Recently, we treated our team to an afternoon out of the clinic for team building, food and fun with our inaugural Clinic Olympics! Oh, I wish I could take the credit for the whole idea, but that goes to one of my docs - Jen Bolser. I did come up with the events, and I'm excited to share them with you.
Dr. Bolser and I were "referees" and the rest of the crew split into four teams. The staff loved it! Everyone who attended got a gold medal (party favors I found at our local Target). Other prizes were candy bars and silly things we pulled together to keep the event really inexpensive. For 20 employees, the whole thing cost less than $50 to pull together, not including food, which the doctors helped pot-luck. Anyone can do this!
Here are some of the events we came up with, which I hope will inspire you if you decide to hold this kind of event for your team!
Some of these games are team games, some are relay-style, and some are individual, which mean that the team had to select the player to compete. We ran some of the games multiple times.
Jeopardy Just like the TV show! We crafted a board with pockets for questions - this part was both fun and educational for the group. We had categories with themes like safety, dog trivia, cat trivia, and even doctor trivia, with both serious and hilarious answers. This was fun to create and we created enough to play twice.
Insurance Claim Target For this game, players took paper "claims" and shot them at a target with a rubberband. They had one minute to get as many papers onto the target as possible.
Operation Yes, the board game. Player surgically removes the game pieces in "minute to win it" style, and the player with the highest number of body parts removed - without the buzzer going off wins. Our chief surgeon nailed this one. The best part was that I was able to pick up the board game on sale at Target for only $10 bucks.
Suture Speed Trials Using some expired suture packets and bananas, our doctors had to stitch a variety of suture patters. First to finish the right number of stitches in each pattern wins! Then we save the stitched up bananas for use in another game.
Fill the Script This game was so much fun! We had blank Rx labels, containers of Tic-Tacs candy, pill vials, counters, and cutters. Using the tic-tacs as pills, the player had to count, cut, and fill an Rx faster than their opponent, including hand-writing a complete label. Prizes were awarded for both speed and accuracy. For us, it was clear that we rely on that label printer quite a bit.
Pet Carrier Assembly This is a two-person relay. One person takes apart the pet carrier, then their teammate must rebuild it. Fastest team to complete this wins.
eCollar Toss Players race to assemble a plastic elizabethan collar, which must then be worn by a team member. Another team member then must toss balls which are caught in the cone.
Bite Confinement I stole this game idea from Minute to Win It (the website for this show is a good source for ideas, by the way). Basically this game involves moving small bags of various heights from one place in the room to another. You can't use your hands, so you must bite the bag in order to transport it.
Separation Anxiety Another game idea stolen from Minute to Win It. Player sorts M&M candies by color into clear plastic cups. The trick to this game is to have the same number of each color, and to have just enough candies so that it's possible to finish in time, but not too easy. Play around with it - you can always eat your experiments!
Gown Up Relay By far and away the most popular game of the day. Players race to gown up - racing to point A, where they put on surgical gloves, then race to put on a gown, then race to put on a mask, then to another point to put on a bonnet, then to another point to don booties, then race to the finish. This was hilarious - putting the gloves on first made it more challenging.
We had a variety of guessing games, and unfortunately snow prohibited us from the outdoor technician's obstacle course that we had envisioned. Maybe next year? Some of the games were more fun than others, and some were more practical and educational. My team had so much fun with this, they're already planning next year's event, talking about mid-year rematches, and practicing some of their more favorite games. What cool games can you add to my list?
Have Fun!
Kat