Easy Office-Based Team Building Ideas #5

If your workplace is anything like ours, then you love yourselves a slice of cake. Birthdays, Fridays, national celebrations - in our eyes, they're all the perfect excuse to swap our lunchtime sarnies for a bit of Victoria Sponge. This week's Easy Office-Based Team Building Idea adds a competitive element to your average office tea party: behold, The Great Team Building Bake Off!

Here at CCC HQ, we'll be holding our own Bake Off in the run up to Easter Weekend - we're looking forward to it so much that we'd thought we'd share our tips on how to organise your own.

A few weeks before you plan on holding your Bake Off, be sure to email everyone to let them know which day it will be held and display our poster to remind everyone. This will give people time to think about what they want to bake and get people talking in the run up to your team build.

Competitors can be as traditional or as unusual as they like - there's at least one person in every office who will claim that their Grandmother's recipe for Fruit Cake will be the ultimate contender, but unusual, savoury options such as cheese and jalapeño scones can often be the dark horse and blow everyone away.

Once you know who's going to be taking part, split competitors into three or more teams. Let them know their teams beforehand so that they can plan on bringing a range of baked goods between them and ensure there won't be two of the same thing within their team. This will also get the competitive banter going - you'll be surprised how much trash talking there can be about baking!

On the day, have teams place their baked goods together, and number each cake. For example, you might have the Red Team, with cakes 1-8, the Blue Team, with cakes 9-16, and so on. Send another email to encourage everyone (competitors and spectators) to taste as much as possible throughout the day and to place their ballot. It's fun to include a range of categories, such as 'Best Sweet', 'Best Savoury', 'Best Presentation', and of course 'Best Team Overall'. Place the ballot box (this can just be a shoebox with a slot cut into it) near the cakes, and ask people to write their names at the top of their voting slip to ensure there's no tactical voting.

Once the votes are counted, announce the category winners before awarding the main prize to the Best Overall Team. The best thing about this team build is that regardless of the results, everyone's a winner - at the end of the day, everyone will have had the best lunch ever!

If your team can't get enough of cooking, treat them to a Cookery-based Team Building Event. We'll provide all the supplies - just make sure to bring your appetites!