashboard.

As Getting Things Done has taught us, too many tasks means we will struggle to get anything done as it’s stressful embarking on a day of completing 50 tasks. At NeoMam, we try to group up tasks under 1 task that can be quickly completed. This can be easily done by adding task descriptions.

teamworkkkk6

2. Design tasks lists to manage external feedback

Most projects require feedback from external parties, whether that is from clients or from internal stakeholders. You need a task to follow up on this feedback, but it’s hard to create time specific tasks that take place after the feedback, as there is no confirmed timescale for busy clients getting back to us.

At NeoMam, we get past this hurdle in 2 ways:

Task Repeats

Teamwork Projects allows you to create task repeats, so that you can continue chase up feedback until this is received.

teamworkkkk7

Tasks to set up additional task lists

Instead of tasks without due dates, or task that are late, once feedback is received, we create a task that asks the Project Manager to activate the next set of task lists, so due dates can be assigned using the next task template.

8

3. Create a Task List Reference system

Organic task list templates can grow in all directions until no one understands what they  were meant to be for. At NeoMam, with 25 task lists, knowing what to set up when can get  messy. We solved this by creating a clear reference system.

9

Getting the Best Out of Teamwork Projects Messaging

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The messaging feature on Teamwork Projects is extremely useful to avoid lost emails and a clear chain of project history.

The messaging system has most of the standard features for a project management tool, including a ‘Message Subject’, ability to format the text as required, the ability to attach files to the message and email notifications.

11

Following Features

There is also a great feature to ensure that necessary people always get notification of the messages, without selecting to notify them every time a message is sent. This is done through the follow feature…

Followers list can be accessed from the top right corner (Options -> Edit followers) of the message thread.

12

Select the members that need to get notified throughout the discussion and Teamwork Projects will take care of notifying all the selected members each time a new message is posted.

As with any messaging feature, there are certain approaches to ensure the messages are productive:

  • Keep the content succinct and to the point
  • If addressing multiple people, be clear who needs to action, and who is there as a ‘cc’.
  • Keep people accountable by adding a ‘by when’. For example, please let me know by 12:00…’

One thing to note with any messaging system like this, is keeping the messages as a clear history of project progression. An outsider of the project should be able to glance through the history and get an understanding of the project status. This means that we prefer to keep most of the conversational discussion outside of Teamwork Projects, and use a system such as Slack or good old fashioned ‘face to face’. Once an approach has been discussed and decided, this is then updated in Teamwork Projects.

Using Teamwork Projects Notebooks to Your Advantage

13

We love the notebook feature in Teamwork Projects, as it lets you record all essential project information in 1 easily accessible place for all members of the project team to see.

Most project management tools offer this, however, Teamwork Projects allows you to template the notebook (similar to task lists), so that information needed for every project can be filled in as standard for every project.

1. Copying to new projects

Once you have a new project, it is really easy to copy the notebook to the project for filling in.

14

Using Teamwork Projects as a Team

The key takeaways of the NeoMam approach to Teamwork Projects are:

  • Use Teamwork Projects Task List templates to capture your unique tried and tested process.
  • Assign working days for each task, so you don’t need to work this out when you start a new project every time.
  • Assign roles, not individuals to the tasks, so they can be easily assigned to the correct person once the project is set up.
  • Don’t over do it on the number of tasks, combine smaller tasks into one task using the task description feature.
  • Create a standardised reference system to keep the task lists templates organised.
  • Keep messaging concise and actionable. Leave in-depth discussion for other tools.
  • Use notebooks to keep essential project information all in one place.

And remember, the project management process is a process that need continuous review and improvement. What made sense 6 months ago may not work now, so aim to review these on a regular basis.

 How do you use your project management software to ensure your project process runs smoothly? I’d love to hear your comments below. If you’re interested in more tips on the tools we use at NeoMam, take – 6 Project Management Tools That Transformed our agency .

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  • Working with Your Projects
  • Project Reports

Generating Task List Reports

Within Teamwork.com, you can generate reports for the task lists you have created on a project.

To generate a report of all task lists on your project, go to the project's Table or List area.

Image Placeholder

  • Tasks assigned to: Choose who you wish to report on, all users, not assigned yet, or an individual.
  • Type of tasks to show: Choose from all tasks, incomplete task, or completed tasks.
  • Date range: Choose from any due date, due by today, due by tomorrow, due in the next seven days, due in the next 14 days, due in the next 30 days, or between dates.
  • Include late tasks:  Include tasks that are passed the due date that has been set on them.
  • Include tasks without a due date:  Include tasks that have no due date set.
  • Ignore start dates: Choose whether to base the report with or without start dates taken into account, this is very much dependent on the date range selected.
  • Group by task list: Choose whether to keep the tasks ordered within their associated task lists.
  • How should tasks in each list be sorted: Select sorting to be based on how displayed on the website,  due date, task name, priority, or assignee.
  • Excel, PDF, or CSV.
  • Include logged time:  Include any time logged against a task.
  • Include estimated time:  Include estimated time that has been added to a task.
  • Include comments: Include any comment left on tasks.
  • Comments can only be included in PDF exports.
  • Include my private items:  Include any tasks that are only visible to you.
  • Include custom fields:  Include any custom field details for tasks in your task lists.
  • Custom fields can only be included in Excel exports.

You can also choose to date range this to view for a certain period of time.

Note: Due to formatting constraints, there is no option to include comments when exporting to Excel.

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Task management software

Trusted task management tools.

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What is task management?

Plan your workload.

Take the stress out of daily task management. Using task management software, you can plan and manage your individual and team tasks, ensuring that you have full visibility over your to dos.

Track your progress

Get immediate status updates on your work throughout the task lifecycle, and follow each task from doing to done.

Report and optimize

Quickly report on how tasks are progressing, spot bottlenecks before they happen, and get a more holistic view of your workload.

Why do people use our task management software?

Robust task management software.

Take control of your tasks with our task management software. Add tags, estimate time, assign work, set due dates, and get granular with your privacy settings — Teamwork lets you manage your tasks your way.

Track your tasks with Teamwork

Track time on tasks

Get a full breakdown of how your team’s time is being spent. With our task management software, you can see an itemized list of tasks, allowing you to better estimate work for future projects.

Track your time with Teamwork

Automate and scale

Save time on recurring work, reduce admin, and scale your task management best practices by using Task List Templates and automation in Teamwork to streamline your workflow.

Break down work into subtasks

Get even more granular with subtasks (and subtask templates). Assign subtasks, create dependencies, and loop in the right people throughout each task’s lifecycle to create a more efficient task management system.

The task management system that saves time

Project management template

Use this ready-made project template to help you manage your team’s work and deliver on time.

New client onboarding checklist template

Deliver a better onboarding experience and build stronger client relationships from day one with our template.

Task management template

No matter what you’re working on, keep your tasks moving and get more done with our amazing task management template in Teamwork.com.

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Trusted by over 20,000 companies.

Join teams all over the world increasing their productivity with Teamwork.com

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"How D’Addario leveraged Teamwork.com to revolutionize their manufacturing process"

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Teamwork: project management software that lets you work the way you want and deliver the outcomes that matter.

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Integrate with the tools you already use

Get the support you need to succeed.

Work from anywhere at any time with the Teamwork.com mobile app, the agency project management app that’s super easy to use.

Our customer support team is the best in the industry and are always there to help — no matter what the question. “The support is best I’ve ever had – that is absolutely critical to me.” – Luis Muniz, CEO at Funnel Wave

Teamwork.com is the only project management software that allows all customers (not just enterprise) to choose where in the world their data is held and processed. We offer hosting in Europe, North America, and Australia. This means incredible speeds for you and peace of mind that your data is safe, secure and legally protected.

Our roadmap is driven by customer needs — see what we’re working on at any time.

To make sure your data is safe and secure, Teamwork.com is ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and SOC 2 Type 2 certified.

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What makes Teamwork different?

Basic project management tools can’t meet your needs as you scale while others are expensive and too difficult to learn. Teamwork is the best of both worlds: easy-to-use, flexible, and feature-rich.

Our customer support team are always there to help — no matter what the question. “The support is best I’ve ever had – that is absolutely critical to me” – Luis Muniz, CEO at Funnel Wave

Unlimited free access for clients. Time tracking. Invoicing. We know what agencies need, we ran one before starting Teamwork.

Teamwork is at the core of managing your work and projects. But Teamwork with our other tools can manage your whole business. Unlock more value by using our chat, helpdesk, CRM, or content collaboration software and Teamwork as one integrated suite.

Teamwork is the only project management software that allows all customers (not just enterprise) to choose where in the world your data is held and processed. We offer hosting in Europe, North America and now Australia too.

This means incredible speeds for you and peace of mind that your data is safe, secure and legally protected. We'd love to tell you all about it and we can help you move any existing data to Teamwork.

Get started with Teamwork.com

Start working together beautifully. See how Teamwork.com can help your team with our 30-day free trial.

Automation with Zapier

Automation inspiration

4 ways to automate Any.do with Zapier

Manage your tasks more effectively by automating your to-do app.

A hero image of the Any.do app logo connected to other app logos on a light yellow background.

In the hustle of everyday work, staying on top of tasks is key to keeping productive and scaling up your efforts. That's where Any.do comes in handy—it's a go-to app for organizing daily tasks.

But as your to-dos get more complex and intertwined, there's a growing need for smoother workflows. Enter Zapier's automation magic, which links Any.do with thousands of other apps, making your workflows more efficient.

New to Zapier?  It's an automation tool that helps anyone connect apps and automate workflows—without any complicated code.  Sign up for free  to use this app, and many others, with Zapier.

Table of contents

Connect any.do to your calendar app, share tasks across to-do list and task apps, create any.do tasks from email and chat messages, make any.do work for you with ai.

To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.

Your to-do list determines how you schedule your days, so why not connect it directly to your calendar? Manage your time more effectively by automatically sharing event details and tasks between your calendar app and Any.do.

The first thing you can do to improve your daily schedule is put your important time-bound tasks right into your calendar. Weekly deep work sessions or meeting-free afternoons can help you power through complex projects faster. 

If you want to block off time for a project, create a Zap that automatically adds a time block to your calendar app when you add a task to a specific list. 

For more involved events or meetings, automatically create a detailed event with all the information, points of contact, and subtasks you've put into your Any-do list. You'll stay more organized and avoid missing important deadlines.

Add detailed Google Calendar events for new Any.do tasks

Any.do Personal logo

Create Microsoft Outlook calendar events for new tasks in Any.do

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Create Google Calendar events for new Any.do Personal tasks

Meetings usually require prep work or follow-up tasks. Set your calendar to automatically add necessary to-do items to your list before or after the events you have scheduled. Set a task before meetings to create an agenda or after to clean up notes or send follow-ups. 

Add new Google Calendar events to Any.do as tasks

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Read our step-by-step guide on how to create tasks from calendar events .

If you're someone juggling multiple to-do apps—maybe you use Any.do for your personal tasks and another app for work—automating task transfer ensures that nothing falls through the cracks. It also allows for greater flexibility. You can use the strengths of different apps while keeping all your tasks aligned and accessible in one place. Plus, it saves time and effort, eliminating the need for manual updates across platforms, and ensures that your entire to-do ecosystem is synchronized and up-to-date, enhancing overall productivity.

If Any.do is your single source of truth for managing your day, set up workflows to bring tasks from your other apps into Any.do for you. That way, you can manage your personal to-do list how you want to alongside any tools your team may use.

Add new Google tasks to Any.do

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Add new Trello cards as tasks on Any.do

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Add new incomplete Todoist tasks to Any.do

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Create tasks in Any.do Personal for new tasks in Asana projects

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Add new Microsoft To Do tasks to Any.do

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Does your team need visibility into your work, but they use a different app? Connect Any.do with other task-management tools without switching apps with these workflows.

Add new Any.do tasks to Google Tasks

Add new any.do tasks to microsoft to do, create trello cards for new any.do tasks, create notion database items from new any.do personal tasks.

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Add new Any.do tasks to Todoist

Our most important assignments often come in the form of messages. We get requests from clients, shared documents from colleagues, and urgent assignments from our managers in our inboxes—but those inboxes are often overflowing. 

Email doesn't make a great notetaker or task manager. Never leave an important task wallowing in your inbox. Instead, set up a Zap so that any email you tag gets automatically added to your to-do list as a detailed task. You can do the same for Slack, adding saved messages to Any.do to follow up on later.

Automatically copying important emails and chat messages into your to-do list is a more efficient way to work. It keeps your focus on your task instead of slogging through your inbox and puts the details you need into the app you use to manage work.

Create tasks in Any.do for new saved messages in Slack

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Create new Any.do tasks from starred emails in Gmail

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Create Any.do tasks from new labeled Gmail emails

Think of an important task while you're deep in work on something else? Link your to-do list to your Alexa with a simple automated workflow. That way, you can simply speak the task out loud and instantly add it to your list to complete later. 

Create Any.do tasks from new trigger phrases spoken in Amazon Alexa

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You can also use AI to streamline your work . Mem is an AI-powered personal assistant that can do anything from summarizing notes to searching your own data for needed information. You can automatically add all your new tasks to Mem so that you can use AI to organize your work efficiently and give you a comprehensive overview of your to-do list.

Create Mems in Mem app for new tasks in Any.do Personal

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Let your to-do list manage itself

There are plenty of productivity hacks out there that can help you streamline your days and get more done with less stress. The most powerful tip of all, however, might be to simply—simplify. 

Automating your to-do list puts more of the information you need in one place. It reduces how often you have to switch between apps, and gives you one manageable place with your day's work cleanly laid out for you.

Spend less time managing your task list and more time on your actual tasks with the help of automation. This is just the start of what you can do with Any.do and Zapier . What will you automate first?

Related reading:

6 ways to automate your to-do list and task apps

Automatically create tasks from email or Slack messages

Automatically create tasks from calendar events

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Wren is an NYC-based writer and photographer. She completed her BFA in Film Production at NYU and MFA in Photography at Concordia University and has worked in independent fashion retail management in Montreal and New York.

  • Task management & to-do lists

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  1. 5 Task List Templates that Make Your Whole Team More Efficient

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  1. Task Lists

    Within Teamwork.com, you can add task lists in a project to group tasks together. Note: You can't add a task to a project without adding it to a task list. When creating a task list, you will need to specify a task list name. You also have some additional options: Templates - select a task template to populate the task list.

  2. Create a Task List

    Best practices Organize: Use task lists to group tasks into relevant subsets of work (e.g. based on department, or by micro-goal). Increase efficiency: Set default properties for new tasks in the task list. Psst! You can have all new tasks added to a particular board column by default.

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    1. Onboarding clients and employees to Teamwork Projects This template is perfect for getting new users acquainted with Teamwork Projects. New software can be overwhelming, so this breaks down the learning process into simple steps for new users — even those who are reluctant to move beyond email — feel confident and supported.

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    Search for and select a project. Select List from the project's navigation menu. The List tab might be under the More... option. Select a task list from the left navigation menu. If you're using the All Lists view, scroll to the relevant list. Click + Add a task at the bottom of the list.

  5. Using Task Templates

    To create a new task list from a template, click the Add Task List button at the top of the project's Table or List area. In the Add Task List modal, enter a name for the task list. Below the name field, you can use the template dropdown to choose an existing template to be applied.

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    Track tasks with Teamwork What Is Task Management? Task management is where every task is scheduled and managed using details and deadlines to deliver projects on time. Task management isn't as complicated as it sounds. It's just a fancy way of planning how tasks are handled from the moment you put them into a schedule until they're completed.

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    The task list options dropdown is available in any area of Teamwork.com where you can view tasks in Table or List view grouped by task list, such as Project > Table , Project > List or Everything > Tasks > List. Click the options button (three dots) to the right of the relevant task list name.

  8. Introducing Personal Tasks: Your own private to-do list in ...

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    Better visbility See your own task workload at a glance, or better manage your team's resources. Use Boards to visually represent your task lists so you can immediately see what needs to be done, ensure no one is overloaded with tasks, and avoid any potential blockers before they become problems. Improved efficiency

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    1. Communication "We never listen when we are eager to speak." - Francois de la Rochefoucauld Communication is a non-negotiable teamwork skill. A large portion of team or project failures (just take the untimely explosion of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter, as one example) arise from miscommunication.

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    1. Communication The ability to communicate in a clear, efficient way is a critical teamwork skill. When working with others, it is important that you share relevant thoughts, ideas and key information. There are many different types of communication skills including both verbal and nonverbal. 2. Responsibility

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  15. Moving or Copying a Task List

    Last modified on Tue, 7 Jun 2022 Within Teamwork.com, you can move or copy a task list to another project on your site, or make a copy of it in the current project. In Table or List view, click the three dots to the right of the relevant task list name and select Move or Copy from the dropdown menu.

  16. 64 team building activities to bring your team together

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    View Templates Summary Teamwork is when a group of individuals work together toward a collective goal in an efficient manner. Read on to learn the 11 top benefits of teamwork in the workplace and examples for each. Teamwork is one of the most important tools when it comes to organizational efficiency.

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    To help you understand the characteristics of successful teamwork, review the following list of teamwork examples in the workplace. Communication. ... Using critical thinking skills at work can help you navigate through daily tasks. When applied to teamwork, problem-solving skills will encourage you to mediate any conflict your team faces and ...

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    Here is a comparison of the 10 best collaborative task management tools available today. 1. Wimi, more than just a task manager. With Wimi, you can easily manage all your project tasks. This 100% French collaborative suite is highly secure (it is one of the first collaborative suites to be SecNumCloud qualified) and allows you to create ...

  20. How we Use Teamwork Projects to Manage Over 40 Projects at Once

    A task list template on Teamwork Projects looks like the following image, taken directly from our NeoMam Teamwork Projects account. It contains tasks, due days and assigned roles or individuals. Assigning People or Roles. For each task, you can allocate an individual, such as Joe Bloggs, or a role. Assigning the task to a role instead of an ...

  21. Generating Task List Reports

    Within Teamwork.com, you can generate reports for the task lists you have created on a project. Reporting on all task lists To generate a report of all task lists on your project, go to the project's Table or List area. Click the options button (three dots) in the top right and hover over Reports in the dropdown menu.

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    Add tags, estimate time, assign work, set due dates, and get granular with your privacy settings — Teamwork lets you manage your tasks your way. Track your tasks with Teamwork The task management system that saves time Task management templates to help all types of teams save time, improve processes, and get more done. Project management template

  23. How to integrate Any.do with your other apps

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  24. Teamwork Skills Checklist: Be a Team Player • Checkify

    Offering real teamwork by allocating tasks to the best person for the job but also being able to support team members by giving them a thumbs up or complimenting on a job done well. Documenting business processes and tasks gives others a way to learn new skills and gain knowledge on how to complete other functions within the business.