Team building activity

A 60-minute team building activity about how you actually work

No trust falls and no outside facilitator. Your team takes two short journeys, about ten minutes in all, then spends the rest of the hour talking about how each person actually likes to work and hear feedback. You finish with one team agreement to try for two weeks. The whole plan is on this page, and you can run it tomorrow without anyone signing up.

Time

60 minutes, or about 45 if people take the journeys beforehand.

Group size

Works from about 4 people. Without sign-in, SkillTree sets no limit. For a large team, split into groups of around 8.

Cost and sign-up

Free. The journeys need no account; only the optional team map needs sign-in.

Space

A room where people can stand in a line, and a whiteboard.

What to prepare

• Take both journeys yourself first. It takes about ten minutes.
• Post the two journey links in your team chat ahead of time.
• Make signs for opposite walls: Solo / Team, Flexible / Structured, Lets it go / Speaks up, Blunt / Gentle.
• Draw three columns on the whiteboard: Meetings, Feedback, Urgent stuff.
• Say upfront that nothing from this session goes into reviews or staffing decisions.

Which journeys to use, and why

A journey is one of SkillTree's short self-discovery quizzes. This plan uses the two from the "How we work" track.

Step by step

1. 0-5 min

   Set the ground rules

   Try: "This doesn't go in anyone's review. Show as much as you like. No style here is the good one." It lands better coming from the manager.

2. 5-17 min

   Take the journeys

   Work Style, then Communication Style, about ten minutes in all. Remind people to answer as they usually are, not as they'd like to be.

3. 17-27 min

   Talk in pairs

   In pairs, each person shares one result that fits and one that doesn't. Pair people who don't often work together.

4. 27-42 min

   Stand on the line

   Label the ends of the room Solo and Team, and have people stand where they belong. Nobody has to show a score. Ask each end when their way works well and when it gets hard. Then do the same with Flexible / Structured, Lets it go / Speaks up, and Blunt / Gentle, three or four minutes each.

5. 42-55 min

   Write your team agreements

   Under Meetings, Feedback and Urgent stuff, write one "We will..." line each. The manager speaks last.

6. 55-60 min

   Pick a two-week experiment

   Choose one agreement to try for two weeks. Name who keeps an eye on it and the date you'll check back.

Discussion questions

1. 1When does your best work happen? What's one thing your teammates should know about that?
2. 2Think of a recent time work went sideways. Was a difference in working style part of it?
3. 3Where do two people here work most differently, and when has that helped the team?
4. 4What kind of feedback can you actually hear? What makes you shut down?
5. 5When something's urgent, how do you want to find out?
6. 6If we changed only one thing for two weeks, what should it be?

Make it fit your team

• Only 45 minutes: have people take the journeys before the meeting and start with the pairs.
• Remote team: swap the line for a shared whiteboard where people place themselves, or share the team map below on screen.
• Conflict or leadership is the real topic: swap in Leadership & Conflict for Communication Style (37 statements, about 5 minutes).

Before you run it

• Don't use this for hiring, performance reviews or staffing. It's self-reported reflection and wasn't built for those decisions.
• Results show each person's own answers, not a comparison with other people, so scores aren't a fair way to rank anyone.
• The questions come from public-domain IPIP scales, a few gently reworded. The Korean version hasn't been separately validated.
• Answers are scored in the browser and kept there. When a result opens, the answers are also sent once to our server to score and make a share link, and aren't stored. What's stored is the link, holding scores and result titles, with no name or email.
• No group has run this plan yet. The timings are our estimate, built from how long each journey says it takes. If you try it, tell us what happened at hello@playskilltree.com

What's kept and how to delete it: the privacy page.

If you also want the team map

Good for a team that would rather see it all at a glance than talk through it. Results appear next to names, though, so with a manager or HR in the room, leave sharing strictly up to each person.

1. 1The day before, sign in, open My tree → Groups, create a group and post the invite link in your group chat. A group holds up to 30 people, you included, and one person can make up to 10 groups, so a larger gathering can split up.
2. 2Everyone opens the link and signs in with Google or an email link. Opened inside a chat app's own browser, Google sign-in can fail; if it does, open the link in Chrome or Safari, or use the email link.
3. 3Check the name field before joining. It comes filled in with the part of the email before the @, so ask people to change it to a first name or nickname.
4. 4Take the journeys while signed in and each result saves on its own. Anything taken before signing in saves the next time that person opens My tree.
5. 5On the group page, everyone ticks what to share under "What I share with this group" and taps Save. Joining shares nothing until they do.
6. 6The team map appears once two people share the same journey, and it shows each person by name. "Present on a screen" turns it into slides for a projector or TV, ending with three questions to talk over.
7. 7Once three people are sharing, Claude, an AI model, writes a team reading: strengths together, where you might rub, and one thing to try. Those names and results are sent to Anthropic to write it. It's rewritten each time what's shared changes, up to three times a day per group, so it can end up missing the last people to tick. If so, open the group the next day for a fresh one. This plan works without it.

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