The ugly truth about team buildings as I experienced them

Are weekend-long team building events any good?

Do they serve the purpose? Does any good come out of them? This has been on my mind for a while now and while other topics just write themselves, this one is simply hard to approach. No matter what I write it just proves simply not correct enough to let it see the light of “publish”.

Most of my memories about team building events are somehow a those of a club mixed with very dizzy colleagues and not much of a “team” sentiment. This is somehow against the whole purpose of a team building. You were suppose to build your team here not to simply isolate micro-blended-teams into “private rooms”.

Some former colleagues have even confessed that they considered this events to be just excuses to hit on one or more persons at work quoting a “what happens in team building events stays in the team building events” policy. This I feel it is just nonsense! This is not a private event, it is in your free time but not at your expense (remember that when on Monday you as a manager simply are the laughing stock of the company because you got so drunk that you forgot what you did/said etc.). My advice, if you cannot hold it together, just go to sleep; same goes if you feel uncomfortable.

About the games the companies organise in the morning — the ugly truth: no adults I know really like to play childhood games with other adults. So, organising a team building is more like organising a wedding where you have people with different taste in music in the same room and you try to find something for everyone. It is just not going to work and some will forever be unhappy.

This being said, why do people attend such events? Some said that it is nice to see that the company spends money on them while others said they would have preferred a bonus instead of the event itself.

How I see a successful team-building event is completely different than any I event I have witnessed so far but I hope that one day I will join such an event.

There are a few very simple things you need to consider to a successful team-building event:

• understand the team — there is no universal team building event for companies with 20K employees that do not work together and most likely have nothing in common (like.. the IT guy and the financial control team…);
• split the company into teams that you would like to improve collaboration;
• identify what is the common ground they have;
• ask the teams what they would consider doing and how much they can spend on this (the question of private time or company time I will leave for another time).

An example of how an event could look like: a Friday every 2 months, the business controllers and financial teams (let’s assume these are the ones that need to better work together) going together to an event where they need to help each other to deliver something — maybe cooking together, maybe reading book club, maybe bike riding, maybe learning to play volleyball — something that the teams chose would be ideal.

Yes, let’s keep in mind — this team-building thing — it is not a one time thing! It needs constant nurturing and attention in order to make it happen. If you want those people to work better together, then you need to take action in the work place as well. Organising events will simply not be a quick fix for bad tooling, toxic culture and so on…

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.