Why your team building plan didn’t work (and how to make it better)

What is the point of team building?

The question still deserves an answer, whether it is asked out of honest curiosity or frustration. The idea behind it is perfectly sound: a pleasant working environment, in which people generally like each other and nurture positive, respectful relationships, and in which individuals are allowed to express their full potential and teams work in harmony sound like the ideal place to get any job done. Conflict, rivalries and mistrust in the workplace, on the other hand, are known to hamper productivities and cause companies to lose their top-performers. Team building is designed to lead companies as far away from the latter scenario and as close to the former as possible.

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Why your team building experiments failed

If you are reading this post, you have probably tried team building in the past and it didn’t work. Why? Sometimes, team building projects fail because their execution does not live up to their good intentions. But more often than not, the intentions themselves appear questionable. If, for instance, deep-seated problems, feuds and enmities exist within a team and the company’s management does not take them seriously and address them effectively, thus creating a healthy environment for the employees to interact, any traditional team building activity will be perceived as perfunctory and inauthentic, as it is not consistent with the kind of leadership that the company is providing. In other words, you can’t solve real human problems with one day’s worth of trust-falls and tug-of-war. If the team building activity or the entire idea of team building are inconsistent with the perceived company values, they will not produce any positive effect.

Employee feedback over forced fun

Why do so many companies still invest in team building and why is this industry thriving? Because there are ways of doing it effectively and, when properly organised, team building can be viewed by employees as a reward and a useful tool, rather than “forced fun” or a waste of time. If ensuring a team-oriented company culture is the first step, the second is encouraging employee feedback on the best activities to book. When planning team building activities for your company, you should always make sure that nobody feels either left out or roped in against their will. A common mistake is going for activities that sit well with “the majority” of your team, without asking exactly how averse the minority would be to those same activities. If, for instance, you are thinking of booking a wine-tasting experience for your whole team, you are likely to make the majority of your employees happy. If, however, your team includes complete teetotallers, they will feel actively excluded and assume that their needs are unimportant. When enquiring into your team’s preferences, therefore, you should not only have them vote for different activities and pick the most popular, but take the time to know individual employees and focus on the aspects of certain experiences they enjoy the most as well as those they are keen to avoid.

Always work with professionals

Poorly-executed team building is not a rewarding experience for anyone involved: do not improvise! Especially when planning team events that involve larger groups or unusual activities, it is advisable to work with professionals that will not only help you pick the perfect activity for your team, but also take care of all the logistic, organisational and practical aspects of it, leaving you free to focus on what matters the most: your leadership and the quality of human relationships in your workplace.

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