HOA Board Team Building Ideas

Team building activities are a great way to make your HOA board of directors function in a more cohesive and harmonious way. Before we take a look at some activities that your board can try, let's look at some of the benefits.

Benefits of Team Building Activities

These activities are fun, and when people have fun they let their guard down. The relaxed attitude that follows will allow your board members to develop increased trust and confidence in one another.

Many team building activities rely heavily on communication. By communicating in a stress-free, non-work environment, your board will get to know one another better. By better understanding what makes one another tick, misunderstandings will be reduced and work-related communication will improve.

These activities are also great for morale. When people learn to enjoy their time spent together, it can function as a sort of reset button that pushes away any business related stress that has built up. Frequent use of team building activities can ensure that tensions never get too high in your HOA's management.

Now that we've laid out some of the benefits, let's take a look at a few activities that your team can try. If you find these enjoyable and beneficial, there are lots of free resources to find more exercises to do.

Two Truths and a Lie

This is a very popular ice-breaker style game that also works well as a team-building exercise. Each member of your board will write down three things about themselves. One of the things will be a lie. The other two things must be true.

In turn, each team member reads out the three things that they have written about themselves. The rest of the group must then discuss amongst themselves and decide which of the three statements is the lie. If the group cannot come to a unanimous decision, a vote will be cast.

Once the group has made a guess, the player reveals whether or not they were correct, and the turn passes to the next person.

Construction Copy

For this game, you will need to break the players into small teams. For each team, you will need a matching set of children's building blocks. You'll also need a set for whoever is conducting the activity.

The person conducting the game will build a small construction with their blocks and make sure that it is hidden from the players so that they cannot see it.

Each team selects a person to serve as the viewer. The viewer from each team will go up and look at the hidden construction for 10 seconds. They will then have to go back and explain the object to their team so the team can attempt to recreate it.

After a minute or two, the viewers will be allowed another 10 seconds to view the construction. Repeat this process until one of the teams correctly replicates the prototype. That team is the winner.

Zoom

This is a very popular team building exercise that makes use of the book Zoom, by Istvan Banyai. Zoom is a book without any words. It consists of a series of pictures that increasingly zoom out to create a larger scene. To make a team building exercise out of it, you must first cut all of the pages out of the book.

Next, take a number of sequential pages, equal to the number of people who will be playing and pass one to each team member, face down and in a random order. Tell them to look at it and memorize it, but not to show it to anybody else.

Have everyone ask each other questions about what their picture shows. Given the knowledge that the pictures represent an ever zooming picture, and the descriptions that are shared, the team must put the pictures back in order. Remember, they must do this without looking at any picture but their own. It helps to have someone who isn't playing check to see if the order is correct so the team can try again if they get it wrong.