Many different games and activities are used in team building in the corporate world, for kids and in colleges. These activities help maintain a healthy relation between team members. The stress that accumulates from the daily work routine is reduced and the employees begin their work with a new vigor and enthusiasm. Following are some activities that act as icebreakers and help the team members understand each other. Read the Face This game is played in groups of 5-10 people. Leaders can be assigned to each group in order to ease the exercise. The time required for the exercise to complete, depends upon the size of groups and it generally spans between 5-25 minutes. This game is all about communicating and interpreting the facial expressions effectively. In this activity, every team member thinks about an emotion and writes it on a piece of paper. These papers are gathered and collected in a container in order to enable 'blind selection'. Every person selects a paper from the container and tries to communicate the facial expression from the slip he has selected. The team members try to guess the emotion conveyed by the person. The game helps the employees understand a lot about facial expressions.

• It helps in identifying the different universal expressions.
• The effects of facial expressions in the day-to-day life is also understood with the help of this exercise.

This game is a nice activity which helps team members open up and communicate effectively. Picture Pieces This activity is a nice way to check how teams operate when they are assigned a particular task. It is a fun activity which involves forming a picture that is several times bigger than the original picture with the help of team members. The coordination and understanding between the team members is tested in this activity. Any picture such as a cartoon, is cut into different shapes and handed over to team members. The members are instructed to create a copy of the picture, but in a proportion that is greater than the original one. Once every person completes the picture, a larger picture is formed by collating the separate pieces together. Following are the benefits of performing the above exercise.

• It helps in testing the coordination among the team members.
• There is an increased awareness among the team members about the tasks performed by their fellow colleagues.
• The team members develop a broader perspective about the tasks they undertake.

Stress Exercise This is an activity to test the capacity of team members to handle stress. In this exercise, members are distributed into groups of 8-10 members. The game involves circulating a ball among the team members by throwing it in a random manner at each other. Every team member has to remain alert as to when he needs to catch the ball. A dropped ball is considered a failed task, and holding the ball for a long time is equated as a delayed decision. As the game proceeds, the number of balls in circulation are increased. As the balls increase in number, an atmosphere of stress and chaos begins to develop. Care should be taken that the balls are introduced gradually and also without much delay. The activity offers many different benefits.

• It is the best way to demonstrate the kind of pressure and stress that develops in a team environment.
• It helps improve coordination.
• This exercise helps test the temperament of the members.

These activities are considered to be icebreaking activities and they also help in team bonding. Mechanical and highly procedural ways of team building don't help much in today's hectic routines. Any team building or group activity that is undertaken should thus have a 'fun' factor attached to it.