Whether you’re a facilitator designing bespoke client workshops or an L&D lead creating training programs at scale, it can be a lot to manage.

Below, we’ll explore how SessionLab’s new features combine to help you organize your end-to-end planning process in one place and streamline your workflow.

Organizing everything involved in planning and running a session can be complex and time-consuming. 

Trainers need to connect needs assessment and training needs to their agenda design. Stakeholders need to be consulted and give their approval. Feedback needs to be collected, impact determined and reports created. 

All of this while trying to project manage and create repeatable processes to save your team time and effort in the future. It’s a lot of work and mental load that can get in the way of designing exceptional participant experiences and creating lasting impact. 

Whether you’re leading a training team or a solo consultant, SessionLab’s industry leading agenda planner has always been about saving you time and effort when creating your agenda. 

Now, SessionLab makes it easy to streamline the entire planning workflow in one place and automate tedious tasks with AI assistance. You and your team can remove complexity and busywork from your process and improve the quality of work across the board.

Let’s dive in.

1. Capture key information in a session brief

Agendas need context and background information in order to be fit-for-purpose. What expectations does your client have? What outcomes are expected? Who will be there and when is your session going to be held? 

Collecting this information —and ensuring it is accessible to everyone who needs it—can make for a much smoother design process. Nothing is missed, key context is captured and stakeholders can get aligned in minutes. 

With Pages, you can collect all this supporting information in SessionLab, right where you need it most. Collect your brief, map out logistics, and create to-do lists that support your project with a flexible document that lives alongside your agenda.

Examples of how SessionLab users are using Pages

• Brief for stakeholders and facilitators 
• Notes from client discovery calls and rough ideas
• Problem framing, session objectives and desired outcomes
• To-do lists, project timelines and key dates
• Participant list containing contact details, requirements and key context
• Client handovers and facilitator guides

2. Transform planning materials into a structured agenda

Designing the flow of your agenda is where sessions start to come to life. In SessionLab, you can start with a blank agenda or use the AI assistant to instantly turn a brief into a first draft, ready to refine. 

You can even start with a file upload. Turn a PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text file, image, and more into a SessionLab agenda, complete with blocks, instructions and timings. 

In SessionLab’s industry-leading agenda planner, drag, drop and rearrange blocks to easily rearrange your flow. Whenever you make changes, your timing will automatically recalculate, helping your stay organized and saving you heaps of busywork. 

Speed up your design process further by making agenda-wide changes with conversational prompts and AI-powered actions. Add breaks and icebreakers, summarize the goals and outcomes for a stakeholder or create a feedback form. 

The AI Assistant produces results based on your context. The more information included in your brief or your workspace-wide context folder, the better the output. 

3. Collaborate efficiently with co-facilitators and stakeholders

With SessionLab, sending document versions back and forth over email is a thing of the past. Organze your agenda and planning materials in one place where collaborators can co-create, edit and leave comments. Whether you work together asynchronously or in real-time, it’s easy to keep track of changes and ensure a smooth collaborative workflow.

Stay in control with simple editing and viewer controls. Get collaborators up to speed with a simple briefing document, facilitator guide or project timeline attached to your agenda.

Don’t want clients to get lost in the details? Share a simple online overview or create a custom view containing only what they need to know with flexible columns.

In SessionLab, collaboration is simple and efficient. You and your team can focus on designing, and not on chasing documents and digging up emails. 

4. Prepare for delivery with professional materials 

Once your session is finalized, SessionLab makes it easy to create and share professional materials in a beautiful, easy-to-understand format.

Quickly get stakeholder approval by sharing a simple, visual overview of your session. Export your session to Word, PDF, PPT and customize to your needs.

Hide columns, adjust the layout, and include Pages without the hassle of manual design work. Add a facilitator guide with detailed instructions to the agenda so every facilitator can deliver the session with confidence. 

SessionLab also makes it easy to collect all the materials your facilitators need on the day of the session. Attach slide decks, printouts and additional materials to your agenda for easy referral and sharing. 

Add a pre-flight checklist with logistics, contact numbers and key links to support session delivery on the day. With all your planning and delivery materials attached to the session, facilitation is smooth and organized. 

5. Collect and Analyse Feedback

Feedback is one of the most valuable tools in facilitation. Input from stakeholders and participants provides insight that can improve the quality of sessions and is essential for long-term improvement.

However, facilitators often lack an easy, systematic way of collecting and analysing feedback. It’s one more thing on a long to-do list and it can be hard to find the time and space.

With SessionLab Forms, it’s easy to consistently collect feedback without additional mental load or busy-work.

Instantly generate a feedback form based on your agenda with the AI assistant. Tweak your questions easily with the dynamic form builder and share a QR code or direct link with participants. Responses are collected in your session alongside your agenda. No more switching tools or losing insights. 

Export responses as a .CSV or ask AI to summarize key findings and suggest improvements to your agenda based on feedback.

Never miss the opportunity to gain insights and improve the quality of your sessions again. Demonstrate value to your stakeholders and create key deliverables with ease. 

6. Document outcomes and produce reports

So the session is over. Now is the time to close the loop, follow up with participants and produce post-session reports.

With tight turnaround times and more workshops to design and facilitate, this can be a lot to handle. But with SessionLab, it’s easy to organize your post-session process and follow best practices, every time. 

Ask AI to summarize feedback and collate your findings into a client report, ready for you to enrich with your own insights. Because your briefing, agenda, feedback responses and notes are all in one place, it’s easy to stay organized and contextualize your findings.

Export the materials you want to share with your client and stakeholders as a PDF, Word or PPT and easily produce key deliverables and reports.

7. Reuse what works and optimize your design process 

Experienced facilitators and L&D teams rarely design completely from scratch. Every agenda you design and activity you run can serve as the basis for future sessions, but only if they’re easy to find, reuse and adapt.

In SessionLab, you can turn successful sessions into reusable templates and keep them organized in one-place. 

Save your agenda, planning documents and forms in a single template and kickstart future designs. Ensure every session follows a proven process, maintains best practices and stays consistent across your team. 

Examples of complete end-to-end design processes include:

• Proven workshop and meeting formats with a brief and feedback form as standard.
• Recurring training programs, complete with a facilitator guide and training materials for easy rollout and delivery. 
• Multi-day events with stakeholder lists, timelines and key actions attached.

With your end-to-end design workflows organized in SessionLab, facilitators and trainers never need to start with a blank canvas and can easily find a proven structure for their needs.

With templates, teams can reduce preparation time while ensuring a proven, consistent structure is followed by every facilitator and designer. Quality standards are maintained and the feedback and improvement loop is kept in place, even at scale. 

How a connected workflow strengthens facilitation practices 

Bringing the entire design workflow into SessionLab is all about making the complex art of designing and delivering sessions simpler.

Rather than getting lost with multiple tools and repetitive busywork, SessionLab now helps you organize your workflow in a single place and streamline your process. Here’s how:

• Consistent alignment with stakeholder goals. By ensuring all important context is collected together, it’s easier to make design decisions based on learning objectives and desired outcomes. Everyone involved can get aligned easily and find everything they need in a single source of truth.
• Faster preparation cycles. Reusing existing materials and workflows helps speed up the design process and keep things running smoothly. Rather than starting from a blank canvas, your team can kickstart your design process with a proven structure.
• Easier reporting and continuous improvement cycles. With Forms connected to sessions, it’s easier to connect outcomes to objectives and collate feedback when it comes in. Track impact over time, ask AI to help with reports and insights and improve your facilitation practice.
• Systematize your process and ensure your proven workflow is followed, every time. When teams need to redesign from scratch, it’s easy for something to be missed or for inconsistencies to creep in. With a proven playbook to follow, standards are maintained and facilitators are supported at every stage of the design journey.
• Context-aware AI built on your content and instructions. Set workspace-wide AI context to get consistent results tailored to your preferred frameworks. AI-powered actions can help make smart changes to your session or generate materials instantly. Use AI to do busywork and help with sensemaking, not to replace creativity.  
• Present professionally. Whether you’re sharing a brief with a client or a report with stakeholders, everything looks polished and cohesive. With a simple visual overview and connected documents, it’s easy to guide stakeholders through a plan and get approval and tell the story of what happened afterwards.

SessionLab users like Luisia at Vlerick Business School are already seeing the benefits of  uniting their team’s workflow in a single, connected environment. 

SessionLab is helpful with alignments and processes. As our team has grown, it’s now easier to adapt the process, because it’s all there in SessionLab.

Christian Valentiner at Norconsult is also finding a lot of value in using SessionLab to create reusable training programs at scale and encourage a culture of continuous improvement.   

“We have a project manager’s course and a leadership initiation course that are set in SessionLab. We use these as templates, and as we learn things from evaluations and running those courses, we tweak things.”

Whether you’re a freelance facilitator wanting to deliver more value to clients or an L&D team designing programs at scale, SessionLab can help you maintain clarity, consistency, and professional standards throughout the entire lifecycle of a session. 

Check out this example template, complete with a brief, feedback form and client report to see how a connected workflow can work for you.

In conclusion

Designing workshops and training programs can amount to a lot of complex busywork. From organizing background information and chasing stakeholders to crafting an agenda and analyzing feedback: it all adds up.

But it can be made simpler.

With a connected workflow that supports your end-to-end planning process, SessionLab can help you focus on what matters most and facilitate with confidence.

Want to learn more? Check out our 3-minute video to see a connected workflow in action or get started by signing up for free.

When working in Excel, I found myself frustrated with endless copy and pasting, manually calculating timings and struggling to stay on top of my learning flow.

Whether it was presenting a messy spreadsheet to clients or struggling to maintain formulas, the task of finalizing my agenda always filled me with dread. There has to be a better way, right?

Back when I had to use Excel, I would always end up with a completed agenda and the work got done. But the amount of mental load and busywork meant a lot of wasted time that I’d have rather spent on perfecting my facilitation design.

This is where SessionLab comes in.

In this post, we’ll unpack why SessionLab is such a game changer for anyone still using Excel for agenda planning or session design.

Why Excel falls short

Let’s start with the obvious: spreadsheets are not built for session design.

Excel and Google Sheets are great for tracking metrics or project timelines, but they fall apart when it comes to designing an agenda. Sure, you can do it. But should you?

Here are the usual pain points we hear from users who’ve used Excel to design their sessions.

• Manual time calculations: Shift one activity and you’re recalculating all the timings.
• Formatting nightmares: Ever tried to make a last-minute update on a spreadsheet and ruined the whole layout?
• No collaboration flow: Comments get lost in email threads or clunky file shares.
• Inconsistent style: Facilitators using spreadsheets often have their own system which makes knowledge sharing and consistency difficult. 
• Poor quality printouts: Exports are ugly, difficult to format and don’t make a great impression with clients.
• Knowledge gets lost: Agendas and supporting materials aren’t centralized, making it hard to find content. 

We get it. Learning new tools has a time cost. But here’s the way I think about cost when it comes to using Excel. What is my hourly rate? What else could I be doing with that time? What additional mental load do I take on by using this tool?

Yes, I can use a free spreadsheet tool to create my session, but when I spend a day creating and manually adjusting the agenda, the cost is actually quite high. 

Here’s a real example of a Team Dynamics Workshop agenda in Excel. 

Making changes becomes a chore

On one hand, Excel does the job. Each activity has a row and in the columns I have timing for each activity. I could absolutely run this current session and have a decent sense of what comes when. So I feel pretty organized, right? Kind of. 

As soon as something needs to change, the busy work begins. I need to manually copy and paste the row containing an activity. Then, I need to adjust the timing manually and update all affected entries. And if I colour-coding or timing formulas get broken? More manual updates that take me out of the creative flow.

For a single item, this is tedious, but going back and forth with a client can turn this into a nightmare. Working on V4 of your spreadsheet when a client sends back a revision of V2 can result in a lot of headaches and additional busywork.

“We designed a core one-day agenda with all the modules. But because each event is in a different location, the timing always shifts—starting early or late, changing breaks, or accommodating local logistics.

Without SessionLab, updating all those versions in Word or Excel would have doubled the amount of time we spent.”

Christian Valentiner from Norconsult

Difficult to overview, too unpolished to share

Understanding the learning flow of a session in Excel is hard. It’s near-impossible to see the entire agenda in one-screen without manually adjusting cell properties and then switching back. Want a simple visual breakdown? Again, this means manually hiding columns and rows or creating additional charts and formulas. 

When my agenda gets longer than a single page, I’m endlessly scrolling back and forth to try and get a handle on how the day flows together and what the experience is like for my participants. 

How about collaboration? Frankly, a spreadsheet with all the information I need to run the session doesn’t feel great to share with clients or stakeholders. It doesn’t look professional and there’s so much information on the screen, it’s easy for people to get lost. 

Excel can get the job done but there’s so much tedious manual work along the way that gets in the way of designing the best possible session. 

Now, here’s the same Team Dynamics Workshop agenda in SessionLab. 

The first thing you’ll notice is a cleaner interface that helps make the work of agenda design easier, but SessionLab goes way further.

Underneath the hood, you’ll find many features designed to make the agenda planning process smooth and intuitive.

Let’s explore how SessionLab improves over the Excel design experience below.

What makes SessionLab different

SessionLab isn’t a general-purpose tool. It’s designed specifically for designing workshops, training sessions, and facilitated meetings. Every feature exists because we’ve been there and felt the frustration.

We’ve designed training sessions in documents and spreadsheets and thought, “There has to be a way to do this without pulling my hair out!” 

In SessionLab, you don’t have to “hack” a document or spreadsheet to make it work. Let’s break down what this looks like in practice.

Automatic time calculations

Let’s say you’ve set up your agenda timing in your Excel spreadsheet. You’ve added a row for duration, overall timing and even what time it’ll be on the clock for each activity. Then something changes. Not only do you need to move around your rows, but you also need to recalculate and update timing.

Of course, you can work out a timing formula for my Excel agenda but in my experience, this is prone to human error, particularly when iterating on a session. There’s nothing worse than realizing you messed up your time calculation formula mid-session and having to amend in front of your participants. 

With SessionLab, timing is recalculated automatically, which means you don’t need to come up with formulas or make constant manual adjustments. Facilitators have peace of mind and can free-up mental space to focus on what’s important.

Intuitive drag and drop 

Anyone who has designed a workshop, event or training session knows how much can change and shift during the process.

In Excel, this means wearing out the CMD X and CMD V on my keyboard, reformatting the table and having difficulties seeing how small changes affect the agenda as a whole.

In SessionLab, you can easily drag and drop blocks to change the order of your session. Formatting is preserved, everything stays organized and I can quickly iterate without the hassle.

I can instantly minimize all blocks too, making it easier to see my session flow and move blocks into new positions, even if they have heaps of information attached.

Colour-coding and visual overview

As an agenda develops, it can quickly become loaded with details and become difficult to parse. Adding colour to rows and columns in Excel is possible, but inefficient. With SessionLab, a single click allows you to visualize your agenda and iterate efficiently.

Colour-coding is present on the minimap and your session overview. This means you can quickly zoom out and see a simple visual representation of your agenda.

Colour categories are also helpful when it comes to presenting to clients and stakeholders. It is so much easier to follow and present an agenda with a simple visual breakdown rather than with a busy spreadsheet. 

Want to see more examples? Check out this post with 10 example meeting agendas built in SessionLab.

Rich-text editing and flexible columns

It’s no secret that Excel is not designed for long-form text, but even adding simple instructions in an easy-to-read format is hard. I would regularly run into issues formatting text (basically, you can’t) and find it difficult to present instructions in a way that made it simple to actually run the activity on the day.

In SessionLab, you can easily style your text to make it simple to follow and add bulletpoints, checklists, notes and more to enrich your material. Instantly add in-line images, attachments and materials to create a usable agenda that everyone can understand.

With flexible, collapsible columns, it’s easy to go from seeing all the details to getting a simple overview with one-click. Rather than struggling to get the information you need, SessionLab makes it easy to work with your agenda and provide beautiful facilitator guides to your colleagues.

Professional outputs in a click

Excel is not a client-friendly format for presenting information. Getting approval on your design and giving stakeholders confidence in the session you’ve designed is an important part of the process.

Whether you’re creating a facilitator guide or sharing a finished draft, SessionLab creates professional quality outputs that make it easy to share your vision and get approval on your design. 

Export a beautiful, polished agenda in Word, PDF, PPT, QR code and more. Customize the printout to your needs and provide the right level of detail to your chosen audience.

Reusable content & templates

In Excel, agendas and supporting materials need to live separately. When teams start collaborating and reusing agendas, it’s so easy for agendas and handouts to go missing. In SessionLab, you can attach materials directly to a block or agenda so they’re never lost and everything is mastered in one-place. 

SessionLab also serves as a knowledge base for all your best content. Every activity and agenda you make can be added to your personal and team library for quick and easy reuse. Everything is organized and teams are able to improve efficiency and session quality at the same time.

Consistency across teams

Teams using SessionLab tell us time and time again that SessionLab enables them to work more consistently and efficiently. In practice, this means creating a repeatable session design process with shared templates, clear access rights, and a single place to find past agendas. For many, this is a huge upgrade from the mess of scattered files and inconsistent formats. 

The benefits go further than a faster workflow. When everyone has their own agenda format in Excel, ensuring high quality design and optimizing your workflow is hard. In SessionLab, teams can align on best practices and repeat what works. Learning is shared, standards are raised and the quality of what is delivered is improved. 

SessionLab vs Excel feature comparison

While it’s possible to design an agenda in Excel, the process is painful, frustrating and time-consuming.

When I think back to having to working in Excel, my lasting impression is not of creative agenda design or thinking about leaning objectives: instead, it’s all the work I had to redo after breaking formulas. It’s the manual edits I had to make and the frustration of getting everything to look good when presenting to others.

For facilitators like Tucker Wannamaker, there is no going back to Excel after using SessionLab. 

“Excel is not a great tool for professional workshoppers. SessionLab is the agenda tool.
We use it every day.”

Tucker Wannamaker, Facilitator & Inclusive Change Leader at Thrive Impact

Don’t settle for redoing work manually after breaking formulas and layouts, even the thought of designing an agenda in Excel gives me flashbacks.

SessionLab gives you the structure, speed, and flexibility you need to easily design engaging sessions and make you look while good doing it.

Send participants on a learning quest, discuss what equipment perfect* facilitators might use or give kudos for positive examples of facilitation in action. 

Learn more about how to use Workshops & Wizards to support your session below. Download the free print-at-home version, try out the digital deck and register your interest in a physical edition. 

What is the Workshops & Wizards deck? 

Workshops & Wizards is a deck of cards that helps teach key facilitation skills, improve collaboration and help you run better workshops and meetings. Each card is a magical item that represents a core skill that helps facilitators, leaders and anyone working in a team to improve how they work together.

Below, you’ll find suggestions for how to use the deck for standalone activities, to support team building and as an entire training flow. 

The deck is designed for play and for experimentation and we know that creative facilitators like you will come up with your own wonderful ways to use the cards.

We’re still testing Workshops & Wizards and would love to get your feedback, suggestions and thoughts before moving towards a physical deck you can hold in your hands. 

If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know here!

You can also register your interest in a physical copy of Workshops & Wizards using the link below. 

How do I use the Workshops & Wizards deck?

I created the first prototype of the Workshops & Wizards to support internal facilitation training at SessionLab. 

We introduced the cards at the start of the session and encouraged folks to “give” the cards to other members of the team as they demonstrated the core facilitation skill on the card.

Throughout the session, the team gave one another kudos, had conversations about what they might improve and the cards they hoped to get, and even created their own cards during their session. They were great fun to use and helped engage the group in the training material.

This updated and expanded version of Workshops & Wizards can be used in a variety of ways, but here’s what we think it’s best at:

• Supporting facilitation and leadership training, particularly when you touch on the skills covered by the cards.
• Sparking conversations about facilitation skills and group dynamics. You might use the cards at the opening of a session to set intentions for how we want to show up or during a team building workshop to understand how your group might improve how they collaborate. 
• Giving participants an opportunity to give kudos when they see others demonstrate great collaboration or positive group behaviour. You might bring them to your regular workshops and meetings to bring attention to positive behaviours and celebrate one another during the session. 
• Exploring areas of personal development and facilitating self reflection. Facilitation skills = leadership skills = collaboration skills. These cards can be used to support personal development, whether individually or in a group. 

Of course, these are all just suggestions. We encourage you to play, experiment and let us know how you like to use them!

The cards 

Workshops & Wizards is a set of 22 cards separated into 3 levels and 3 suits – hand, heart and head. Every card represents a facilitation skill or aspect of a facilitator’s mindset. Let’s explore them now!

Level 1 cards

The seven Level 1 cards represent core facilitation skills and aspects of successful collaboration.

Level 1 cards are a great way to start having conversations about group dynamics, teach some of the most fundamental aspects of facilitation and to celebrate positive group behaviours!

Level 2 cards

The eight Level 2 cards go a little deeper, asking participants to pay greater attention to group dynamics and what might make others feel safe and valued.

Level 2 cards create an opportunity to bring some of that “invisible” facilitation work into the light and discuss softer aspects of great collaboration.

Level 3 cards

The eight Level 3 cards include facilitation skills and techniques that help move groups past obstacles and towards action.

Level 3 cards are an opportunity to talk about concrete techniques that participants can bring to future collaborations and group settings.

When using the cards with a new group, I recommend you start with the level 1 cards only. These seven cards create plenty of scope for learning and conversation without potentially overloading participants. In most of our suggested exercises, you’ll introduce level 2 and 3 cards later in the process.

It’s worth noting that none of these skills are “better” than any others and instead, they correlate more with a learning journey from the general fundamentals of facilitation through to some specific actions and outputs that may be beneficial for a facilitator to learn. 

The suits 

The Workshops & Wizards deck is organized into three suits: Head, Hand and Heart. 

Head cards represent ways of thinking and perspectives you might hold or encourage in others. 

Hand cards represent more practical facilitation tools and techniques you might call on during a session.

Heart cards represent qualities you may embody as a facilitator and softer ways of being that can impact group dynamics. 

In my experience, facilitation is fluid. Different faciltiators often have completely different ways of thinking about facilitation and the skills used while facilitating. 

These suits are just one possible categorization of core facilitation skills. Use them to create discussions, organize the deck and help participants consider what kinds of skills they naturally gravitate towards and which may need development.  

Downloads & resources

Here, you’ll find a PDFs for the print-at-home version of Wizards and Workshops.

Print at home deck

• Updated version of the full deck including 2 copies of each card, activity flashcards and wildcards (PDF)
• Updated Level 1 cards only (PDF)
• Updated Level 2 cards only (PDF)
• Updated Level 3 cards only (PDF)

Generally, you’ll need as many cards as you have participants and as such, you’ll likely need to print out multiple copies of the appropriate PDF (minus the cover page.) To make this easier, use the level specific PDF to get the extra cards you need easily.

You can also find links to the previous version of the deck here:

• Full deck including 2 copies of each card and wildcards (PDF)
• Level 1 cards only (PDF)
• Level 2 cards only (PDF)
• Level 3 cards only (PDF)
• Full deck in Spanish, kindly translated by Marta Porta. (PDF)

Miro template

The Miro template includes the full Workshops & Wizards deck plus additional assets for virtual workshops. You’ll find everything you need to bring the deck to your next online session.

Workshops & Wizards activities

Below, you’ll find a set of activities we’ve designed to help teach groups facilitation skills using the cards, support your meetings and give kudos.

Magical Kudos

Using a set of 3 cards, participants spot examples of effective facilitation in answer and give one another kudos during a session. We found this particularly effective during a facilitation training session we ran at a recent team retreat.

For me, good facilitation looks a lot like good collaboration and so you can use this exercise to support any kind of workshop or collaborative session and give your team the opportunity to reflect and celebrate healthy group dynamics.

Wizard Mingle

This activity is a simple networking activity which uses the cards to kickstart conversations about facilitation and group dynamics. After giving each person a card, participants must mingle, greet each other in a manner befitting a witch or wizard and then discuss the skills noted on their cards.

You can use this activity at the beginning of skills development sessions and facilitation training, regardless of whether you want to use the cards later in the session.

Wizard’s Boon

Wizard’s Boon is an icebreaker/check-in activity where participants select a card to embody during the session. Begin with a quick question about how the party in Lord of the Rings might have used the items to peacefully resolve Middle Earth’s challenges before inviting the group to choose a card they’ll keep for the rest of the meeting.

If using the digital version, try giving everyone a backpack and have them keep their item there for an added sense of ownership.

Facilitation Market

In this more involved training game, participants will first select their favourite items from the market and then work together in pairs to explore how a facilitation witch or wizard might use those items to lead an effective session. Pairs will then present learnings and ideas to the group, leaving everyone with a heap of crowd-sourced insights they can bring to their facilitation practice.

Personal Development Quest

Best used as a closing reflection, this activity asks participants to choose a card representing a skill they’d like to work on. Next, the present their quest to develop that skill to a small group who gives support and advice on how they might develop. Go round the circle until everyone has received support and then send everyone on their respective quests!

License and credits

Workshops & Wizards work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. You’re free to use, adapt and remix this material so long as you give clear attribution, indicate if changes were made, do not use the material for commercial purposes and distribute materials under the same license.

Workshops & Wizards is designed by James Smart for SessionLab.
Testing and development by Deborah Rim Moiso.
Visual design and illustrations by Laura Vidal.

Feedback

As mentioned above, we’re working on a physical edition of Workshops & Wizards and welcome all feedback. If you have any feedback, suggestions or would like to collaborate, please let us know with this short feedback form.

If you’d like to register your interest in a physical copy and get updates on the project, you can also leave your email address below.

Within AVIATAR, Agile coaches play a central role in supporting teams and leaders with structured collaboration, continuous improvement, and change initiatives. To design and deliver effective workshops that support these goals, Alexander Simon and the Agile coaching team relies on SessionLab.

From Excel to a smarter, more visual way to plan workshops

Before adopting SessionLab, workshop planning often happened in Excel, which was time-consuming and didn’t support efficient collaboration. Once the team was introduced to SessionLab, things changed quickly.

“When I first started using SessionLab, I realized how much time I could save—and how much better it was as a knowledge management tool for our workshop designs.”

Now, workshops are planned in a flexible, visual format that encourages smooth collaboration from the start. Agile coaches are able to plan effectively and support their teams across a variety of uses cases and business functions:

“I use SessionLab for designing diverse workshops: for example Management Workshops for drafting OKRs, Sales Workshop, Project Kick-Offs, Creative Sessions, Welcome Days for new personnel, Retros etc.”

With the drag-and-drop agenda builder and colour categorization, SessionLab has helped the team streamline the design process and clarify what needs to be done, whatever the goal of the session.

SessionLab has also helped when it comes to staying mindful and in control of time. By assigning every block a duration, it’s easy to plan for the time you actually have for the session.

When something changes, SessionLab will automatically recalculate session timing, meaning Alexander and his team can focus on designing high-quality sessions, rather than adjusting formulas.

“SessionLab’s visualisation helps to clarify the assignment for a workshop. It also helps with good time planning, especially if you have a workshop where time is very tight.”

A structured, repeatable workflow

SessionLab is now part of the Agile team’s end-to-end workflow. From the moment a workshop assignment begins, it provides a central space for planning, refining, and sharing.

• Initial planning: “I open a SessionLab file as soon as I begin clarifying the assignment with the client.”
  
• Concept development: “I use it to sketch out the structure and approach.”
  
• Client alignment: “We review the workshop together in SessionLab during follow-up meetings.”
  
• Finalizing and delivery: “Once finalized, I often print the agenda or use the live version during delivery.”
  

This repeatable process helps coaches stay aligned with stakeholders while keeping the design process organized and transparent. When it comes to sharing the agenda and getting approval, Alexander has options too. 

In SessionLab, you can share your agenda with editors and viewers directly, so they can leave comments or make edits directly based on your needs. Or like Alexander, you can bring SessionLab to your client meetings and make changes to the agenda based on the conversation in real time. 

Managing workshop designs and centralizing knowledge for the Agile team was also important to Alexander. In SessionLab now, they have a record of all the workshops they’ve designed, ready to re-use, adapt and run again whenever the team needs. 

“We maintain knowledge in SessionLab: i.e. we can quickly fall back on old workshops and reuse methods.”

Handling complexity without the stress

Whether it’s a creative session with tight time constraints or a multi-stakeholder event with dozens of participants, SessionLab makes it easier to manage even the most complex workshops and multi-day events.

“It’s a big help when working with co-facilitators or multiple stakeholders. And for large events, where the process needs to be mapped out in detail, it really makes coordination easier.”

SessionLab gives Alexander and his team the power to plan their sessions down to the minute and stay in control. With support for multiple days, breakout sessions and time locks, the team is able to design complex sessions with confidence.

With many people working on the same agenda, clarity is key. In SessionLab, Alexander can assign blocks and activities to specific collaborators for a smooth workflow.

By working together in one space, nothing is lost and all stakeholders know exactly what is needed. The result? Smoother, more organized events and happier participants. 

From faster planning to better results

For the Agile Coaches at AVIATAR, SessionLab has become more than a planning tool. It’s an essential part of how they work, bringing structure, clarity, and consistency to every workshop. And with a growing library of reusable content, the team is able to move faster without reinventing the wheel.

In a fast-paced, global organization like Lufthansa Technik, this kind of support makes a real difference. SessionLab helps the team deliver workshops that are not only well-designed, but also drive real alignment and impact across the business.

“With SessionLab, we are better at clarifying objectives, quicker with planning, and we can coordinate better with each other. That leads to more effective workshops—and better results overall.”

Our improved AI Assistant, now accessible via the prominently placed “Ask AI” button, enables users to generate, modify, and improve session content with greater flexibility. Crucially, it is now able to read and understand the context of your session, making it a collaborative tool that adjusts to your goals and supports your workflow.

Let’s explore what this update brings, how it supports your facilitation practice, and what to keep in mind as you start experimenting.

5 things you can do with SessionLab’s improved AI Assistant 

1. Generate or adapt an agenda based on your prompt

Whether you’re starting from scratch or working with one of our essential templates, the AI is now even better at generating a complete workshop structure based on your goals. You might ask it to:

• “Generate a four-hour workshop to align on design principles.”
  
• “Adjust this agenda to focus on stakeholder collaboration.”
  
• “Transform this template into a session on creative problem-solving.”
  

SessionLab’s AI Assistant is able to understand the broader context of your prompt and any content you provide, allowing it to produce coherent, structured agendas tailored to your needs. It won’t just fill space with empty blocks: it will prioritize outcomes and create a logical flow based on your prompt and materials. 

Another great place to start when working with the AI Assistant is with a template. We’ve had great results using a structure like this essential workshop template and asking the AI to tailor the skeleton agenda into something right for our needs. 

2. Make context-aware edits to your session

Previously, AI support was limited to generating new sessions from scratch. Now, you can make targeted changes to an agenda by prompting the AI to make refinements and edits. These actions take into account both the instructions in your prompt and the content already available in your session, leading to much better outputs and instant changes in your agenda. For example:

• “Add instructions and a goal to all blocks that are missing them.”
• “Can you translate this agenda into German?”
• “Revise this session to suit a skeptical client who needs clear rationale for every activity.”
  

The AI Assistant will engage with your session information directly, meaning it can edit multiple blocks, maintain internal consistency, and expand content when needed. You can now easily enrich your block descriptions, adjust tone or timing and even translate your agenda into another language without needing to leave the session. 

The Ask AI menu can also speed up some of the tasks involved with agenda creation. The suggested actions toolbar has some great examples, such as adding colour categories to your existing blocks or adding some additional breaks or energizers. In these cases, you don’t even need to write a prompt: one click and you’re away! 

3. Work with attachments to create agendas from existing materials

One of the most exciting developments is the ability to upload files directly to the AI in SessionLab. This includes:

• Word documents containing training plans or agendas.
• PowerPoint presentations or slides. 
• Screenshots of Miro boards with session outlines.

The AI Assistant is able to parse this material and use it as the foundation for a structured SessionLab agenda. While still experimental in this beta release, this feature opens the door to easily import your existing content into SessionLab or enrich an agenda from notes, screenshots and online whiteboards quickly. 

Top tip: formatted documents currently deliver better results than copy/pasting text into the prompt. In my experience, docs that have clear headings are easier for the AI Assistant to structure into a SessionLab agenda. 

4. Get smart suggestions on what to improve 

Not sure where to go from your first draft? The AI can review your agenda and suggest improvements based on your objectives or facilitation best practices. Simply click the What can be improved? button to start a chat and get instant suggestions tailored to your session. Alternatively you can start with a custom question or create a prompt for your use case , for example:

• “How could I improve this workshop plan for an online audience?”
  
• “How can I make this session more interactive?”
  
• “Which parts of this session might need improved instructions?”

Depending on the prompt, the AI may offer general advice or tailored feedback, helping you spot gaps you might have missed or improve overall session flow. You can then ask the AI to implement the suggestions and update your session accordingly.

As the AI Assistant is in beta, suggestions can vary in detail and precision though even now, this feature can offer a valuable second opinion or reflection point when refining your agenda.

5. Use Ask AI on specific blocks for quick, controlled adjustments

Using the primary Ask AI button will make adjustments to the entire session. But sometimes, you’ll want to update or refine a single part of your session. With the new block-level Ask AI button, you can apply prompts to individual blocks and adjust your agenda with greater control. 

For example:

• Suggest a specific activity for a block, such as an effective brainstorming or decision making activity.
  
• Expand a brief description with more detail or simplify one to make it easier for co-facilitators to understand.
  
• Add missing instructions or adapt existing ones to a specific use case.

Block level prompting gives you precision control on what AI will adjust and refine. This is ideal for fine-tuning or experimenting without disrupting the broader structure or flow of your session.  

How the AI Assistant can help you speed up your design process 

Facilitators often need to balance creativity with time pressure. Our new AI tools are designed to support the most common (and time-consuming) parts of the session design process. Now, you can focus even more on creating the perfect learning flow, rather than getting bogged down in busywork. 

• Jumpstart ideation: Get a structured starting point based on just a few lines of input. With improved contextual prompting, your initial results and refinements can get you even closer to the final product.
  
• Save time on editing: Let SessionLab’s AI Assistant handle bulk updates like adding missing instructions, colour categories or aligning tone across a session.
  
• Tailor existing content: Modify templates or previous sessions you’ve run to suit a specific topic, audience, or client need. No need to start over from scratch.
  
• Quickly import agendas from other sources: Convert docs, PPTs and other materials into digital, editable workshop plans without needing to endlessly copy and paste content. 

Ultimately, this means facilitators can spend more time thoughtfully refining content and less time wrestling with formatting or structural tasks. 

Whether you’re running leadership training, design sprints, or brainstorming sessions, Ask AI is designed to help you work faster and with more confidence.

Best practices and tips for using the AI Assistant in SessionLab

While the new capabilities are powerful, they work best with thoughtful interaction and prompting best practices. Here are some things to keep in mind while using the new Ask AI feature in SessionLab:

🧠 Give clear, contextual prompts

The more specific your prompt, the better the results. Instead of “Make this better,” try:

“Adjust this agenda to include interactive activities suitable for a group of 15 product managers.”

The more information you give the AI Assistant about your session goals, desired outcomes and audience, the better the output will be. 

🔄 Expect some trial and error

AI outputs aren’t always predictable. Occasionally, the assistant may generate more content than expected, overlook timing constraints, or misinterpret instructions. Use version snapshots and small iterations to stay in control.

See additional tips from our support team here.

📅 Use versions to review and roll back changes

Every time AI makes changes to your session, SessionLab creates a version snapshot. This ensures that:

• You can review what was changed.
• You can roll back to the previous version at any time.

Even when you’re experimenting or iterating rapidly with Ask AI, you’ll never lose your original content. See more about using versions here.

🧰 This is a beta release

There are currently some limitations and occasional bugs with the beta release of this feature. We’re actively improving Ask AI and welcome your feedback as we continue development.

👍 Account owners must opt-in

To enable the new Ask AI feature for your workspace, account owners must opt-in from the workspace settings screen. This ensures that account owners remain in control of when and how AI is able to read content and make suggestions as a result. 

With all of SessionLab’s AI features, session data is used solely for the purpose of generating relevant suggestions and improvements. This data is not used for model training or refinement. 

Curious about security and privacy? You can read more about how our AI features work and what data they access here. 

The future of AI in SessionLab

Our vision is for AI in SessionLab to become more than an ideation tool. We want the AI Assistant to become a collaborator that understands your facilitation style and adapts to your process.

In the coming months, we’ll continue refining the interface, enhancing performance, and expanding the feature set based on your feedback. 

For now, we encourage you to explore. Play with prompts. Upload your materials. Tweak templates. Let us know what you’d like to see next and how AI might help you design your next session. 

If you haven’t yet explored AI in your session design workflow, now’s the perfect time to start. 

To support the design and delivery of these sessions, Lea Flytkjær and the consulting team at Implement are using SessionLab to bring structure, clarity, and collaboration to their process, making it easier to deliver high-quality workshops at scale.

Workshops as a foundation for change

Implement is a consulting firm with 1800 employees worldwide. They support organizations in achieving their strategic goals with tailored, people-centered solutions. Their mission is to empower businesses to realize their full potential by combining deep expertise in change management, organizational development, and transformation strategy.

Workshops are a cornerstone of this approach. Whether working with executive leaders, team managers, or internal teams, Implement uses facilitated sessions to create space for learning, reflection, and experimentation.

“Workshops are a key component of how we work. They provide hands-on experiences that allow participants to apply new concepts and strategies directly to their work environments—ensuring sustainable and measurable improvements.”

For Implement, the importance of workshops to their ongoing work required a platform that could keep up and which made adjusting, updating and running sessions a breeze. Enter SessionLab. 

Designing with structure, speed, and adaptability

At Implement, many consultants design and deliver both client-facing and internal workshops. For Lea and the rest of the team, SessionLab has become the go-to platform for building sessions quickly and clearly:

“I use SessionLab for developing workshops, meetings, and training sessions. It’s especially helpful when repurposing sessions we’ve used before.”

Drag-and-drop functionality, color-coded blocks and automatic timing calculation has helped improve the design process across the consultancy.

Instead of wrestling with manual formatting or static documents, consultants at Implement can iterate and adapt fluidly with an easy-to-use agenda planner. 

“I appreciate SessionLab’s functionality, which allows me to easily color-code various elements and adjust timings seamlessly.”

From individual use to a shared solution

SessionLab has added a layer of flexibility and collaboration that was hard to achieve with previous tools like PowerPoint and Word. Instead of working in silos and losing track of materials, Implement are able to work together in a single, unified workspace. 

“As we expanded use across our team, the sharing features and ability to adjust timings really stood out. The built-in AI bot has also become a helpful companion in designing engaging sessions.”

As more team members got on board, it became clear that SessionLab filled an important gap: helping consultants not just plan workshops, but iterate on them, collaborate easily, and save time along the way.

What’s more, SessionLab’s AI Assistant has helped the team speed up their design process and focus on what matters most to them and their clients. 

Meeting the real-time demands of facilitation

A common challenge facing facilitators and consultants at Implement? Making timing adjustments on the fly during a workshop and ensuring the agenda stays in sync. 

“During workshops and trainings, we often need to tweak the timings in real-time. That function in SessionLab is great—it makes adjusting and rebalancing the agenda smooth and stress-free.”

Instead of halting a session to re-calculate activity timing or manually rework a Word doc, facilitators using SessionLab can tweak activities and timings seamlessly to stay in the flow and on track.

With SessionLab, consultants at Implement an adjust their session with confidence and participants can enjoy a high-quality session.     

Conclusion

For the consulting team at Implement, creating transformative change for their clients means designing and running workshops that encourage engagement and create lasting impact. Lea and her team needed a tool that helped them collaborate effectively, repurpose their best session materials at speed and deliver value to their clients.

With SessionLab, Implement has been able to supercharge their internal and external workshops and improve their collaborative processes too. The feedback from consultants and workshop designers using SessionLab has been overwhelmingly positive:

“The users I know are thrilled about SessionLab. They find it very user-friendly and helpful in their daily work.”

With SessionLab, consultants at Implement have found a workshop planning platform that matches their needs: flexible, intuitive, and built for the realities of facilitation.

But how do you choose the right activity for your team event, and where do you get started when trying to encourage deeper team bonding or alignment?

We’re here to help with this collection of effective team building activities! You’ll find instructions, tips and advice that makes improving team work and engaging your group easy.

What are team building activities? 

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

Team building activities are self-contained group exercises and games that help bring your team together and build the collaborative skillset of your group. They are especially effective in a work environment, where collaboration and cohesion is imperative to a team’s success and overall happiness.

Examples of team building activities include team games and learning experiences, away days and retreats, or simply doing things together as a team. Whether it’s an escape room or a deep activity designed to help your team get to know each other more deeply, the key with any of these activities is to bring your team together with purpose in a fun and engaging way.

Team building activities for work

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 and employees get to know each other better and start to develop bonds.

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.

Want more? See this collection of corporate team building activities for activities based around the 5 C’s of team building.

3 Question Mingle

Purpose: Breaking the ice, deepening team bonds, networking and movement
Participants: 2-40
Activity length: 30-60 minutes

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. 

3 Question Mingle is a great way to help an entire team get to know each other while also inviting the group to ask the questions they really 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!

9 Dimensions Team Building Activity

Purpose: Building relationships by evaluating and sharing perspectives on team dynamics
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 20–60 minutes

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.

Awareness Circle

Purpose: Getting to know each other, improving non-verbal communication
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–30 minutes

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. 

Break the Ice with The Four Quadrants Activity

Purpose: Breaking the ice with a group, self-reflection, deeper sharing
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 30–120 minutes

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! 

Just One Lie

Purpose: Encourage sharing and connection in a lighthearted manner
Participants: 5–20
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

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!

Life Map

Purpose: Create deeper connections and shared understanding, encourage visual thinking
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

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! 

Personal Presentation

Purpose: Build team trust and openness, skills sharing
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–240 minutes

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.

Passions Tic Tac Toe

Purpose: Break the ice and deepen team understanding in a fun, physical way
Participants: 10+
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

Helping employees get to know each other more deeply and connect beyond the scope of their job roles is a great space to explore with a team building exercise. In this activity, your entire team fills in a 3×3 grid with a passion or core value in each of the boxes. Then, ask your group to mingle and compare passions.

When someone finds a match, they each sign for the other person in that square of the grid. Declare your first winner as the person who gets three passions in a row. This team building exercise works well for remote workers and is a great way for your entire team to get to know each other a little better.

Office Trivia Challenge

Purpose: Test knowledge about the workplace and highlight achievements
Participants: 5–30
Activity length: 30–45 minutes

In Office Trivia, employees are asked to get into small teams and answer questions as a group. You’ll need a set of 15-20+ questions, the majority of which relate to your organization, company culture and little known facts from around the office.

Office Trivia is a fun, low-stakes way of helping your team get to know each other better while also reviewing key company information. Try throwing in some questions about KPIs or company values to bring these things into employee awareness. Mix in some lighthearted questions about your team members and some general knowledge and the result is great for any team building session.

Human Knot

Purpose: Enhance teamwork and communication skills, get the group moving
Participants: 7+
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

Team meetings can sometimes be heavy going, but they don’t need to be. Human Knot is a fun team building game that encourages your group to loosen up while working together to solve a puzzle that involves their bodies!

Start Human Knot 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!

Quick team building activities for getting to know others

Team building doesn’t have to take all day. While running dedicated team workshops like a team canvas workshop can have a profound effect on team dynamics, you can also run team building exercises in as little as 5-10 minutes.

In this section, we’ll share some effective yet quick team building activities you might use to warm-up your group and kick off the team building process. If you’re looking for quick team building activities to easily slot into your meetings and events, this is a great place to start!

Best and Worst

Purpose: Encouraging open sharing and deeper understanding among team members
Participants: 5–10
Activity length: 10–15 minutes

Team building 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.

Group Order

Purpose: Facilitating networking and recognizing commonalities within the team
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

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.

Happiness Exercise

Purpose: Build positivity, team bonding, share appreciation
Participants: 4–30
Activity length: 10–20 minutes

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.

Name Juggling

Purpose: Enhancing name recall and energizing the group through interactive play
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 1–15 minutes

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!

Open Fist

Purpose: Building cohesion and improving group communication
Participants: 3+
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

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.

Cross the Circle

Purpose: Encourage sharing, building team connections
Participants: 10–25
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

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.

Sync Claps

Purpose: Encourage presence and focus, energize the group
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

This fast-paced exercise is fun but gently challenging game that helps create focus and presence in a group. Get started by getting your team into a circle and ask them to move a clap around the room quickly by having two members clap at the same time.

By asking your group to synchronize and move quickly, sync claps is a fun way to energize the room and help your group feel more connected.

Fun 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.

Bang

Purpose: Energizing the group, encouraging quick thinking and name recall.
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

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!

Build-a-Shake

Purpose: Lighten the mood, encourage creativity and collaboration
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

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!  

Count Up

Purpose: Enhances group focus and non-verbal communication
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

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. 

Follow the Leader

Purpose: Encourages observation, build group cohesion, laughter!
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 5–20 minutes

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! 

Portrait Gallery

Purpose: Team bonding, collaboration, communication and creativity
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

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! 

Snowball

Purpose: Knowledge sharing and movement, energizing the group and encouraging playfulness
Participants: 8–50
Activity length: 20–40 minutes

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.

Celebrity Party

Purpose: Creative thinking and problem solving, levity and networking
Participants: 5–20
Activity length: 30–60 minutes

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.

Non-verbal improv

Purpose: Improve group communication skills, build connection with fun, memorable moments
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–20 minutes

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!

Rock, Paper, Scissors (Tournament)

Purpose: Build excitement and camaraderie, break the ice in an active, engaging way
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 5–10 minutes

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!

The Viking

Purpose: Energize the team with physical movement and encourage playfulness
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

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!

Wink Murder

Purpose: Create focus, sharpen observation skills and have fun
Participants: 6+
Activity length: 5–15 minutes

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!

Team building activities for small groups

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 and communication in small groups, you’ll find inspiration in the activities here!

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

Conflict Responses

Purpose: Reflect on past conflicts as a team and develop effective conflict-handling guidelines
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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.

Heard, Seen, Respected

Purpose: Building empathy and team connections
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 35–45 minutes

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.

Myers-Briggs Team Reflection

Purpose: Reflect on team dynamics, improve collaboration and mutual understanding.
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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. 

Strength Building exercise

Purpose: Celebrating team strengths, boost confidence and create a positive team environment.
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 15+ minutes

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 Envelopes

Purpose: Share positive feedback, enhancing group morale and mutual appreciation.
Participants: 5–40
Activity length: 40–60 minutes

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. 

Team of Two

Purpose: Strengthen one-on-one working relationships, clarify expectations and preferred collaboration styles
Participants: 2+
Activity length: 20+ minutes

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.

What I Need From You (WINFY)

Purpose: Improve collaboration and team communication
Participants: 10+
Activity length: 55–70 minutes

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.

Physical team building activities

Teams often come together to solve big problems as a group. Whether in the form of large projects or daily collaboration, improving this skill is something all teams should do – in or out of a conference room!

Improving team work and problem solving skills with a physical game that asks for communication, collaboration and creative thinking is a wonderful way to bring everyone together.

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, build problem solving skills and teamwork in an experiential, physical way!

Blind Square – Rope Game

Purpose: Building communication skills, trust and collaboration
Participants: 4–20
Activity length: 40–45 minutes

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 a perfect square. By debriefing afterwards, your group will find communication, planning and attention to detail are all important aspects of creative problem solving – all while having fun too!

Crocodile River

Purpose: Team collaboration and problem-solving
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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 and reach the finish line together.

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!

Egg Drop

Purpose: Encourage creativity and teamwork with gentle competition included too!
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–20 minutes

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!

Helium Stick

Purpose: Improving coordination and communication as teams work together to lower a lightweight stick to the ground.
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 5+ minutes

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!

Lego Challenge

Purpose: Improve team communication cooperation and explore the impact of assumptions on group dynamics
Participants: 10–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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. 

Marshmallow Challenge with Debriefing 

Purpose: Promote innovation and teamwork while exploring roles within the team.
Participants: 6–100
Activity length: 45–60 minutes

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. 

Spider Web

Purpose: Build group trust and problem solving skills in a fun outdoor setting.
Participants: 6–20
Activity length: 15–30 minutes

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. 

Stress Balls

Purpose: Energize the group and explore the importance of good team communication experientially
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 10–15 minutes

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!

Scavenger Hunt

Purpose: Encourage cooperation, problem solving and creative thinking in groups
Participants: 5–50
Activity length: 30–45 minutes

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.

Team bonding 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

Purpose: Self-reflection, honest discussions and trust building
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 20–40 minutes

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.

Telling Our Stories

Purpose: Encourage sharing of personal experiences, deepening connections and understanding within the group
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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

Purpose: Improve team cohesion and create space for meaningful conversations
Participants: 2–100
Activity length: 20–30 minutes

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.

Feedback: Current Strongest Impression

Purpose: Build trust and openness by creating space for honest, open feedback
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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!

Trust

Purpose: Develop mutual trust and strengthen team bonds
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 40+ minutes

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.

Translated Rant

Purpose: Improve active listening skills and promote understanding while also creating space for levity
Participants: 4+
Activity length: 10–30 minutes

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!

Team building activities for purpose and alignment

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

Purpose: Improve team alignment and encourage individual action and ownership
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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.

Engineering Your Team OS

Purpose: Reflect on group dynamics and improve collaborative processes
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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. 

Generative Relationships STAR

Purpose: Assess team dynamics and explore opportunities for improvement
Participants: 5+
Activity length: 20–25 minutes

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!

Team Canvas Session

Purpose: Aligns team members on shared goals, roles, and values, enhancing team cohesion and clarity
Participants: 2–8
Activity length: 90–150 minutes

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 Self Assessment

Purpose: Create an open dialogue on team dynamics and encourage a culture of continuous improvement
Participants: 2–10
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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!

Letter from the Future

Purpose: Create momentum for future action, team visioning and strategic planning
Participants: 6–30
Activity length: 60–120 minutes

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!

Team Purpose & Culture

Purpose: Guide teams in defining their core purpose and cultural values, creating alignment
Participants: 2–10
Activity length: 60–240 minutes

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!

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

Purpose: Allow team members to express their current state or reflections, creating presence and connection within the group.
Participants: 2–40
Activity length: 5–30 minutes

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!

Bus Trip

Purpose: Encourage team members to share positive feedback, promoting appreciation and strengthening team relationships.
Participants: 10–30
Activity length: 20–45 minutes

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.

One Breath Feedback

Purpose: Close a team session with concision and focus, encouraging effective communication
Participants: 2–20
Activity length: 5–15 minutes

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.

What is the purpose of team building? 

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!

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 workshop 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. 

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 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!

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. 

Looking for a quick team building activity you can add to any session? Explore our collection of 5-minute team building activities for a set of quick and simple activities you can bring to any meeting.

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.

Presented with opportunities for improved efficiency and enhanced collaboration, First Advantage needed to move away from spreadsheets and to a centralized, automated solution that helped their learning & development design team to develop high-quality materials with ease. That’s when they found SessionLab.

As a global organization, First Advantage serves customers in over 200 countries and territories with a staff of about 10,000 employees in 19 countries. As such, First Advantage’s Learning and Development team has a large number of training requirements they need to fulfill.

In this customer story, Deborah Masak, Head of Global Talent Development  & Inclusion, and Lavanya Chouhan, Manager, Architect of Learning Design, share how First Advantage uses SessionLab to drive results and enhance service delivery.

Creating an organized, efficient training program 

The Learning & Development team at First Advantage primarily uses SessionLab when creating internal training programs. They cover a diverse range of sessions and workshops that focus on leadership development, technical skills, and professional training.

Tailored for HR professionals, hiring managers, team leaders, and front-line agents, these workshops aim to deepen participants’ understanding of background checks across various industry verticals. 

Deborah says that these training programs are a vital part of equipping their team with the skills necessary to navigate the current world of work and to foster “a safer, more compliant workplace that supports organizational success.”

Before using SessionLab, First Advantage faced challenges with collaboration, efficiency and a lack of a structured process. Lavanya commented that:

“Before adopting SessionLab, our team relied on various tools, including spreadsheets and basic document editors, to plan workshops. However, these methods often led to confusion, lack of collaboration, and inefficiencies.”

As a result of that inefficiency, Deborah and the team at First Advantage recognized that they needed something different. After trying SessionLab, “it became clear that a centralized solution like SessionLab would benefit not just individual users but the entire organization.”

Now, SessionLab helps First Advantage improve efficiency and collaboration on both a micro and macro level.

For individual trainers and workshop design teams, Lavanya says “one of the main challenges we face is ensuring that all team members are aligned on the workshop agenda and objectives. With multiple contributors, it can be difficult to keep track of changes and maintain clarity. SessionLab addresses this challenge by allowing us to collaborate in real-time, making it easy to update agendas and share them with the team.”

As an organization, SessionLab has allowed First Advantage to create a “more cohesive and structured approach to workshop planning.”

By working together in a single, centralized platform, it’s easy for the L&D team to follow best practices, stay organized and streamline the planning process, even when working across teams. 

 “Using SessionLab has significantly improved our workshop planning efficiency.”

Flexible, powerful agenda design

Every training program and workshop begins with an agenda. At First Advantage, agenda design is an integral step the team takes seriously. Lavanya says:

“We use SessionLab primarily for planning and designing our workshops. On a day-to-day basis, we create detailed agendas that outline the structure, content, and objectives of each session.

Our typical workflow involves collaborating with team members to draft the agenda, rearranging days and topics as needed, and utilizing the platform’s features to ensure clarity and engagement.”

Moving away from spreadsheets and docs meant needing a robust yet intuitive solution that enabled facilitators and trainers to do their best work.

SessionLab’s easy-to-use agenda planner helps every team member design and co-create sessions easily. According to Lavanya:

“The key benefits of using SessionLab include enhanced usability, improved collaboration, and greater flexibility in workshop design.”

For Lavanya, the visual elements of planning a session in SessionLab are a key part of what  helps the team get things done. With colour-coding and an interface purpose-built for creating agendas, the L&D team can easily visualize the learning flow and make changes to their training programs instantly. 

“SessionLab allows us to easily rearrange agenda items and visualize the flow of the session, which was not possible with our previous tools.” 

Not only has this helped First Advantage streamline the process of a single sessign design, but it’s helped their team save time and focus on what’s important: delivering exceptional participant experiences. Lavanya comments that:

“We have noticed a reduction in the time spent on designing agendas, allowing us to focus more on content quality and participant engagement. Stakeholder satisfaction has increased, as evidenced by positive feedback from workshop participants regarding the clarity and organization of our sessions”

The end result of all your agenda planning is a workshop that you share with participants. By removing the friction of other tools and helping the team stay aligned during the planning process, First Advantage has been able to design more polished and effective workshops. 

SessionLab has helped the team run their sessions more efficiently too – saving time and ensuring participants are more engaged throughout. Lavanya says that:

“With SessionLab, we have been able to time all sessions and meetings more effectively, which has eliminated approximately 25% of wasted time.”

When it comes to getting folks on the same page or getting buy-in, SessionLab helps by providing beautiful printouts and easy options for sharing a customizable agenda with stakeholders and participants. “The ability to generate QR codes for agendas has streamlined sharing with participants.”

Conclusion

Delivering training for a global organization with 10,000 employees is no small feat. First Advantage needed a solution that helped them stay organized and deliver high-quality sessions at scale.

Using SessionLab has enabled Deborah and her team to centralize their workshop and training design process, creating alignment and structure instead of confusion. The employees taking that training have seen the benefit too – with an increase in positive feedback from participants and less wasted time in meetings and training sessions. Deborah comments:

“Using SessionLab has made it a worthy investment for our organization, driving better results and enhancing our service delivery.”

To deliver high-quality, engaging sessions at scale, HR Development Specialist Christian Valentiner and the team needed a smarter, more flexible way to plan and manage their training programs. That’s where SessionLab came in.

A team-focused approach to leadership and development

Norconsult’s competence development team in HR plays a central role in developing leaders and project managers across the organization.

From multi-day programs to one-day seminars, they design and run sessions for colleagues in locations ranging from Oslo to Copenhagen and Stockholm to Bergen.

As Christian notes, the scale of these programs can be massive:

“Our main audience is internal—leaders and project managers across the group. One example is our annual leadership forum, where over 700 leaders participate in one to two-day sessions throughout the year. Each event has slightly different constraints—start times, lunch breaks, venue restrictions—so no two agendas are exactly the same. For that, we’ve created an agenda in SessionLab.”

To manage events of such complexity and scale, Norconsult needed a tool that could help them design effectively, make changes efficiently and which helped them stay organized. As a result of these needs, they turned to SessionLab.

Saving time and managing complexity with ease

While planning, adapting and running Norconsult’s annual leadership forum at different locations, Christian found SessionLab was instrumental in making it happen.

“We designed a core one-day agenda with all the modules. But because each event is in a different location, the timing always shifts—starting early or late, changing breaks, or accommodating local logistics.

Without SessionLab, updating all those versions in Word or Excel would have doubled the amount of time we spent.”

Using SessionLab’s drag-and-drop interface, visual timeline, and automatic timing calculations Christian was able to quickly update agendas and navigate local changes without additional busywork. The result? Less time fiddling with formatting, more time focusing on delivering exceptional group work and training.

“Without Session Lab, I would have been inefficient and possibly quite frustrated. Also, things might not have run smoothly.”

Visual clarity and better-designed sessions

Norconsult is an organization that values thoughtful facilitation and experiential learning – whether that’s in their training part or for internal workshops focusing on innovation. When it comes to creating the timelines, SessionLab provides Christian and his team with an essential design benefit.

“I’m a visual person. I use color coding in SessionLab to mark different types of activities—yellow for giving information, orange for content delivery, red for group work, pink for plenary reflection. It helps me instantly see if the flow is balanced. Too much yellow and orange? That’s a warning signal for me—we’re missing interactivity.”

The color-coded timeline gives the team a quick, visual way to assess whether the session design supports engagement and deeper learning. When they make changes, the timing of the session automatically updates, so the team is able to see the impact of any changes and make informed decisions about what to cut, add and keep in the agenda.

Supporting collaboration and quick alignment

The team often collaborates with HR business partners and senior leaders—like local managers or the CEO—who contribute to the training. Sharing the agenda and keeping everyone aligned is crucial.

“I use the different sharing options all the time. The detailed agenda goes to the delivery team, so they can follow updates live. For presentations, I’ll use the high-level view to show the flow without overwhelming them with detail.”

SessionLab helps the team not only co-design internally but also share clear session plans with facilitators and stakeholders—saving time, getting buy-in and making running sessions a breeze.

Christian and the team will use custom printouts of the agenda to facilitate a session. He finds the materials list especially useful when it comes to preparing to run a workshop.

“Keeping track of materials is super efficient with SessionLab. Adding materials for each block and getting the materials list is fantastic.

So every time we say, “Oh, I’m doing a training session tomorrow. What do I need?”—here’s the list in SessionLab. Tick, tick, tick.”

Norconsult also uses SessionLab templates as the backbone of their ongoing training programs and courses. 

With a single source of what works well for these courses in SessionLab, Norconsult is able to maintain best practices and speed up the design and delivery of future courses. 

“We also have a project manager’s course and a leadership initiation course that are set in SessionLab. We use these as  templates, and as we learn things from evaluations and running those courses, we tweak things.”

Growing organically with facilitator training

Norconsult’s use of SessionLab has grown steadily over the years, starting with a few licenses in the Innovation department and expanding through the organization. 

“When we ran our Innovation Leader Program—a five-module, two-day-per-module course—we realized we needed a better system to track everything. That’s when we introduced SessionLab. Now, every year we train around 15 new internal facilitators, and we introduce them to SessionLab as part of the program.”

This facilitator training has helped spread adoption organically across teams and departments, especially among consultants running collaborative or creative workshops. By having templates and reusable sessions centralized in SessionLab, onboarding those new facilitators is made even easier. The result is a company-wide culture of facilitation that continues to grow.  

SessionLab as a must-have tool for effective workshops

From keeping track of materials and tweaking timelines to creating better learning flows and training programs, the impact of SessionLab for Norconsult is clear.

“I couldn’t do my job without SessionLab. I’d pay for it out of my own pocket if I had to—it saves so much time and frustration.”

For Christian, the impact extends beyond his own experience designing and running training sessions and workshops. Facilitators and trainers across the organization have been able to bring the power of facilitation and efficient agenda design to their roles. 

“SessionLab helps us to create alignment quicker. If we can save time, we can deliver more effective services. Because of SessionLab, the impact of what we deliver in the end—the quality of the training or the quality of the workshop—is going to be better. We can focus on the process and the people.”

A well-placed reflection exercise can help a group start a meeting with intention, process insights mid-session, and close with a sense of clarity and purpose. Whether you’re facilitating a brainstorming session, a team retrospective, or a strategic planning discussion, reflection activities create space for deeper thinking, alignment, and engagement.

This post explores a range of simple yet powerful meeting reflection activities, from quick check-ins to structured debriefs. No matter your team size or format—virtual, hybrid, or in-person—you’ll find reflection techniques that encourage thoughtful participation and help your team get the most out of every meeting.

What are meeting reflections?

Typically, a meeting reflection is a simple question that participants reflect on in silence before then sharing their answer with the group.

Meeting reflections are intentional moments of pause and inquiry that help participants ground in the moment and then share something with the group.

Some team meeting reflections go further, by incorporating physical action or visual elements designed to improve engagement or accomplish a specific purpose such as making a decision or sharing levels of aggreement.

Meeting reflections are most often used at three points during a meeting:

• to open a meeting and help people share how they are feeling, check existing knowledge on the subject of meeting or align on expectations for the session.
• to close a meeting by asking participants about lessons learned, celebrating wins or to reflect on steps they’ll take after the meeting.
• during a meeting to gauge energy levels, check alignment and understanding or make a decision.

These moments of reflection can take different forms depending on the meeting’s purpose and structure. Typically, you’ll ask participants to reflect on something that relates to the topic of the meeting or which allows them to reflect on how they’re feeling and allow them to be more present and engaged in the session.

Whether it’s a quick one-word check-in, a structured debrief, or an open-ended discussion, reflection activities support engagement, enhance group dynamics, and make meetings more purposeful.

In the sections below, you’ll find a combination of simple meeting reflections and more involved reflection activities too. Let’s explore.

Why are meeting reflections important?

Without any moments of reflection, meetings can feel like a blur of conversations and decisions, leaving participants unsure of what really mattered or what comes next.

Reflection activities help counteract this by slowing things down just enough for clarity, alignment, and connection to emerge.

Here’s why they matter:

• They help ground everyone in the meeting. A good meeting reflection is an invitation to put aside what came before or will come after the meeting and be present in the moment. I often use a meeting reflection at the outset as a means to help participants truly land in the session and prepare to contribute.
• They help facilitators tailor their approach and service the needs of the group. A good meeting reflection will give the facilitator insights that will allow them to tailor the agenda to the needs to the group. Participants low on energy? Maybe you move up that energizer. Already have a positive atmosphere in the room, perhaps you can use that to your advantage.
• They set the stage for productive discussions. A good meeting reflection creates a framework for effective discussions. Participants are given a question and then asked to reflect deeply before then sharing in a structured manner. Practicing this skill ensures team members
• They strengthen learning and retention. Pausing to process discussions helps teams internalize key ideas and apply them effectively. Whether used during or at the close of a meeting, a reflection can help ensure lessons learned during the session are retained.
• They create alignment and shared understanding. Reflecting together reduces the risk of miscommunication and ensures everyone is on the same page. It also gives the group an opportunity to address misunderstandings and discuss any sticking points. In this way, a good reflection helps team members with overcoming challenges too!
• They improve decision-making. By allowing space for deeper thinking, reflections help teams make more thoughtful, considered choices. They often provide space to understand the “why” of a decision or opinion, thus informing the process.
• They support team connection and can help build personal relationships. Inviting people to share thoughts, feelings, or feedback fosters a sense of inclusion and psychological safety. Reflecting on a topic together can also help build these kinds of team bonds that carry through to the next meeting.

Incorporating reflection doesn’t have to take up much time, but it can significantly enhance the quality of a meeting. Whether used to open, close, or punctuate discussions, reflection activities help transform meetings from routine obligations into meaningful and productive conversations.

Simple meeting reflections

In this post, you’ll find a collection of reflective meeting activities you can use to open, close or reflect during the meeting. These are facilitator tested, proven activities that you can follow to great effect.

But what if you’re looking for the absolute simplest way to get your meeting participants to reflect? Sometimes, a single good question is all you need.

For best results, it’s worth considering the group you’re working with and the flow of the rest of the meeting. For example, if you’re running a project kickoff, it can be helpful to prime people for goal-oriented work by asking them what they would like to get from this meeting.

On the other hand, if you’re running a general team meeting, asking people to share how they’re feeling may be the best shout for ensuring the meeting is a success.

These are my personal favourite meeting reflection questions that are as simple to use as just asking the group to respond to the question.

Simple reflections to start a meeting:

1. Could you describe how you’re feeling today in just one word?
2. What do you need in order to participate fully in this meeting?
3. What do you want to leave this meeting with?
4. What are your hopes for this meeting?
5. At the end of this meeting, how will we know it was a success?
6. How do we fail this meeting? (Obviously then ensure you think about how to avoid that from happening with the group!)

Simple reflections to close a meeting:

1. How do you feel at this point in the meeting?
2. What’s something that hasn’t been said yet but is important?
3. What’s something we should remember as we move forward?
4. Do you need anything to help you contribute to this meeting?
5. How are your energy levels?
6. Are we ready to move on or is there something more to be said?

Simple reflections to use during a meeting:

1. How do you feel as we bring this meeting to a close?
2. What was the biggest lesson you learned during this meeting?
3. What is your main takeaway from this meeting?
4. What are you going to do after this meeting?
5. What feedback do you have for this meeting?
6. What do you want more of and less of in the next meeting?

Reflection activities for opening a meeting

Kicking off a meeting with reflection activities can set a thoughtful tone and encourage participants to engage more deeply with the topics at hand. These opening exercises provide a valuable opportunity for team members to pause, consider their thoughts and experiences, and share insights that can enrich the meeting’s discussions.

These are some of our favourite workplace meeting reflections that give team members an opportunity to check-in and reflect at the start of a meeting.

Check-in / Check-out

The Check-in / Check-out method provides a simple, effective framework for bookending sessions, ensuring participant engagement from start to finish. This technique creates a symbolic and collaborative opening or closing process, inviting every team member to be present, seen, and heard.

To implement Check-in / Check-out, gather the group in a circle, either standing or sitting. For a check-in, each person shares something representing their current state – a feeling, a reflection from yesterday, or a response to a playful prompt like “What animal represents your mood today?”

During check-out, participants might share a key takeaway or their feelings as the session ends. Go around the circle, allowing each person to speak once, uninterrupted.

Check-in / Check-out sets the stage for focused and committed group work. As a closing activity, it offers a crucial moment of reflection and symbolic closure often missed in busy work environments.

I EXPECT

The “I EXPECT” method offers an effective way to uncover and align participant expectations at the start of a workshop or training session. By creating a visual map of collective expectations, this technique helps set the tone for the session and allows facilitators to address any misalignments early on.

To implement “I EXPECT,” divide a flipchart into four quadrants labeled: “The Training,” “The Trainer,” “From Yourself,” and “Other Participants.” Invite participants to share their expectations for each category, either verbally in a group discussion or by writing on sticky notes and posting them in the relevant quadrants.

The “I EXPECT” method encourages participants to reflect on their own role in the learning process, and creates a sense of shared responsibility for the workshop’s success. It also helps the trainer to ensure expectations or additional needs are surfaced and met.

Who are you? The pirate ship exercise

The “Who are you? The pirate ship exercise” uses a vivid metaphor to help participants reflect on their roles, attitudes, and feelings about a topic, project, or within the organization. This activity creates a safe space for people to express themselves metaphorically, often revealing insights that might not surface in regular conversation.

To conduct the pirate ship exercise, show participants an image of a pirate ship with various characters in different positions and situations. Ask each person to choose which character best represents how they feel in relation to the topic at hand. Participants then share their choice and briefly explain why.

For groups who may find sharing personal reflections hard, I find the pirate ship offers an easy way for them to express their perspectives and contribute in a fun yet still useful manner.

The Feeling Wheel

The Feeling Wheel exercise, based on Robert Plutchik’s Feeling Wheel, helps participants identify and articulate their emotions at the start of the meeting and create shared understanding in a group.

Start The Feeling Wheel by setting a safe, reflective tone, emphasizing that all emotions are valid and important. Participants examine the Feeling Wheel, using a sticker or post-it to mark the emotion that best describes their current state. If comfortable, each person shares their chosen emotion, exploring why they feel that way and considering related feelings on the wheel.

The Feeling Wheel exercise offers versatility in application. It can explore hypothetical scenarios (“How might we feel when…?”) or serve as part of a daily emotional check-in. Starting meetings with this exercise can help surface and reduce underlying tension and build empathy within teams. Knowing where people are at helps us understand their behaviour and by checking in with our feelings, we can be more self aware and in control too.

Paired walk

The Paired walk activity transforms team dynamics by inviting participants to step outside, pair up, and engage in meaningful conversation while walking together. This technique creates a relaxed atmosphere, free from the distractions of devices or meeting rooms, often leading to more open and honest conversations.

To conduct a Paired walk, participants pair up, ideally with someone they don’t know well. The facilitator allocates a specific amount of time (usually 15-20 minutes) for the walk and talk, suggesting a topic for discussion such as personal experiences, team challenges, or ideas related to the session’s theme.

Paired walks offer versatility in application, serving as an energizer, a trust-building exercise, or a precursor to addressing challenging topics. Often, the change in scenery and action of walking can help shake things loose and help folks reflect in ways that might not be able to in a regular meeting room.

Yoga icebreaker and reflection

Incorporating movement and mindfulness into meetings can rejuvenate participants and enhance focus. The Yoga Icebreaker and Reflection activity combines gentle yoga stretches with reflective prompts, creating a refreshing start to any session.

Begin by guiding the group through simple breathing exercises to center attention. Progress to easy stretches, such as neck rolls and shoulder shrugs, which can be performed seated or standing.

As the group moves through each pose, introduce a reflective question related to the meeting’s theme or simply ask the group to set an intention for the rest of the day, encouraging participants to ponder silently. This blend of physical movement and introspection not only relaxes the body but also primes the mind for engaged and thoughtful participation.

Object Meditation

Object Meditation is a mindfulness exercise designed to help participants become present and aware and move past any distractions at the start of a meeting or workshop.

Start the Object Meditation by asking participants to select a small object from their immediate surroundings—such as a pen, mug, or book—and hold it in their hands. Guided by the facilitator, they close their eyes (or soften their gaze) and take a moment to check in with their thoughts and emotional feelings, observing these without judgment.

Attention is then directed to the chosen object, noting its texture, weight, and other sensory details. Participants are encouraged to visualize transferring any unhelpful thoughts or feelings into the object, allowing them to release what doesn’t serve them in the present moment.

I particularly enjoy Object Meditation in a virtual environment: inviting team members to show the object to the camera can help bring the group closer, despite the presence of the screen.

Reflection activities for closing a meeting

As your meeting draws to a close, it’s essential to wrap things up in a way that reinforces key takeaways and sets the stage for future action. This is where reflection activities come in – they provide a structured, engaging way to consolidate learning, gather feedback, and ensure everyone leaves on the same page.

In my experience, closing meetings in this way has a compounding effect too. Participants get used to thinking about what they’ve learned and what next steps will be at the close of a session and they bring this practice to future meetings too.

One Breath Feedback

One Breath Feedback solves the problem of closing reflections running over by keeping contributions short, sharp, and to the point. Participants take turns sharing their feedback in a single breath—usually around 20-25 seconds.

The process is simple: sit in a circle (or small groups), explain the rules— participants share their feedback or closing reflections in the space of a single breath—then go around the group and share. The time limit forces participants to be concise and intentional, while the quick-fire nature keeps energy high and engagement strong. It’s a great way to wrap up a session on a high note, ensuring everyone’s voice is heard without dragging things out or losing momentum.

Thankfulness Tree

The Thankfulness Tree is a powerful way to close a session with positivity and meaningful reflection. Start by create an image or shape of a tree on a wall or whiteboard. Instruct participants to trace around their hand on a sheet of paper and cut it out, then write down something they’re grateful for or a key insight from the session on a paper leaf and attach it to the tree.

As the tree fills up, it becomes a visual representation of shared learning and appreciation. This method not only encourages personal reflection but also creates a visual representation of the session’s impact. (Remember to take photos!) Thankfulness Tree works well for both in-person and virtual settings, where participants can submit their responses digitally to form a collaborative Miro board.

I Used to Think… But Now I Think…

I Used to Think… But Now I Think… is a highly effective reflection framework that helps participants reflect on how their understanding has evolved during a session.

Participants simply complete the sentence:

• “I used to think…” (a belief or assumption they held before the session)
• “But now I think…” (how their perspective has changed)

Give team members are few minutes to reflect silently before sharing with the group, either collecting the responses on a flip chart or sharing in a circle.

I Used to Think… But Now I Think… highlights the power of learning and transformation by making growth tangible. Sharing reflections in small groups or as a whole can spark insightful discussions and reinforce key takeaways. For facilitators, it also provides valuable feedback on the session’s impact.

Letter to Myself

Letter to Myself helps participants turn insights into action by writing an inspiring letter of key takeaways to their future selves.

At the end of a session, participants reflect on what they’ve learned and how they want to apply it in the future. They then write a letter detailing their goals, commitments, or words of encouragement to their future selves. Facilitators can mail the letters later or participants can set a digital reminder to revisit them.

Letter to Myself creates a tangible link between learning and future action, ensuring that insights aren’t just inspiring in the moment, but actually lead to real-world change. If your group gets into a habit, these letters can also form the backbone of continuous improvement too!

Start, Stop, Continue

“Start, Stop, Continue” is a straightforward and effective method for teams to reflect on current practices and identify actionable steps for improvement.

In this activity, participants individually consider a specific situation, process, or behavior and brainstorm on post-it notes under three headings:

• Start: New initiatives or behaviors that could enhance performance or outcomes.
• Stop: Current practices that are hindering progress or are no longer beneficial.
• Continue: Existing actions that are effective and should be maintained.

After individual reflection, participants share their insights with the group by sticking their post-its on a shared whiteboard. After some clustering and discussion, the group may then choose to vote on actions to take. Start, Stop, Continue is incredibly flexible: I’ve used it with groups and for solo reflection too. It can be used as both an opening activity to set intentions or a closing exercise to identify areas of learning and plan future actions.

Next steps (after this meeting I will..)

Next steps is a simple but effective meeting reflection activity that encourages participants to share the actions they’ll take following the meeting. Here’s the rub: one of those actions is work focused, while the other is something nice they’ll do for themselves.

Start this activity by getting the group into a circle. Next, raise your right hand and say “After this meeting I will…” completing the sentence with an action step you’ll take after the meeting. Then, raise your left and say “but before that I will…” and complete the sentence with something you’ll do for yourself, such as taking a break or making a nice drink. Finish by giving a high-five to the person next to you, who will continue the activity.

Next steps is a fast, easy-to-run reflection exercise that invites participants to reflect on what they need to do as individuals, as well as which action items to tackle next.

Meeting reflection activities for during a meeting

In this section, we’ll explore some deeper reflective activities that are primarily used at the mid-point of a meeting to help a group reflect and explore a subject more deeply.

A notable exception being the Quick Reviews activity, which is a great method for getting a temperature check at any point during a meeting.

These activities are great to use when you want to explore a problem space and find moments for thoughtful reflection on bigger topics as a group. These can provide some inspiration for how you might approach deeper reflection and provide an effective framework for that reflection.

W³ – What, So What, Now What?

The W³ – What, So What, Now What? method is a powerful tool for aligning perspectives and moving teams forward. This structured reflection process helps groups make sense of complex experiences together, reducing misunderstandings that can derail progress.

Participants begin by focusing on What happened, collecting objective observations. Next, they explore So What those observations mean, identifying patterns and drawing conclusions. Finally, they determine Now What actions logically follow. This progression ensures all voices are heard while distilling insights and shaping new directions.

What, So What, Now What? is a great method to use when managing conflict or trying to unstick groups that have become blocked on a tough problem. If you’re facilitating a group/topic that has the potential to become heated or messy, this is a wonderful framework for moving from reflection to productive action.

Team Self-Assessment

Team Self-Assessment is a structured process for groups to evaluate their shared habits, dynamics and ways of working. This method encourages open, honest reflection on six key dimensions of team performance, uncovering both strengths and growth areas.

The process begins with individual reflection on each dimension, with team members completing statements like “As a team, we…” The group then shares and clusters insights, creating a collective map of team perceptions. Through dot voting and discussion, priority areas for celebration or improvement are identified.

Team Self-Assessment makes implicit team dynamics explicit, creating a safe space for constructive dialogue. Newly formed groups can use this method to start strong, while established teams can leverage it to elevate their performance. The final output of the assessment is a collaborative document of decisions made and team best practices which the group will refer to in the future.

Gap Analysis

Gap Analysis is a simple reflection exercise that helps groups visualize the distance between their current reality and future goals. This method makes it easier to identify and tackle obstacles, bridging the divide between present circumstances and desired outcomes.

To conduct a Gap Analysis, the group first describes their desired future state on one flipchart. They then capture their present situation on another. With these two points clearly defined, participants brainstorm the gaps between them. This visual approach clarifies necessary changes and sparks creative problem-solving.

Gap Analysis transforms vague aspirations into actionable plans by breaking down the journey from present to future into manageable steps. The method is particularly effective for project planning, strategic visioning, or any situation requiring a shift from “what is” to “what could be.”

Quick Reviews in 2 minutes

Quick Reviews in 2 minutes is a collection of short, engaging meeting reflections that help capture group sentiment without disrupting session flow. These micro-reflection techniques help participants process learning and reconnect with the group in a time-efficient manner.

The method includes five lightning-fast techniques such as telling a brief story about the last activity, visualizing magic moments with a short meditation, or giving rapid-fire positive feedback. Each approach takes just 2 minutes, allowing facilitators to quickly gauge participants’ experiences or boost energy levels.

Quick Reviews in 2 minutes is particularly useful when wrapping up workshop segments, transitioning between activities, or when you want to clarify where the group is at before potentially changing things up. Quick Reviews shine in situations where time is limited but reflection and sharing remain crucial.

The 5 Whys

The 5 Whys technique is a deceptively simple method for uncovering the root cause of problems. Originally developed by Toyota, this approach helps teams peel back layers of an issue to reveal its core.

To implement The 5 Whys, start by clearly stating the problem. Then, ask “Why?” five times in succession, using each answer as the basis for the next question. This process of continual questioning pushes participants beyond surface-level explanations, often revealing surprising root causes.

The 5 Whys can be applied to a wide range of issues, from technical problems to interpersonal conflicts and personal development. By encouraging deeper reflection and moving beyond our kneejerk thoughts, The 5 Whys is an easy to get groups to deepen their understanding.

In some cases, it can be helpful to provide some direction or examples for continued reflection. If participants get stuck, invite them to think of the reason behind their first answer or give an example. In my experience, if people get stuck or think they’re done on first try, it can also be helpful to ask them to think of “Why is this important?” on both an organizational and personal level.

The Blind Side

The Blind Side is a reflective activity designed to help teams identify and address unknown factors that may impact their success.

In this exercise, a facilitator prepares a visual with four quadrants labeled: “Know/Know,” “Know/Don’t Know,” “Don’t Know/Know,” and “Don’t Know/Don’t Know.” Participants collaboratively populate each section with relevant information, starting with what they are aware they know and progressing to areas where they are unaware of their lack of knowledge.

This structured approach encourages open dialogue, highlights hidden assumptions, and can help create a culture of continuous learning and inter-team sharing.

By the end of the session, the team gains a comprehensive understanding of their knowledge landscape, identifying both strengths and gaps. This awareness is crucial for anticipating challenges, leveraging untapped resources, and enhancing overall team performance.

Final thoughts on meeting reflections

Meetings shouldn’t feel like a whirlwind of unstructured discussions that leave participants frazzled or uncertain about the next steps.

By integrating reflection activities, you create opportunities for deeper engagement, shared learning, and meaningful takeaways. Whether it’s a quick check-in to set the tone, a mid-meeting pause for alignment, or a closing exercise to capture insights, these meeting reflections help ensure that gatherings are not just productive, but also valuable experiences for everyone involved.

The best part? Reflection doesn’t have to take up much time—it just needs to be intentional. By choosing the right activity for your team and context, you can help the group be present, hold more productive discussions and encourage more meaningful engagement too.

So the next time you plan a meeting, ask yourself: How can a moment of reflection help us get more out of this conversation? Chances are, the answer will lead to more thoughtful discussions and improved collaboration.

More resources:

• See this collection of tried-and-tested meeting agenda templates to help improve the structure and outcomes of your future meetings.
• Reflective activities are a great foundation for workshops and training sessions too. See our guide on how to plan a workshop or our step-by-step process for creating a training session for tips on how to incorporate them into a learning flow.
• Looking for a simple meeting icebreaker for your next online meeting? See our collection of icebreakers for virtual meetings to instantly engage your remote team.