Martello Manor Takes Team Building to the Pitch for Care Home Open Week

The team at Martello Manor, part of the award-winning Boutique Care Homes group, marked Care Home Open Week 2026 with a full morning of outdoor team building at Hythe Town Football Club, as the home celebrated the spirit of togetherness that sits at the heart of exceptional care.

Team from across the home gathered at the club’s grounds on the morning of 24 June, splitting into two teams, fittingly named Team Martello and Team Manor, for a programme of activities designed to build trust, spark laughter, and strengthen the bonds that make Martello Manor the close-knit team it is.

The session began at 09:30 with a classic icebreaker: the Birthday Line-Up. The challenge was straightforward in theory, form a line in order of birthdays, but with no talking permitted, what followed was a full minute of enthusiastic pointing, creative miming, and a good deal of good-natured confusion.

From there, the teams moved through a packed schedule of activities. Two Truths and a Lie invited colleagues to test how well they really know the people they work alongside every day, with each person presenting three facts about themselves, two true, one invented, and the rest of the team voting on which was the lie. The results were revealing, often surprising, and occasionally hard to believe.

The Towel Bridge challenge brought out the competitive edge. With just two towels between them, each team had to cross the length of the pitch without any team member touching the grass. Everyone had to remain on the towels at all times. a task requiring coordination, communication, and a willingness to trust your colleagues completely. The Football Hot Potato added a further test of nerve: pass the ball between team members and, after every pass, take a step back. The biggest circle wins. It sounds simple until the gaps between you become genuinely daunting.

Salt and Pepper turned the pitch into a detective exercise. Words were written on team members’ backs, pairs of things that naturally go together, and the only way to find out what you were was to mingle and ask questions that could only be answered yes or no. Finding your match required persistence, logic, and occasionally, a willingness to accept that you are, in fact, a fork.

One of the most meaningful moments of the morning came with the Puzzle Piece activity, in which each team member took time to reflect on and write down what they personally bring to the team. The completed pieces are being laminated as a keepsake, a tangible reminder, displayed in the home, of the individual strengths that come together to make Martello Manor’s team so special.

The programme also included Photo Challenges, where teams competed for the best jump shot and the best superhero pose, the results of which need to be seen to be believed, along with Worst Idea Wins, which invited both teams to pitch the most spectacularly bad solutions to real workplace challenges. The worse the idea, the bigger the laughs. And finally, the crossbar challenge: every team member took their shot at the goal’s crossbar. Accuracy was mixed. Confidence was not.

At some point between activities, someone connected a Bluetooth speaker. What followed was an entirely unscripted team boogie in the middle of a football pitch on a summer’s morning. It was not on the programme. It was, by some margin, one of the highlights of the day.

By 12:30, the teams wrapped up, headed back to the office, and celebrated with pizza and drinks.