Program category
Summer Team Building Ideas and Activities
The best summer team building ideas get your team outside: a SmartHunt® across your city, a Team Olympics field day on a lawn or a raft race on a lake, with a hosted game show indoors for the hottest afternoons. We run summer corporate events for groups of 30 to over 1,000, at your office, a park, a resort or a conference venue.
Each activity fits a company summer picnic or stands as an event of its own, and runs from 20 minutes to 2.5 hours depending on which you choose. Outdoor favorites include Corporate Survivor and SmartHunts®, and teams who want water and sun pick Earth Wind and Solar or Build-a-Raft.
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8 summer team building ideas
The activities companies book most for June, July and August, from our event calendar since 2022. Most run indoors or outdoors, so a hot or rainy day can move the plan inside.
1. Best Corporate Feud
Our most booked activity in summer. A hosted game show in an air-conditioned room, good for a summer meeting or a picnic that the weather moves inside.
2. City SmartHunt®
Teams explore your city on our iPads, solving clues and filming photo and video challenges, with a slideshow of the day at the finish. 2 to 2.5 hours.
3. Team Olympics
Relays and field events for a lawn or a park, with challenge by choice so each person picks their level. Summer groups average over 120 people.
4. Bike Build Donation®
Teams earn parts, build bikes and hand them to children from a local nonprofit. It works on a patio or under a tent as well as in a ballroom.
5. Amazing Chase SmartHunt®
A race-style hunt with missions, puzzles and photo challenges on iPads. It runs anywhere, from a resort to a downtown, for 30 to 1,000+.
6. Corporate Survivor
Physical and mental challenges loosely inspired by the TV show, where tribes trade members midway. It needs a big lawn, about 50 square feet per person.
7. Build-a-Raft Competition
Teams design and build a raft, test whether it floats, then race it in a pool, a lake or any suitable water. 1.5 to 2 hours.
8. Go-Kart Competition
Pit crews design, build and race their own self-powered karts, indoors or out. Summer groups average about 110 people.
Every summer team building activity we run
Corporate Survivor
Test your team’s physical grit, mental agility, and group strategy in Corporate Survivor – a dynamic series of team-building challenges loosely inspired by the hit reality TV show. Designed to push collaboration, communication, and trust to the limit, this high-energy program brings out competitive spirits in a fun, structured, and unforgettable way.
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Earth Wind and Solar
On your mark…Get set….Sun! In this energizing event, teams compete in trivia and creative challenges to earn materials, build solar-powered “rovers,” and assemble science kits that are donated to children in need.
See the activity →Build-a-Raft Competition
This high-energy event will bring out your group’s competitive spirit as they work together to design, build and race their very own “seaworthy” vessel! Once their initial rafts are built, it’s literally sink or swim as each team takes to the water to test their craft in an effort to identify possible design flaws before the races begin! When the heats start, the excitement mounts—which crew will take home the gold? This dynamic team challenge will test each participant’s problem solving skills and creativity.
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A Minute 2 Win It!
As seen on the popular TV game show, and adapted for team play, your group will participate in rounds of fast-paced tabletop challenges. The competition heats up as one-minute games are practiced and scored using commonplace items like pencils, plastic cups and a deck of cards. Teams will cheer and have a blast as they vie to be named A Minute 2 Win It! Champions!
See the activity →Amazing Chase SmartHunt®
Unleash your team’s potential with an Amazing Chase SmartHunt®! After a fun icebreaker, teams armed with iPads tackle interactive missions, solve puzzles, and complete photo/video challenges for points. Navigate Road Blocks and Detours to maximize your score. Real-time communication and a live scoreboard amp up the excitement. Get ready for an unforgettable adventure with a highlight video finale!
See the activity →Bike Build Donation®
A build-a-bike team building activity for groups of 30 to 1,000+. Teams earn parts in quick challenges, build new bicycles together and donate them, with helmets and locks, to kids from a local charity.
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Bridge to the Future
In this collaborative event, teams work together to build an actual bridge that has the strength to support the weight of the entire group. There are two amazing aspects of this project. Each section of the bridge will be an independent artistic representation of your future mission and goals AND the principal building materials of the structure are cardboard and duct tape!
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Catapult
Put your team’s creativity, collaboration, and accuracy to the test in Catapult, a high—energy team—building experience in which groups design, build, and compete with their own working launchers. This hands-on construction challenge fuels innovation and friendly rivalry while bringing teams together for a shared mission of design, experimentation, and success.
See the activity →City SmartHunt®
Unleash your team’s inner explorer with City Smarthunts®, the ultimate tech-driven scavenger hunt! Work together while exploring with the most advanced team building scavenger hunt on the market. Ready for an unforgettable team-building experience?
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Competition to Collaboration®
Our engaging, trademarked training program that highlights the positive impacts of organizational synergy, both in sharing best practices and celebrating your colleagues’ successes. It begins with two sub-teams completing various challenges separately, attempting to improve their own performance and reaching goals for the other team to beat. This is followed by a surprise twist that reinforces the message of team collaboration.
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Corporate Canvas
Corporate Canvas is a collaborative art-based team building program. In this creative experience, participants contribute their own brushstrokes and signatures to a large-scale company mural designed to reflect your brand, values, and team spirit.
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Crack the Case!®
Crack the Case!® is a thrilling mystery-themed team building experience that challenges your group to work together, think critically, and collaborate across teams to uncover clues and solve a final case. With engaging puzzles, unexpected twists, and a dramatic group finale, this detective-style adventure inspires connection and creative problem-solving in a fast-paced, interactive format.
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Fiesta Fun!
Fiesta Fun! is a delicious and exciting recipe contest where your teams will combine creativity with culinary skill to make their own brand of Salsa, Guacamole and Golden Margaritas! Experience the sights, sounds and flavor of Mexico with the beat of Mexican music setting the stage for this gastronomical team builder. Once the creations are finished, it’s on to the judges table to see who will win the medal for best taste, creativity and presentation.
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Food Truck Face-Off
Set your team on course for a culinary adventure with Food Truck Face-Off. This is a deliciously exciting competition and bonding experience. After forming into sub-teams, participants will choose a cuisine and theme for their very own “food truck”. Teams will name their company, design a logo, build, decorate and market their truck and prepare an original dish. Once the gold-winning team has been chosen, all will be invited to roam from truck to truck and sample all of the tasty creations!
See the activity →Go-Kart Competition
Put the pedal to the metal and get your group fired up with Go-Kart Competition, a high-octane event where teams turn into competing pit crews and drivers – designing and building their own self-powered go-karts to race to the finish line. Promoting teamwork, creative originality and hilarious fun, this event is a winner no matter which go-kart comes in first.
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Igniting Team Performance®
This exclusive training will guide your team through a progressive series of engaging initiatives followed by rich processing discussions focused on high-performing teams. Throughout the program, demonstrated skills are acknowledged while areas for improvement are identified and immediately applied during subsequent activities. Igniting Team Performance® will enhance individual and team performance in the workplace.
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Mini-Golf Build and Food Donation
Mini-Golf Build and Food Donation is a fun charity team building program where your group will design, construct and play a mini golf course using canned and boxed food items. Working in teams, each hole has a special theme and rules, unique to that hole. After the course has been built, an entertaining tournament ensues with scoring and fun competition. Once completed, the course will be deconstructed and the food donated to a predetermined food bank or similar organization.
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Momentum
Momentum is an inventive team building event where each sub-team will be tasked with designing and building a Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction machine to accomplish a simple task. Teams must collaborate and strategize together to not only create a successful contraption but also to out-design other teams and ultimately be declared the Momentum champions!
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Morning Jumpstart
Kick off your group’s day with Morning Jumpstart! This fun and engaging program was developed based on requests from clients to create an event that can be delivered on any day of the week as a fun way to launch into a productive workday with smiles and camaraderie. Morning Jumpstart will promote team cohesion and enhance relationships through a fun series of games, challenges, and morning wake-up-themed activities.
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Putting for Pets
Putting for Pets is a fun corporate philanthropy event that concludes with the donation of pet food/supplies to local animal shelters and rescue organizations. Your group will design and build a unique one-of-a-kind, miniature golf holes using pet supplies and other building materials. Your team will experience the joy that comes from giving to fuzzy paws and a worthwhile cause!
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Race Car Rally
Race Car Rally is a high-energy, collaborative team building event where creativity meets competition. Teams build and customize their own mini race cars – crafted on official LEGO® car platforms – then take to the track for head-to-head races.
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Tapas and Sangria Making
Emphasizing creativity, delegation and teamwork, Tapas and Sangria is a program with a lot of punch. Your group will be formed into “wineries” tasked to develop, make and market their own brand of Sangria. Each winery will also make tapas from cold ingredients – no recipes provided! The event will close with a tasting contest and awards presentation for Best Tasting Tapas, Best Sangria and Best Marketing Campaign.
See the activity →Team Olympics
Go for the gold with Team Olympics, a high-energy program that combines athletic-inspired team challenges with spirited collaboration and friendly competition. Whether hosted indoors or outdoors, this program is a surefire way to ignite energy, camaraderie, and lasting team pride.
See the activity →Customization and Flexibility for Summer Corporate Events
Best Corporate Events tailors each group’s activity to best meet their unique needs, and embrace the seasonal spirit of summertime. While capitalizing on the energizing and fun vibe of summer, Best Corporate Events’s summer team building activities are created for groups of 30 to over 1,000 people, but are flexible for varying group sizes, preferences, and both indoor and outdoor venues. These summer team building activities are the perfect match for your company summer picnic or as an event all on their own – depending on which activity you choose, they can fit a timeframe from 20 minutes to 2.5 hours.
Popular Summer Team Building Activities
Some of our most popular programs are especially suited for the summer season, from outdoor competitions like Corporate Survivor to SmartHunts®, to water and sun focused challenges like Earth Wind and Solar or Build-a-Raft. These activities promote the pillars of team building while taking advantage of great weather.
Ready to plan your event?
So if the summer sunshine is around the corner, start planning your summer corporate event today. Reach out to get started planning your summer team building activity!
Client Testimonials
The Igniting Team Performance event at the One Ocean Resort yesterday was “Outstanding”!! Your lead facilitator did an incredible job in getting that event completed in 2 hours. Our client was absolutely thrilled with the exercise and the results. The great debrief overview at the end and the client was very impressed. I watched and saw the team morph from ‘oh here we are another event again’ to totally immersed in the exercises and the results. The client was providing feedback and commentary on what they were learning, etc. I was in the corporate world for over 33 years and never had a team-building event done as exceptional this one. Truly remarkable, I was very impressed. I can really sell this one easily now to our corporate clients. Thank you for all your help and please pass on my great appreciation of the exemplary execution of this event.
We enjoyed the whole thing very much! Our facilitator was early, energetic the whole time, funny, engaging, and everyone loved him. He probably deserves a raise.
During training presentations, it’s so important to know if the audience is ‘getting it’ and with this cool audience response polling system, you’ll know just that, while the session is taking place! It’s an amazing tool that we are excited to offer!
We are known for taking team building program concepts and ramping up their excitement level by incorporating our proprietary app technology. We’ve done it again by combining high-tech activities with the most popular casino games to create our new Casino Competition!
This unique, high-tech version of our fun, fast-paced tabletop competition uses our proprietary event app technology and a ton of iPads to deliver one of the most unique, high-energy, interactive, gaming team event ever!
Our mystery writers have combined elements of the TV show, Punk’d, with the perfect crime. Just like Ashton Kutchers’ show, you’ll have fun just watching the people in the dining room as they start to figure out that what is going on around them is really a show.
In this show, our mystery writers have combined elements of the TV show, Punk’d, with the perfect crime. This time, the dinner theater show involves the music and antics of the venue’s band. A customized song and murder turn the event into a whodunit!
Almost everyone has experienced the heartbreak that Alzheimer’s and dementia can bring to a family. This program was inspired by the movie “Alive Inside”, the idea of being able to help unlock the mind of an elderly person through music from their past is both a moving and exciting part of this program.
Shark Tank is one of my favorite TV shows. There are variations of this program all over the world, including Dragon’s Den in Canada and England and Den D in the Czech republic. The more I watched these shows, the more I thought a hybrid version of this concept would make a great corporate event. It really unleashes the competitive and creative juices of the participants as they brainstorm to come up with a product and marketing campaign to fill a public need.
We tasked our app developers with helping us design a high-tech version of the popular Spy School-type teambuilding program. The result is simply amazing because the program is now a great mixture of fun physical, mental, and high-tech spy challenges that will have your group in stitches.
Phil’s unique talent as a team building facilitator and writer is truly evident in this one-of-kind high-tech entertainment experience. If you are looking for a highly engaging SmartHunt, that has people constantly wondering what’s around the next corner, then choose The Riddle.
Our professional celebrity look-alikes are hilarious! So, if you are looking for a fun, exciting outdoor SmartHunt event that ends with an indoor finale that has people laughing so hard they are literally falling out of their chairs, then you absolutely need to consider this comedy SmartHunts event.
FAQs about Summer Team Building Activities
What are good summer team building ideas for work?
In June, July and August companies book Best Corporate Feud, City SmartHunt®, Team Olympics and Bike Build Donation® with us most. For a lawn or a park, Team Olympics and Corporate Survivor fit best; for a lake or a pool, Build-a-Raft. Each runs 1 to 2.5 hours for 30 to 1,000+ people.
What types of summer team building activities are available?
Summer team building activities are available in a great variety of categories, including outdoor adventure, creative challenges, and corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Outdoor & Active Adventures – These programs, like scavenger hunts, obstacle courses, beach games, and physical challenges such as Team Olympics put team propblem-solving and collaboration to tangible tests, boosting communication skills outside the typical day-to-day office roles of the group.
Creative & Collaborative Challenges – These challenges, like Food Truck Face Off or raft building emphasize collaboration and bond groups with shared goals.
Community & Giving Back – Donation builds and charitable competitions like Mini Golf-Build and Food Donation enhance team bonds through a shared and meaningful experience, while also benefitng the greater community.
What are the best summer team building activities for outdoor events?
The best summer team building activities for outdoor events include:
Summer is ideal for outdoor team building thanks to weather, flexibility, and wide activity range. To choose the right outdoor activity, consider group size, activity level, and goals.
What happens if the weather changes on the day of our summer corporate event?
Unpredictable weather is a common concern for summer events. A professional team building facilitator like Best Corporate Events will have contingency plans for unexpected weather.
Indoor backup options are available for most Best Corporate Events programs and can be activated quickly. Nearly all of our summer team building activities can take place indoors.
Some activities can be relocated or adapted for sheltered areas.
Customization allows for hybrid formats that blend indoor and outdoor elements if conditions shift.
Planning for weather changes is built into the event design at Best Corporate Events, ensuring minimal disruption.
Need help getting started or want a quote?
A planner will match the right activities to your group and send a same-day quote.
Something Else?
Don’t see what you are looking for? We have a wide range of events and options not listed here, and we are always open to new ideas! Choose “Something Else” on the request form and let’s work together to create the perfect event for your group!
Get my quoteInvent an Event!
Do you have your own great idea? We love to collaborate to customize existing activities or create something new from scratch. Let’s combine your ideas with our experience and expertise to design the perfect event for your group. Choose “Custom Event” on our request form and call us at 800.849.8326 and we will get to work for you!
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Go Collegiate!
Did you know that many of our activities can be tailored for University and College students, faculty, and administrators? Check out Best Collegiate Events for programs, events, training, and keynotes for a higher education audience!
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